5 Signs You're an Amateur Pickleball Player (and how to fix them)

there are five habits that prove that you're an amateur pickle ball player so we're going to go through them and show you how to fix them so they stop holding you back you can tell someone is an amateur before they even touch the ball here's how where you stand at the Baseline whenever your partner is serving the ball is a clear indicator of how good you are at pickle ball so you already know that when you're serving you don't want to be stepping into the court and then staying there because if the ball comes back

to you you have to let it bounce and if you're standing in here then the ball might bounce behind you and now all of a sudden you get jammed but the same is also true whenever your partner is serving and you're just hanging out you also want to make sure that you're standing a couple feet behind the Baseline you want to be in a position to hit a good third shot drop or a third shot drive if you watch a lot of amateur players this person that's not serving is very often just not ready at

all so just being more engaged as a player whenever your partner is serving is going to elevate your game a tremendous amount one pro tip to make this really easy for you is to be actively watching your partner as they serve if you're standing back here and watching them as they're hitting this ball it's almost impossible for you to not be tuned into the game but if you don't watch them serve it's very likely that you're getting distracted by things around you and you're probably not being aware of where you're positioned on the court so

when you're this person who's not serving make sure you're a couple feet behind the line you're low you're ready to go and you're actively watching your partner serve and then as they hit that ball you're staying just as low if not even lower and then preparing to hit your third shot or approach the kitchen as your partner hits the third shot but just because we're engaged in this game does not mean that we should be taking room away from our partner who is serving very commonly you'll see people crowd their partner as they're about to

serve instead just give them a lot of space and make sure you're behind this line and then the second they serve you can move into the proper position but you never want to crowd your partner as they serve because it gives them less room to follow through and might make them more nervous which in turn makes them miss the shot you know someone's an amateur when they fear one of the simplest shots in pickle ball a vol Dink and I get it a vol dink does seem more intim ating it gives you less time to

react and it forces you to do an awkward motion that can feel uncomfortable but we're going to break it down and show you why it should be the most important part of your dinking game so here's what an amateur typically does they like to let the ball bounce and then hit the dink because it gives you more time I mean it's actually easier to read a ball that bounces than it is to take one out of the air the only problem is that every time you let the ball bounce you're giving your opponent more time

to adjust and react to the next shot you're about to hit that's why a volley dink is essential and dinking it takes away time from your opponents and even allows you to hit some angles you wouldn't be able to hit from a bounce Dink and it makes sense most amateurs don't want to try this because you end up being punished the first couple times you go for a volley dink typically the first attempts are going to be a popup which will get the ball smashed at you or you might just make poor contact and hit

it into the net so it's frustrating but you have to get over that hump to get to the next level of pickle ball and that's why we recommend trying out the volley dink even though it's difficult also as we know the kitchen is a nonb Zone what that means is you can't step into the kitchen and hit a volley it feels weird because your body is actually outside of the kitchen but you're hitting a volley inside of the kitchen it takes them getting used to and that reaching motion also requires extra balance but once again

this allows you to hit the ball even closer towards the net which takes away time from your opponent that's why it's so important so here's some tips to make it a little bit easier for you one is you don't need much motion at all a volley should just be a short chop or really just a redirect of the ball that aims it towards the destination so to aim it your paddle face has to be perfectly aimed at wherever it is you want the ball to go so that's the most essential part have your wrist stiff

and locked that way when you make contact your paddle face doesn't change direction and the ball goes where you intended it to hitting every dink aggressively is a guaranteed way to prove that you're an amateur but hitting every dink softly is also a guaranteed way to prove your an amateur let's talk about it early on in your pickle ball career you're probably not getting into a lot of dink rallies so when you get into these rallies you get excited and you want to hit the ball super aggressively it's a clear sign that you haven't practiced

this so in pickle ball there's actually two types of dinks there's a lift dink which is defensive and a push dink which is aggressive and what we see most often is that people just want to hit aggressive dinks so they get up to the kitchen line and they start to get into a dink rally and their first thought is to be aggressive and win the point as fast as possible so they start pushing the ball trying to be offensive and more often than not they hit the ball into the net or they hit the ball

too high and inadvertently hit a speed up that their opponent can smash back at them so the really important thing here is just to slow down whenever you get up to this kitchen line you have way more more time than you think and whenever you slow the game down in your head you start to make way better decisions from this position but you don't want to slow down too much because very often people also hit really soft dinks and that's all they do so remember there's a lift Dink and a push Dink and if you

hit a lift dink into the back half of the kitchen one that lands around here that Ball's going to bounce up relatively high and you're just giving your opponent a really easy chance to push that ball back at you so if you're hitting a defensive shot this lift ink make sure that it's Landing somewhere in this first half of the kitchen and if you're hitting an aggressive shot that pushed intin make sure it's Landing in the back half of the kitchen but you need to know when to use these if you find yourself being stable

with a lot of time and that Ball's bouncing up super high that's when we want to be aggressive but if that ball is super low to the ground maybe someone just hit an aggressive shot at you you want to be more defensive in this position sometimes though amateurs hit aggressive shots and they don't even mean to and more often than not it's because they have a floppy wrist so when your wrist isn't locked very often you will add more Pace to the shot than you intended to and when you do this that ball tends to

go long and up high into the air so your opponents can hit it back at you the very simple fix here is to on every single dink shot have your wrist locked remember that the most important thing in a dink rally is your paddle face position wherever this paddle face is pointing that's where the ball goes and when you start to have a floppy wrist then that paddle face changes and you might end up hitting a shot too high that you meant to hit softly over the net it might seem counterintuitive but the more lazy

you are very often the more aggressive shot you hit so in a dink rally whenever you get nice and low and you're super balanced you have way more control over your shots and when you have more control over your shots you can hit more defensive shots with purpose but if you're standing straight up and you try to hit a ball very often you'll just be using your arm instead of your hips and your legs which have way more control and so when you're just using your arm your back swing might get too big your wrist

might get loose and because you're not getting low here and you're being a bit lazy you might start hitting more aggressive shots when you don't actually mean to and the last thing we'll say about laziness is it doesn't just apply whenever you're the one hitting the ball if my partner is in a really long back and forth dink rally I need to be just as involved and ready to hit the next shot as if it were me hitting those same shots if your opponents are more experienced and they see you being lazy and uninvolved in

a dink rally they're going to hit that ball to you and you're not going to be ready for it you can tell you're facing amateur just by the way they hold their paddle a ready position is key in pickle ball and it tells you a lot about the level of the player you're playing against just by how they get ready for the next shot so you know you're facing amateur when they just don't have a ready position at all a ball comes their way and they're having to move their paddle in giant motions to get

it to a position that's able to hit a shot but if you're already in a solid ready position the amount of time you have increases to hit every shot that comes your way because the actual motion gets shorter so if my paddle down by my side and I try to hit a volley my paddle has to raise all the way up here and then I hit my volley but if my paddle up and ready because I'm anticipating it all I have to do is move this small motion which gives me a lot more time to

hit a strong Bley but also huge note here here your ready position changes dynamically in pickle ball based on where you were at on the court when you're at the Baseline you won't be hitting volleys so there's no use having a paddle all the way up here when it could be down here getting ready for either a drive or a block at your feet but as you transition closer and closer to the kitchen your paddle is going to raise slowly upwards because now we might have to reset and that's going to occur at our chest

we want our paddle prepped for that position so up at the kitchen is actually where our paddle is at its highest point because we need to be ready for those fast hands for a volley and if they do happen to hit a dink which hopefully they do that gives us even more time to prep down and we can get our paddle nice and low and then get back to this ready position for a volley in case they decide to speed up or hit a high ball a PR Habit to be even more ready on the

court outside of just your paddle is your footwork so whenever a ball is coming your way as soon as your opponent is about to strike it you're going to split step which gets you nice and low and ready to hit any shot that comes toward you most amateurs don't bother stopping before they hit the ball instead they run through it which puts them off balance and makes them hit awkward shots and ultimately just leads to more errors and on top of those two there's another awesome way to get ready on the court that a lot

of people don't think of it's called shading basically you're tracking the ball and moving with the ball dynamically throughout the court so let's say someone hits a crosscourt dink I don't want to just sit here and let the dink go by I want to track that with my body and move with my partner who might take the dink this allows me to cover much more angles as a team rather than just covering my zone over here which leaves a giant Gap in between Shay and I and being ready is also just as important when your

partner is the one involved in the play right now so let's say shay hits a dink and he hits it down the line and I'm chilling over here I've just left a giant Gap that sheay has opened up by hitting a ball down the line and now we have a space that our opponent would hit and immediately get a free point so instead of me just sitting here watching my partner do all the work what I should be doing is reacting dynamically and covering the now Gap that we've opened up which allows me to block

any angle that they would have had if we left that Gap open when an overhead looks like this you know you're looking at an amateur and just for reference here's what it's supposed to look like so let's break down how to take your overheads to the pro level when I started playing pickle ball I had no tennis background so my overheads did look like that it's very natural to have your arm go straight up have your paddle face pointing forward and then hit down on the ball as your overhead it's a very safe shot because

you're pretty much guaranteeing that you can't miss that ball but you're not adding any power to your overhead usually people hit this kind of overhead not because they're unable to hit the better overhead but just because they don't have the knowledge to do so so let's give you that knowledge right now the first thing you want to do in an overhead situation is point at the ball that's coming towards you when you point at the ball that's coming towards you number one you get your arm up in the air so that you can eventually drag

it down to the ground and that's going to generate a lot of power for you but number two you're giving yourself a guideline to see how close that ball is to your body so when that ball is about a foot away from your finger that's when you would start the motion of the overhead but if you never Point your finger up into the air to see where that ball is you have no guidelines so you're going to be less controlled and and you're not able to drag your arm down so you're going to have less

power when an amateur hits an overhead they always keep their hips pointing forward and this makes a lot of sense because they're just hitting straight down on the ball but when you want to make your overheads more effective you need to turn your hips towards the sideline that way you can utilize your hips as you're hitting this overhead so the beginner overhead your wrist pretty much stays still you might snap it a little bit but if you want to hit a very effective overhead you need to get good at snapping your wrist at the point

of contact so your paddle face when you're prepping is not forward it's actually more side on like this so when you're prepping behind your head it stays in this position and then right when you're about to make contact you snap your wrist forward and turn your paddle face forward and this makes your paddle head speed really really quick which makes your overheads really really powerful the second benefit to snapping your wrist at contact is you can get extreme angles on your overheads to make your puta aways much more effective I know it feels natural for

most amateurs to finish straight down but I promise if you start finishing your overheads across your body it's going to be way more powerful so whenever you're throwing a baseball you finish across your body throw a football you finish across your body for me I was kicking footballs I would finish across my body same thing happens in soccer anytime that you can finish from one side of your body to the other side of the body you're utilizing your hips and your core more and when we utilize these big muscles that are really fast and strong

we can get a lot more power on our overheads so just put all of these together to make sure you're hitting an athletic overhead and now you know the top five differences between amateurs and pros and how to take your game to the next level if you like our content go ahead and subscribe it actually helps us out more than you think and maybe watch this video it's going to help you out even more you'll be so good