There are many different shots in pickleball that you can do. A lot of what goes into winning pickleball games has to do with taking the right shots at the right time. In this blog, I’m going to walk through all the types of different shot scenarios that you may face during a real pickleball game.
Serve
The first shot in a pickleball game is always a serve. The way to hit a serve is to bend your knees and put your non-dominant foot forward. Put some of your weight on that non dominant foot and put your non dominant hand in front of you and hold it straight.
Let the ball drop slightly out of the air and hit the ball with an underhand motion with your dominant hand. Make sure to aim the ball cross court because otherwise, the ball is out. When you’re starting out, it’s completely okay if you feel like your serve doesn’t have any power to it.
As long as it’s in, it’s a good serve.
Once you start to progress, then you want to serve the ball towards the end of the opponents baseline and ideally to their backhand since most people don’t have a powerful backhand.
Return of Serve
The return of serve is the next shot after the serve. Just like how a powerful serve can dictate a rally, your strategy for returning serves is the second most important. A good way to prepare a return of serve is to stand a couple feet behind the baseline and be sure to track the ball when the opponent is serving.
When your opponent is about to make contact with the ball with their serve, you want to take a split step. This makes it easier on your feet to go left or right.
Typically you want to go for the forehand return, but sometimes they will serve the ball to your backhand so you are either forced to hit a one hand slice, or put two hands on your paddle and hit a topspin backhand return.
In terms of placement of the return, you want to aim for their baseline. Returning the ball to the middle of the court is the safest place to return, and might even cause confusion if the other team is not communicating with each other.
My partners and I have scored a couple points just by identifying that the opponents don’t communicate well so got some easy points there.
The other 2 places that are effective places to return are the backhand of both of your opponents. The way to remember this if you’re a beginner is to just aim at their left feet because most people are right-handed. Most players struggle with their backhand, so it’s a great target to get potential pop ups to set up an easier 3rd shot for your team.
3rd shot – Drive or Drop?
There are 2 shots that you can choose from when hitting a 3rd shot. The first shot is called a drive.
This is a hard shot that you take a big swing at if the return of serve is high and in the middle of the court. The goal of the drive is to attack the ball and force pressure on your opponents to block the ball.
The correct form for a drive is similar to a serve where you are bending your knees, and taking mid swing – not a big backswing like tennis otherwise the ball will fly out of the court long.
When you are driving the ball, you want to aim in 1 of 2 directions. You want to drive the ball either straight ahead of you, or towards the middle of the court. If you try to drive the ball cross court, you may find that you are going to hit the ball wide and your opponents have more time to react if you are attacking cross court.
The 2nd shot that you can perform is called a drop. This is more of a neutralizing shot if they hit a good return or if you don’t trust that your drive is powerful enough or if your opponents have good blocks. You can think about a drop as a really extended dink. The goal is to hit the ball into the opponent’s kitchen so that you have an easier time moving up to the kitchen.
Again, the safest place to drop is to the middle of the court, because it cuts off angles of your opponents. If you drop to either corners of the court, then your opponent can hit an ERNE, which is where they can jump, hit the ball out of the air, and land outside of the kitchen.
As a rule of thumb, if you drop the ball high – plan to stay back or even take 1 to 2 steps back because your opponents will be able to hit an overhead smash.
If the ball is at a medium height, then you can plan to take a couple steps forward and play in the transition zone. You want to continue to drop the ball at this stage. If you hit the ball at a medium height again, just be prepared to reset the ball. Watch out for your opponents targeting your backhand here.
If you hit a good drop and it goes over the net, then prepare to run all the way up to the kitchen.
4th shot in Pickleball – Flicks, Rolls, Blocks
The most overlooked shot in pickleball is the 4th shot. Your shot selection can change the direction of keeping your opponents backing, hitting a pop up, or even letting your opponents have a free ride into getting into the kitchen.
If your opponent hits a drive, you want to block that ball and get the ball down, so that they can’t attack it again and are forced to drop the ball.
Where beginners struggle here is not having their paddle out in front of them in a ready position. You can also plan to cheat and cover your backhand because it’s easier to hit a backhand block rather than a forehand.
If your opponents are going for a drop and the ball is high, you can go for a flick shot. This is where you use your wrist to snap and generate a ton of power. The goal is to keep your opponents back.
The next shot is called a roll. A roll is essentially brushing on the ball and putting spin on it so that your opponents have a harder time resting and dropping the ball.
This pressures your opponent to hit really precise drops so that they don’t pop up the ball. This also keeps the ball back.
If your opponents hit a good drop, and you try to hit a flick or a roll, you will either hit the ball into the net or you will pop the ball up. You have to learn how to identify that it was a good drop, concede and hit a dink back into the kitchen.
Dinking
Once all players are in the kitchen, this is generally where a dink rally will begin. A dink is where you hit the ball just over the net that’s unattackable for the opponent. If you or your opponent tries to speed up the ball when it’s below net height, the ball will likely get hit into the net or go out of bounce.
This forces you to keep the dink rally going. You want to be moving the ball around in the kitchen. Hitting the ball cross-court, straight in front.
If you think that you hit a good dink, you should be leaning forward and trying to take the ball out of the air.
If you hit the ball high, take a step back and be prepared to counter or reset the ball.
If your opponents hit a high ball, speed the ball up and be prepared to counter.
Around the Post – ATP Shot
Sometimes when you are dinking, the ball will sometimes get hit wide. This is an opportunity to hit the ball around the post. This is a shot that’s hard to defend because you don’t know where they will hit the ball.
Overhead shot
One of the final shots in pickleball is the overhead shot. This is when the ball is hit high above your shoulder. This is a similar shot to overhead where you raise your non-dominant hand, turn your body so that your dominant foot is back, and swing with your dominant hand down.
This shot could be tricky at first if you didn’t play a racket sport, but you will eventually get it if you drill.
Conclusion
These are the most common shots in pickleball. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Leave a Reply