Transcription
My name is Tony R. It's a pleasure to coach you in this video. Like you, I'm a 50-plus-year-old pickleball player. The five tips I'm sharing with you in this video are what I use to play at the senior professional level. Tips one through four will all build on each other, and tip number five will radically change how you think about the sport of pickleball. Let's get into it.
The first thing that I do as a senior professional pickleball player is make sure that I'm up at this non-volley online every single rally, sometimes referred to as the kitchen line as well. Playing pickleball, you have a positional advantage when you're at this line. You'll have a strategic edge over your opponents if you're playing from up here. That's particularly relevant when you're playing on the return side and when you're the returner. If you're not able to make it up to this line after every return of serve, you're going to put yourself and your partner in a tough situation.
The way you deal with that is you give yourself more time to get up to the non-volley line after you return serve. The mistake that players make is they'll hit the returns of serve short, low over the net, and hard. So they'll hit low over the net and hard. That does not give you enough time to get up to the non-volley line, particularly as we get up in age. As a 55-year-old player, I am going to give myself time to get up to the non-volley line by aiming my return of serve higher over the net. A higher return of serve will allow me more time to get from the baseline up to the non-volley line.
The second tip I want to share with you follows the first tip, and it has to do with playing up at the non-volley zone or kitchen line. So you got up here, what's the best way to get ready for the next shot? Pickleball is a small court sport, so balls are coming at you fast from a very close distance. You need to be ready for that ball coming your way. The way you're going to be ready for that ball coming your way is to always be expecting a hard shot. You always want to expect a bang coming your way.
What happens a lot of times with players is we'll get lulled into a sense of security. We're expecting a slow shot, so the ball gets hit, we're thinking, "Oh, that's going to be a dink for sure," and next thing you know, the ball's sped up into our body or it's rolled out of the air into our body. In those situations, if you're not expecting a hard shot, you're going to get caught with your feet rooted and your paddle out of position. You always want to expect that your opponents are going to attack or speed up the ball your way. If you're ready for the bang, as we say, then if the ball gets hit softly or dinked, then you can move. You have time to adjust. If you're not ready for the bang, so you're expecting a dink and the ball comes hard, you're not going to be in position to be able to react in time and respond to the shot.
Tip number three is going to build on the last two tips. So we're up at the non-volley zone line, we're playing from here, and we're expecting a bang. The question is, what is the best paddle position for us to have to be ready to receive that hard shot? Remember, we're always getting ready for that bang. What you're going to see is you're going to see young players, particularly pro players, a lot of times will stand with their paddles down like this. This is a perfectly good ready position for a younger player. A lot of times they're receiving balls in this zone, particularly pro players, so they're having to defend more here. The other reason is they have faster reflexes than we do, so they can get that paddle into position easier than we can. Once you're no longer a young, young player, you're better having your paddle further up in your in the strike zone that you're going to defend.
Tip number four, I'm going to give you a limitation on that zone, but you want to have the paddle up, up in this zone here. And then how much angle you put on it to your backhand will depend on how quick you feel you can get your paddle on the ball. We're generally going to defend on our backhand, so we want to always favor the backhand side for our defense. We're not going to defend too much with our forehand because a forehand is limited in its range. The backhand, I can actually get that same ball with my backhand with that chicken wing. So I'm always going to favor the backhand. How far over to the backhand I'm going to start will depend on where I'm at and how quickly I get the paddle around. If my objective is primarily to protect my body from attack, so I don't want to get hit in my body, there's nothing wrong with having your paddle position like this. You're ready position like this, or even some players will do this. That's perfectly fine. Now, you're going to be, it's going to take you more time to get it to the forehand, but we'll sacrifice that in exchange for better body protection. If you want to, if you have more time and you can get your paddle around, then you can hold it like this or like this. Somewhere around here is going to be a perfect ready position because this ready position will then get, allow you to turn the paddle this way or or this way to get ready for that bang coming your way.
Tip number four continues building. We've got up on the non-volley line, ready for the bang, our paddle in good ready position. The next thing we want to do is we want to be smart about which balls we hit and which balls we let go. Usually, when you get attacked from inside the court, so your opponent is inside the court attacking, whether it's out of the air with a bang or off of the ground, there's a high chance that that shot is going to go out because our court is a fairly short court relative to the height of the net. So what you want to do is when you're up here and you're and you're getting, everything else is good, you're up here, you're ready, you're expecting a bang. If you get a ball that is anywhere around your ribs or higher, just roll out of the way and let that ball go. And remember, I mentioned I was going to give you a limiter on your ready position. You can use that out ball to give you the upper range on where you're going to take your paddle. So if you're holding your paddle here, for instance, on your ready position, this is probably too high because you're not going to take it higher than this. You should let that ball go, and you're going to have to bring it down. So better off having it a little bit lower, knowing that my limiter is here and I'm going to defend from here to here. Now, so use that limiter of your around your ribs, a little bit higher in your ribs, to let every ball go and let that then dictate the height of your ready position.
One last note on out balls is don't beat yourself up. The times that you let that ball go and it lands in, this is not a 100% strategy because there is no 100% strategy. There's not even 99% strategies like you're hearing on YouTube these days. Those don't exist. What you're doing is you're understanding the big number game that you're playing. You're going to give up some points or some rallies by letting balls go that will ultimately land in, but you're going to gain many more points, many more rallies in your favor with the balls that land out. Remember, you're playing a big number game and don't second-guess yourself just because one or two shots that you let go land in the court. If you hit every ball that's out there because you're afraid of the balls going out, you become the banger.
Huckleberry for tip number five. I've found some shape because you and I are going to spend some time talking about a concept that'll really change how you play pickle. The strategies and the shots that you decide to use when you're out there playing. The way to think about it is think about the framework of the sport. Think about the way the game is constructed because the better you understand that framework idea, the better you're able to develop strategies and shots that are going to accomplish what you want when you play. And what I want to focus on here is the most important part of our sport and how the sport is constructed, and that is the non-volley zone or the kitchen. Think about a pickleball court and remove the non-volley zone from it. You're no longer playing pickleball. Now you're playing some sort of mini tennis, and shots like the third shot drop lose their significance or lose their importance if you don't have a non-volley zone.
So what we want to do is we want to start thinking about our games moving away from a game of brawn, a game of just of power, of trying to fight fire with fire. And we want to play higher IQ pickleball, which involves using that non-volley zone more. You can use it defensively, so whenever you're in trouble, know the non-volley zone is there for you. Learn how to throw the ball into the non-volley zone, and you can get out of trouble anytime that they put you there. You'll have more time to get yourself ready and you reset the action to a neutral state again. You can also use the non-volley zone offensively. You work on finding ways to stress your opponents inside the non-volley zone, and what you're looking for is you're looking for them to make a mistake, you're looking for them to hit the ball into the net, to give you an easy pop-up that you can put away. Or if you're playing an aggressive player and you put that ball in the non-volley zone and they decide to attack it, use tip number four and get out of the way. Let that ball go out to win the rally.
My co-head coach, CJ Johnson, and I both know what it takes to play really good pickleball into your 50s and beyond. We're happy to share these tips with you and we look forward to the opportunity to coach you more in depth inside our Better Pickleball Academy. Until next time.