What are some key tactical items of the return of serve in pickleball?
You would likely answer “to send the ball deep to keep the opponents back making the third shot more difficult, all the while making sure you have time to get to the non-volley zone.”
But what if you do the opposite? Hit an extremely short return that lands in the non-volley zone? That goes against all that you’ve been taught. You don’t want to make it easy for the servers to get to the net, right?
Here’s the thing. Hitting an intentional short ball shouldn’t be your go to. You’ll be too predictable. The deep return should be your bread and butter.
But there’s a huge benefit to having the short return in your arsenal, or what we call the return dropshot, or “2nd shot drop.” To hit it successfully, you need to have good hands and an overall high level of experience and training with pickleball. It’s more suited for players 4.0 and up, a speciality shot to increase variety.
There’s a lot of feel and spin control needed to execute it consistently. When successful, it will often result in a clean winner where the ball bounces twice before anyone gets it. And you’ll get the satisfaction of seeing those servers desperately sprint to get it as they’re clearly caught off guard.
What are some key technical checkpoints to make this difficult shot feasible? The first is having a solid underspin drive as the foundation, because you as the player must hide that you’re going to execute the shot. The preparation for the drop is similar to the underspin drive. You want your opponents expecting a deep ball, not a dropshot.
Then, instead of driving through as you would with the underspin drive, you shorten the swing path substantially, and open your paddle face more. With this sharp cut, you should be imparting even more underspin on the ball, while creating a loftier short ball, similar to the parabola of a 3rd shot drop.
When the ball bounces, it should stay in the non-volley zone, making it extremely difficult for servers to catch up to it before it bounces twice.
A good skill building activity for this shot is have someone serve at you, then you as the receiver slice the ball to yourself so that it bounces by your feet. This will start to give you the feel of exaggerating depth control. Once you have that down, you can gradually extend the target to be farther and farther away from you and closer and closer to the actual target of the opponent’s non-volley zone. It’s all about playfulness and feel!
Still struggling?
Slate will have a fully developmental pathway for adults in our Adult Group Instructional program. Improve faster and funner than you ever have before. See our ADULT PROGRAMS page for more information!
Leave a Reply