The Drills!

Drilling is the best way to improve your game! Please see below the set of drills Chicago Elite Pickleball practices themselves!

1.) Dink straight ahead: play first three dinks with no speedup, then after three can speedup.  Play to 7 or 11.  

Key Learning Objective: Get comfortable moving straight ahead dinks to forehand and backhand.  Try and land each dink about 6 inches from the kitchen line (in front), that is called the pressure zone.  

Key Question: What spots are the most effective to speed up to?  At what pace? Off what ball?

2.) Dink cross court (Forehand-to-forehand if righty):   Dink Crosscourt, play first three dinks with no speedup, then after three can speedup.  Play to 7 or 11.  

Key Learning Objective: Get comfortable hitting crosscourt dinks all day.  Think of this as your rally ball in tennis it should be the foundation.  Again dinks should land about six inches in front of the kitchen.  Bonus: start aiming for either the left or right foot, I have found those to be good targets to induce errors

Key Question: Do you prefer to dink with topspin or slice?  Do you switch it up?  

3.) Repeat the down the line drill: but switch sides that you are going straight ahead at each other.

4.) Switch to crosscourt backhand dinks: same principles apply as above.

5.) One person at net, one at baseline:  Straight ahead for this variation, then do cross-court forehand and cross court backhand.  Person at net feeds ball and then point is played out.

Key Learning Objective: 

For the person at the baseline, objective is to learn how to drive/drop and then move through the transition zone to get to the kitchen.  

For the person at the kitchen: objective is to learn how to keep the person at the baseline back and ideally prevent them from getting to the kitchen because then the point is even.

Key Question: For the person at the baseline do you prefer dropping or driving?  Which is more effective?  Does it change based on how quick someone’s hands are?

6.) Transition zone game: Start one at kitchen, one about 3 feet inside the baseline.  Person from "no mans land" feeds and then the point starts.  Start head to head then switch to the crosscourt variations

Key Learning Objective: This is all about learning how to reset the ball in the transition zone.  Ideally you want your reset to bounce inside the kitchen and be pretty soft.  

Key Question: Do you prefer resetting out of the air or off the bounce.  For backhand resets one or two hands?

7.) Fast hands: 5.5 Frenchie and i do three drills here.  All cooperative not playing out points:

1.) Do quick volleys but each person about a foot inside the kitchen so that way when your at the kitchen the ball will feel slower

2.) Figure 8 hands drill: Ben hits forehand volley to 5.5 Frenchie’s Backhand, Frenchie hits his backhand to my backhand.  I then hit my backhand to his forehand, and he hits his forehand to my forehand.  Then switch patterns after a bit.  Note start at about 50% speed and work your way quicker.  These should all be volleys.

3.) Moving volleys: Start at one side of the kitchen and move sideways across the kitchen hitting volleys to eachother.  Do 10 times.

8.) Skinny singles: probably my favorite drill to train everything.  Basically play out the point using half the court and server switches sides when they win a point, receiver always stays.