I have created a lot of pickleball drills on my blog to help you transition from beginners to intermediate level players!! Complete with a free PDF printable, it will give you ideas on what to do on the court with a partner to improve your soft shots from the baseline or kitchen. Let’s get started on the court friends!! 😉
Pickleball Dink Drills for Beginners
Let’s start from the beginning. If you are learning how to play pickleball, welcome. We are here to help you understand and improve your skills. Dinking well is one of the most important skills to have for sure. The soft shot is key to slowing the ball down and many times you can win the point just by becoming consistent and making it over the net (low) every single time.
I like to create pickleball printables as well as explanations on each skill. You will see this one below. Maybe because I am old, or I prefer to think of it as how I am a visual learner but it is handy to be able to take a copy of this to the court! Especially if you are new to this sport, and your friends are too you can follow along better with instructions and pictures. Share with your friends too!
Pickleball Dinking Drills PDF
If you are like me and want to print this out, just click on my link here for the dinking drills and it will open in a new tab on your computer. Then you can choose the number of copies you want and go from there. If you don’t want color it is fine as a black and white version too for sure.
Once you understand what is a dink you can read on regarding how to perfect it. Key is to keep it low to the net without popping it up (that will allow your opponent to smash it back).
What are the 3 different types of dinks?
My favorite type of dink is the push dink. This is exactly what it says meaning you are pushing it over the net with the tip of your paddle facing down. Two of these are the best, and hardest to attack; one that barely makes it over the net (trickles over) or pushing it low and barely over the kitchen line right at their feet!!
Once you have perfected that you should practice the slice dink. This is where you start to put some spin on the ball so it is harder to return. You do this by swiping your paddle from right to left in a linear way. This will put a spin on it that will propel it toward the person as it goes over.
Moving the paddle the other direction will create a topspin dink instead which you do the other way swiping the paddle on the outside of the ball from the bottom to the top as it goes over. This motion will create a spin on the ball which will cause it to spin toward the net as it goes over making it very difficult to return.
Once you have perfected these move on to our pickleball footwork drills, or work on these at the same time as they are all connected.
