These 5 Pickleball Beginner's Mistakes Are Ruining Your Game

just recently I was at a park and I was playing with some beginner players while playing with them I gave them a few tips here and there and when I was done I identified five key things that they were doing incorrectly that they could do better and it's five things that most beginners do wrong so let's get right to it hey I'm Kyle and this is the vat pickleball guy YouTube channel if you're new here welcome I do tips I also share some of the journey that I'm on to plan Pro pickleball and I'm going

to help you guys along the way gosh I hated that so I got the most beginner pickleball player I could find I typed in beginner pickleball player on Craigslist and this guy showed up so I paid him 100 bucks to come to my house so daddy's gonna help me Daddy are you ready I'm ready what do you want to learn today I don't even know nothing well you want to learn the five mistakes that beginners make yeah let's learn the first five you can't even speak English okay all right so let's Jump Right In all

right here's mistake number one it's something I see so many beginner players do it's when they serve they serve and step in I'll say it again they serve and step in that's bad here's why okay when I serve the ball according to the rules right I'm gonna serve it the ball is gonna come back and I have to let the ball bounce before I hit it again right so I cannot serve it come in and hit it out of the air I'd immediately lose the point so because of that I gotta take that into consideration

so if I serve the ball and I step in and they hit a good deep return I'm gonna have to back up in the moment I have to back up all of a sudden all of my weight is coming backward and the moment my weight is coming backward I'm gonna have to Pop the ball up which is going to be high for an immediate put away and they're gonna potentially put the ball away or I might just miss wild if I'm off balance I'm gonna have a much more difficult time making the shot so here's

what you do instead instead of serving and stepping in what I want to do is I want to serve and stay so I serve it yikes Mama have mercy okay it's not as easy as it looks okay I want to serve and stay where I'm at so that my next movement can be forward so I'm either gonna serve and stay or serve and if it's a good return maybe I take one step back to allow myself to move forward so I serve it stand now I'm going to move in and hit my next shot when

you serve it don't serve and step in serve and stay serve and step in is mistake number one so you want to serve and stay on your serve mistake number two is players on their third shot in my opinion driving the ball way too much so what does that mean what's your third shot well your third shot is after I serve it so Danny's back at the Baseline when I serve the ball this is shot number one daddy is shot number two and this is our third shot you have a couple options on your third

shot one of them is the drive a drive is essentially you go to hit the ball hard right so I'm here and I hit a really hard shot that's a third shot Drive what I see a big mistake that beginner players make is one they're very bad at the third shot drive but they love to hit it because it's pickleball and everybody wants to hit the ball as hard as they possibly can so my encouragement to you is to actually drive the ball way less just the other day when I was at the park I

was playing with the guy and as I played this guy for the first time he hit eight balls third shots either out or into the net so he essentially gave up eight chances to win a point because he drove it into the net now listen if you're a tennis player and you actually have a really nice drive ball then I would say drive it until the person that you're playing against shows you they can handle it but for a majority of first-time players trying to rip every single ball is actually just a really bad strategy

here's what you should do instead it's called a third shot drop the goal of the third shot drop is one that's your first shot second shot is to hit the ball in a way that actually lands in the kitchen here's why you do that one your Drive is probably horrible right now okay it could get better but it's probably not that good so you actually want to take a softer approach that will allow you and this is higher level stuff right here but it will allow you to get to that kitchen line so I hit

it ball comes back I drop the ball into the kitchen and now I play with so many pickleball players have a lot of trouble figuring out early on is the soft skin okay so it's the third shot drop the same guy that had just drove 8 balls into the net or out just two games later I gave him the suggestion suggestion don't drive any balls this game just hit drops and in his fourth game he went 13 for 15 on drops turned into an absolute dropping machine so if his conversion on third shots was 13

for 59 drops versus I think it was like two for 16 on his drives played the percentages play the shot that's going to help you win more points because honestly what happens for a lot of beginners is they just lose points the other team doesn't win them they give away points whereas at the beginner levels if you just get the ball into the kitchen get to the kitchen line and then start dinking which we're going to talk about here in a moment the other team's just going to lose the point and then you're going to

win it that way well Danny my my beginner friend Danny is at second Jensen I think that's uh actually it's irrelevant he's not gonna pick him all he's a beginner he doesn't know anything I'm just kidding he's my friend I'm just kidding he's a paid actor okay so here's the third mistake it's being sporadic at the kitchen line versus standing their ground at the kitchen line so here's what that looks like being sporadic at the kitchen line so we're in a dinking battle here right so we're at the kitchen line and we're playing the soft

game and when I saw a ton especially the other night when I was playing was that every time the players I was playing with got dings to they took these sporadic movements they were back forward back forward I'm gonna be a little exaggerative here but honestly not really this is what I saw right they were here well dag on it no that is what you saw that's actually that is what I saw I saw a lot of balls into the net okay here we go so we're dinking but they're just not confident yet so they're

back in their forward in their back and they're forward and they're back and they're forward instead of being sporadic at the kitchen line stand your ground at the kitchen line and so what does that look like it means you're dinking and if you can take one out of the air you do if you need to move you either move to the side or a slight backward diagonal movement here we go you stay strong and part of the reason is number one you're on balance when you're strong at the kitchen line all this motion around the

kitchen line is just throwing you off balance which what it leads to honestly is pop-ups right and all of a sudden they're gonna put the ball away now on the flip side as we're dinking another reason you don't want to get backed off the kitchen line is if they ever Pop the ball up you want to be able to smash the ball which is maybe the most fun thing in pickleball here's mistake number four taking unnecessarily monster big ginormous large swings yeah so here's what happens a ton especially for beginners it used to happen to

Danny and it used to happen to me all the time when we first started playing you see that ball that looks like it's kind of high and all you're thinking is I'm about to annihilate this ball into the person that's in front of me maybe not that mean but you're going to annihilate it somewhere in the court for a winner right and so what end end up what ends up typically happening is this right the ball is not high enough foreign ly that happens you hit the ball and you get so frustrated like ah right

because the ball literally hits the tape and it happens more than you might think part of the reason why is because the ball is too low you're taking a downward swing and what's gonna happen you take a downward big swing is it's going to go down directly into the net so here's what to do instead of taking these unnecessarily big swings now if there isn't an overhead the ball's above your head for sure crush the Snappers out of it so throw it up real quick but you're here boom right Danny just freaked out he's not

on camera right now but he he almost got hit right Crush those balls ah but if the ball is around the forehead and Below area here's what you do instead you punch punch punch punch punch forehand punch backhand punch it's not a big swing it's a punch right and I'm going to get a little bit lower as I go for that punch I'm here boom boom boom so I get my body low right and I can so I can still get a little bit of a downward motion but as I get low I'm just looking

to punch to remove air if you do this you're gonna have a ton less errors into the net and you're gonna have way more good shots hit where your opponent's gonna have trouble hitting the ball back or they're going to pop up another ball and then you will get the overhead that you really want that's mistake number four Oh Danny Boy welcome back okay all right so here's mistake number five Danny are you ready for this ready take a guess I haven't told you what this is yet do you know take a guess what it

is uh uh day two oh that took too long yeah okay so we could just have uh here's mistake number five it's being closed-minded part of the beauty of pickleball is how simple it is yet honestly how complex it is as well because it's simple you can go out there and you can play and you can have fun the first time but as you get better and better and better just like anything in life the more you learn the more you realize how much you don't know and so I was out of the park recently

and there was a guy there who'd been playing for maybe just a few months and he definitely thought he was way better than he was and we made mistakes he thought he knew the correction for him but he actually didn't whereas the sky player number two super open and so my encouragement to you the flip side of being close minded being open-minded but the actual tip for you is get feedback seek feedback so if you're at the park with a bunch of people walk up to somebody um after you play with them if there's a

group of four and someone on your court is significantly better than you just go up and ask them what's one thing you saw me do or one thing you saw in my game I could improve on people love to help each other right they love to share everything they know especially in pickleball everyone has every answer right I sometimes feel the same way about myself I gotta like check myself and sometimes even ask you well probably not you you just have to say that you're fine just kidding you're so smart um but that's okay here's

the second thing if you don't have a player in your court who is significantly better than you and say you're at a bigger complex look around and you're probably gonna find a player and just watch them and observe what they do watch what they do with their drives watch what they do with their dinks with their shot selection with their interactions with their teammates and just by watching and observing you're going to learn a ton that way and that's another way of getting feedback so don't be close-minded be open-minded and you're going to accelerate your

improvement faster than you ever thought possible anything to add that's pretty good actually first compliment this guy's ever given me I mean we just met but okay all right all right so here's a bonus one I said I was gonna give you five mistakes I'm actually gonna give you six here's the bonus the mistake is having paddle position low all right so here's the thing back to my buddy player number two when we were playing at the park he was he was doing awesome right he was hitting great third shot drops he actually became a

machine very quickly and he was doing an awesome job and then say the ball was a little bit high and he he had to reset it or we or I had to reset it to get us to the kitchen we did that and then when we got to the kitchen the mistake that he kept making early on was he would get there and do all the hard work to get there and then he was playing with his paddle down here and so if your paddle's down here and somebody goes to hit a ball um close

to your face right I gotta move my paddle all the way from down here to up here which is very inefficient work smart not necessarily hard here when you get to the kitchen line this is one of the first things that I learned when I started playing it was Game changing for me immediately was I got into a ready position which was basically I'm down in The Stance ready active ready to move and my paddle is right in front of my face now it's not in front of my face so I can't see the ball

necessarily right even though you can still kind of see through it but it's just a little bit down so anytime someone did speed up the ball which when you're playing beginners people are going to hit the ball hard all the time because it's the way they play so if it's really really high about your head let it go out but if it's around your face area and all you can do is block it you want to have your paddle here here so that as you go boom I'm just here to Boom boom boom so Danny

and I are playing so we're here playing we're gonna dink paddle goes back up each time I'm just ready so anytime that somebody does speed it up boom ah that's pretty good you're ready for it sounds like I thought it was pretty good for the first time playing it was a really good time you've never played it before never someone's got to pick you up that's so good all right so keep your paddle position high so Danny I'm gonna give him a challenge you cool with that let's go okay so here's the challenge for you

I just gave you six mistakes that beginners make and how to avoid them the next time you go and play maybe it's this afternoon or maybe it's tomorrow or maybe it's the next day write down two of these these tips ways to avoid these mistakes and then go Implement these two things don't try to do all six in the first time it'll be too much to remember you'll be overwhelmed especially as you're just learning the game you don't want to do more than maybe one or two things so do two things then the next time

you go out add a third thing and then a fourth thing and then a fifth thing So eventually you're doing all five of these things pretty naturally and you're gonna find yourself winning a ton of games so in conclusion here's a quick recap of the six mistakes mistake number one don't serve and step in serve and stay mistake number two avoid too many third shot drives instead try a third shot drop mistake number three don't be sporadic at the kitchen line but stand strong at the kitchen line number four avoid unnecessarily big swings at balls

that are really not attackable that are around your face area or your chest area mistake number five being close-minded and instead seek feedback so you can improve faster and then mistake number six is your paddle position don't have your paddle down low have your paddle in a ready position if you like this video what should they do subscribe I mean yeah if you want to that's pretty good comment below one area of the game that you'd like me to make another video on and I'll do that so you can learn and get better at this

game it's getting so fun yeah I love pickleball I'm really good at them all yeah let's pick them all oh yeah all right thanks for your time I'll venue you 100. hopefully we're not still rolling [Music] foreign