Pickleball Tips: The 5 Best Skills

Pickleball is fun, but let’s be real it’s more fun when you’re winning. If you’re looking for ways to improve your game, try out these pickleball tips.

1. Master your footwork
2. Hit it to your opponents backhand
3. Play at the line
4. Know when to drive and when to dink
5. Practice patience

Master your footwork (My #1 pickleball tip)

A lot of beginners focus on hitting the ball when trying to improve their pickleball game. But the truth is lot’s of the game is in your feet. That’s why this is the number 1 pickleball tip: master your footwork. Pickleball is a ground up game — solid footwork can help get you to the ball faster, keep your balance, and better direct your shots.

The most important thing is to keep your feet pointed toward the net. Try to move laterally and keep the front of your body facing the court. When you hit the ball, try to avoid stepping over your body with your front foot. It’s normal for you orientation to move shift a little, but you want to avoid having to hit the ball back across your body.

Using your feet to keep your body facing forwards will equal more accurate shots and turn you into a more mobile player.

Hit it to your opponents backhand

Another pickleball truth — you have less offense with your backhand. Now before you push back, I don’t care how good you think your backhand shot is. It doesn’t matter if it’s your ‘secret weapon’ or if you beat your grandma with a killer flick of the wrist shot last weekend. 99% of players are better forehand.

So with that logic, how can you knock your opponent down a peg? Make them hit it backhanded. By placing a ball between toward the boundary of your opponents non-dominant side, you’ll often force a backhanded shot that likely won’t have much heat on it. This can set you up for an easy kill shot or when you’re lucky, an immediate point if they hit it out of bounds.

Play at the line

This one is burned in my memory from my mom yelling at me during my early pickleball days. I used to like hanging back so I could return long drives. But the smartest way to play the kitchen is to get up to the line and return from there. The court is oriented in a way that makes it really hard your opponents to squeak a shot by you if you and your partner have a good doubles strategy and spacing tactics.

Playing at the line also lets you hit better dink shots and force your opponent backwards. Of course playing the line comes with risk of breaking one of the kitchen rules, so if you’re up there, be careful.

Know when to drive and when to drop

We all love a beautiful third shot drop, nothing is quite like it. But that doesn’t you should try to hit it every time. There’s a not-so-old saying that the worst pickleball player is a predictable one, and there’s a lot of truth there. Drops can be hard to defend, but not if you’re expecting them.

Mixing in drives keep your opponents on their toes and let you send them backwards on their heels. If you are able to force your opponent back to their baseline, you can crush them with a short dink.

Practice patience (The most underrated tip for pickleball)

We all want the win. We crave the glory of crushing a ball or a cross court dink that sends our opponents packing. But victory doesn’t come fast pickleball. When you meet an even match, rallies can last for a while before a player or team finally wins a point.

So my last pickleball tip is this: be patient. Stay focused on returning the next ball and maintaining good position on the court. There won’t be an opportunity to win the point on every hit, so don’t force it! Instead, work your opponent and wait for a change in their position that opens up an opportunity. Then you can strike.

Remember that in pickleball, the most important hit is the one that’s happening next.

Wrap up

You can spend a lifetime mastering pickleball, and a lot of professional players are doing just that! But for most of us… well we’re just looking for a couple of ways to up our game on the court. Try these pickleball tips, and I gauruntee you’ll improve.

If you’re looking for more ways to up your game, you can check out our articles on mastering your serve or pickleball drills. We’ll see you out there, in the meantime, keep picklin’.