Tips & Drills

Practice Your Pickleball Drills!

You probably just want to get on the court with friends and start a pickleball game but drills are an essential part of your pickleball journey. The most important reason is that drilling the same shot over and over again trains muscle memory. The more you train your muscle memory, the more confident you become, and the more you can focus on other things during a match.

1. Triangle Dinks. At the kitchen line, move your partner with dinks. Place one dink to their forehand, one to their backhand, and then one in front of them in the kitchen.

2. Dink-Dink-Drive. At the kitchen line, partner 1 dinks, partner 2 returns, and then partner 1 drives it hard to partner 2. When blocking hard drives it is essential to have your paddle up and close to your chest in front of you. Having your paddle up in the ready position is one of the basic fundamentals of pickleball. It helps you to position your paddle correctly when the shot is coming. Be consciously aware of that when you are doing this drill. If you are popping the balls up, make sure you loosen your grip as this lets the paddle absorb most of the force.

3. Third Shot Drop. One of the most important drills to learn in pickleball. Partner 1 stands at the baseline and partner 2 is at the kitchen line just like in a real game. Partner 2 (at the kitchen line) feeds balls to partner 1 (at the baseline) who will then attempt the third shot drop. The third shot drop is a shot performed at or near the baseline that lands softly in the opponent’s kitchen. The shot is designed with mostly one thing in mind: to get your team to the net. A very repetitive drill but making yourself do 50-100 of these will train that very important muscle memory.