How To Hit Deep Driving Forehand Volleys | Keeping your opponents back at the baseline

Hi, welcome to Primetime Pickleball. My name is Nicole Havlicek and in today's video we're going to be talking about the forehand volley, particularly when your opponent is mid-court or beyond and they've decided that they're not going to drop it and come in, but they're going to drive it at you for whatever reason. It may be a good idea, maybe not such a good idea in that instance, but we're assuming that that's what's happening and they're back there and when they're deep, what you want to do is keep them deep. So I'm not going to take it, like they're going to rip it at me, I'm not going to try to drop it because I want to maintain my offensive position here and keep them defensively back. So what I'm going to do is take their pace and just pop it back deep. I'm going to try to put it right on their shoelaces or if they're at the baseline, I'm going to try to put it as close to the baseline as I can. Alright, so how we're going to do that is when we're volleying, ideally I'd like to have my knees a little more bent. I have a bit of a back issue, which is why I'm not in these videos, so I'm going to be a little straighter up than we should be. Ideally we'd like to be a little more like that. When I see it coming in, I'm going to split and get low here and volley like this, but I'm going to be a little taller than you should be. So keep that in mind, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a little split. I'm going to lay the wrist back out in front and transfer my weight forward and start in front and finish more out in front. I'm just going to bump it back deep. You don't want to slap it with your wrist out here. Definitely you don't want to be slapping it with your wrist back here. I see a lot of volleys coming back here and then people are doing this kind of thing. You want to have a stable paddle face, meaning that the face is moving like this through the ball, not like this. I'm going to put my index knuckle on this 45 degree angle here, so not on top. Let's say this is zero and this is 90. This is 45 degrees, index knuckle there, wrap it around. I'm going to lay my paddle face out in front, just very little arm movement, lay my wrist back and bump it deep. Bump it deep. Stable paddle face and it's just this little move, ideally a little bit lower. Jordan's going to rip some balls at me and I'm going to punch it back deep at him. It's a bit short. That was good. That is the forehand volley, keeping it deep off of a drive. Thanks so much for joining us today. We'll see you in the next video. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like. Thanks for watching. For more pro player pickleball secrets to help you play your best game, please visit PrimetimePickleball.com. You'll find a clickable direct link in the video description below. But before you head on over there, please be sure to subscribe to our channel so you don't miss out on any of our future videos.