Anybody who watches the pros play, especially the Johns' brothers, knows that dinking is far from dead.

Thanks for the tips well appreciated

Such great advice!

Thanks good info

Great drills! I've shared with my drill partners

Thanks Nicole Love the clear progressions and demos. Now have to get out and do it!

Thank you for your knowledge>

Love it, Nicole. Thanks for your time and efforts in creating this video and all your videos. I find when teaching many players are trying to get ahead of you and not taking time to apply the basic levels/layers before attempting the more advanced levels. I like the way you break it down. 1. Consistency. 2. Lateral movement. 3. Lateral pressure and sustainability 4. Adding spin (top spin mixed in with side spin) with push and pull or pull and push tactics. Please correct me if I've mistaken any level that I've listed above. Thanks for all you do. The sport as a whole appreciates your gifts and talents. Thank you.

Personally, I'm a dinker, but I've noticed deep dinks are much more attackable than previously thought. For example the dink at 6:07 is attackable. Since your opponent is further from the net, the angle the ball has to climb is less. The key is topspin and that's why everyone is looking at carbon paddles. Even though you are speeding it up from below the net, by the time it reaches your opponent it's below the net on their side and they have to deal with a much faster ball.

I’m 66 and played a lot of tennis and some squash years ago but gave them up with bad knees. I’ve played pickleball for just two years now but most people where I play have played 5 years or more and I would call them pure bangers, our games have very little soft game involved. The people don’t seem interested in a soft game, any ball above the net comes back with vengeance. I start out each day with a goal in mind to work on dinks, drops, good placement and my positioning but after the first hour succumb to the style of play and bang away with tennis type topspin, slice backspin and going for lines. If I want to get past the 3 level or so I may have to change groups. I haven’t got a long history but for me all I’ve seen is a heavy hitting bangers game.

Did I see a NVZ violation at 9:08?

Good lesson, I watched 40 people playing on 10 courts, looking for patterns? 3.0-4.0. The biggest problem was dinking or returning the ball too high over the net. I call it fine tuning. As we play better players, one must fine tune really all the shots in the arsenal . again, great lesson.

As usual I have some comments/questions. 🙂 You show almost all of the drills with both players directly across the net from one another. Yet aren't the (vast) majority of dinks hit cross court? Aren't cross court dinks a lot easier? And couldn't a beginner get away with hitting every dink cross court (since they're easier)? It seems to me that part of a typical doubles warmup is to hit a bunch of dinks to the opponent directly across but then it's pretty infrequent to actually do that in the game. I find it fairly easy to hit cross court backhand dinks with a lot of topspin, even one-handed as the ball is sort of inherently out in front when you hit it that direction. I use a ping-pong backhand to hit straight across backhand dinks with topspin. The catch is that I have to get super low to the point the I can almost touch the side of the paddle to the ground, then it's a slowish wrist flick with a slight upward arm motion (very little total motion). It's a shot that obviously wouldn't work in tennis but that I've hit many hundreds of thousands of times in ping pong and translates fairly well to light pickleball paddles. I also find that cross court "dinks" are often more like speedups/attacks since kitchen corner to cross court kitchen corner is more than 24 feet which, especially with topspin, allows for a ball with quite a bit of pace to clear the net and still drop in or near the kitchen. It's actually one of my favorite drills to hit these sorts of shots. I do wonder if the effort I've put into dinking is worth it. I find that most people I play attack balls that are pretty low so there just isn't much dinking. When they attack those low balls they come to me pretty high (well above the net) so it doesn't make sense for me to reset - they'll just attack it again. If I receive a low fast ball I'll usually attempt to reset it, but they'll just attack that too. So maybe one slow ball (usually a reset) for every four fast balls. I think that if I and my partner were better at handling high attacks my opponents would be more likely to dink low balls instead of attack so looking back I think I would've benefited more from developing super fast hands first, then dinking later!

I am a beginner and am 75 years old. When i took the lesson the coach always tell us to get to the nvz but when i go to play with other begiiners, i noticed no one rush to the nvz and no one dings so i get the ball at my feet at the nvz line but no way to let it bounce and no way to take it in the air. I guess i have to resort to the transition zone in order to hit these balls. Any suggesrion or insight would be appriciated !

I'm a 60 yr old female, and I consider myself in good shape, but I have to be careful to coordinate who I play with. After being hit on the face twice, I'm now very leery about who I play with. I appreciate your videos!!!! 👍🏻

This looks so easy when you do it...

3.5 to 4.0 is all bangers and firefights. Its hilarious. Why do people want to firefight similar level players, your odds are 50/50 you win it, or maybe 70% if you are better at them. Why would you take those odds when you can just tap them to death and make them slam it into the net.

"technology" side-eye

Is dinking dead? Clickbait! 🤣

I feel like I’m not expecting to score from dinkikg. I’m waiting for the opportunity to hit it hard when opponent’s dinking gets high.

Dinking in the kitchen is dead because everyone wants to bang outside the kitchen

And it is still true the first team to speed it up usually loses the point.