The Art Of The Dink: A Pickleball Coach’s Perspective
Pickleball players experimenting with their dink shots.
Discovering The Dink
Firstly, what is a dink in the context of pickleball? A dink is a shot in pickleball that involves softly hitting the ball into the opponent’s non-volley zone. A well executed dink stays low, making it harder for your opponent to attack. I emphasise the importance of practising dinks to my students who are keen to get their game to the next level. This involves many sweaty hours of dedicated dink drills near the non-volley zone.
Soft Buttery Hands
Now we know what a dink is, let’s talk about a key concept in pickleball dink mastery. Having soft hands! A well rounded pickleball player is strong in strategy and finesse. Many points can be won by executing effective dinks. To execute an effective dink we need to be able to soften our hands.
Correcting Common Errors
A common struggle that I’ve seen with many beginner students when practising their dinks is that they are too tense when dinking and are gripping their paddles too tightly. This will cause them to hit the ball with more power than needed and use up a lot of their energy. Dinks are not power shots - they are touch and finesse shots. So let’s be sure to stay relaxed and loosen our grips on the handle of the paddle. Imagine you are almost letting go of the paddle before you hit your dink, this will encourage looseness in your hands and body.
Drills We Do To Enhance Our Dinks
My students’ favourite dink drills are to play with no paddles first! We start by standing near the non-volley zone line and throw the ball to each other with our hands, like a game of catch. The focus is on keeping the body relaxed and gently throwing the ball into the other player’s non volley zone, letting it bounce once. After this drill, the paddle merely becomes an extension of our hands.
Now that we have explored concepts we can apply to enhance our dink mastery, with dedicated hours of fun, sweat and tears, we can be sure to reach our pickleball goals! If you’re keen to master the dink with Play! Pickle academy, check out our options for pickleball lessons.
