5 Pickleball Drops That INSTANTLY Raise Your Level

Hi, I'm Ava Ignatovich. I'm a PPA professional pickleball player, and today I will be teaching you how to hit a perfect drop every time in five different ways. So a few rules that I like to live by when thinking about drops. Number one, it is always better to miss a ball deep than it is to miss a ball high. Instead of trying to hit a perfect drop that lands right into the kitchen every time, instead focus on hitting a low ball that starts to dip before it crosses the net. If the ball is dipping before it crosses the net, your opponent will have to hit up on the ball, which is all we ever really want to achieve from a drop anyway. This gives you a chance to move in rather than a high ball your opponent can easily hit down on that pushes you back. Number two is try not to hit a drop with your body weight moving backwards. Always try to hit drops while you're leaning forward. So make sure you're balanced, get your feet behind the ball, and always lean into the drop when you hit it. If you drop while leaning backwards, the ball is going to go up, which is going to cause you to pop the ball up. So for number three, you never ever want to hit drops while taking the ball on the rise. You want the ball after it bounces to drop before you hit the drop. And lastly on drops, if you find that you're squeezing the grip or holding the paddle a little tightly, you're doing it wrong. You want to always have a loose grip when you're hitting drops. You want to kind of feel the vibration at contact through your fingers. Now for every single shot that I'm going to show you here, I will be using a continental grip. So the way that you find that is you're going to pretend you're shaking hands with the paddle, right? So this little moment between your thumb and your index finger, you're going to just want to put the U on the edge guard, shift it down. There you go. That's a continental grip. So drop number one. Let's talk about a basic forehand drop. Not a lot of spin on it. I call it a grandma drop. So what you're going to want to do is you're going to hold your paddle in your continental grip, and the butt cap is facing up. The paddle face is facing down, and all you're doing is moving your feet behind the ball, catching it, and swinging through. Just a short shoulder movement straight up. For this one, notice how my paddle is always going to be directly in front of my body. This technique is closest to your basic toss forward. If you want to learn this, get a couple balls and just toss them into the kitchen. That's going to be the same vibe. This one is the easiest to learn, very straightforward, like an elephant trunk in front of you. So for the forehand slice drop, your paddle is going to be a little more to the side of you. You're going to want a more horizontal upright paddle face, and it's going to be a really short and compact swing. I personally like to think of it as more cradling the ball into the court rather than cutting under it. You don't want to get too spinny here because you'll risk popping the ball up. It's almost like a soft u-shaped motion, just a small push forward, high, low, high. What I recommend doing here is to work on this shot's dink counterpart first. Hit forehand slice dinks until you're comfortable, and then move backwards and try and have that same feeling on the forehand slice drop. There's only so much I can cover in a video, but lucky for you, I've put together a 58-page, in-depth, complete pickleball system roadmap from beginner to pro. It covers every shot in pickleball, high-level strategies, it has over 20 different drills that I use, and it even has structured practice plans for every single level from 2.5 to pro. If you're interested in really transforming your game, this is The Missing Piece, a collection of everything I've learned for the past few years playing on tour. Secrets from the best players in the world. I'll leave a link in the description and pinned comment down below. I highly recommend you check it out. An easy way that I love to work on my drops, and a good way to get it dialed in, is to do a drill called the slinky drill. So you're going to start at the kitchen, and you're just going to hit dinks back and forth with your partner until you feel comfortable and you feel like you're making a lot of them. And then once you're chilling, you take a step back. And then you continue hitting dinks from this portion of the court. And then once you're feeling comfortable, take another step back. And then before you know it, you're at the baseline and you're hitting perfect drops. And then after a couple at the baseline and you're dropping comfortably, you start to work your way up. And this is great because you not only get to practice dinks and drops, you also get to practice every ball in the midcourt. I'll probably do this about a couple times a week, just when I really feel like I need to dial in my touch from every area of the court. So for the backhand slice drop, it's going to be the same soft u-shaped motion. You're kind of cradling the ball, pushing it forward with your shoulder. Not really slicing, not cutting under it, not getting wristy at all. So a big thing here is I want my body to be pretty closed. I don't want an open chest facing the court when I hit the shot, because then what's going to happen? It's going to go over there, not in the direction of the court. So you want your shoulder to be pointing where you want the ball to go. So if I want to hit my slice drop cross court here, I'm really closed. If I want it down the line, my shoulder is pointing in that direction. Also remember, try and hold the paddle really loosely. You want to feel the ball through your fingers while you hit. You also want to keep a really firm, stable wrist. That way, you're going to keep the paddle facing upright. You don't want to slice this way. You want the paddle to be facing, not the paddle. You want the paddle to be pointed up towards the sky. You also want a really firm and stable wrist through the shot. You don't want to let your wrist drop ever when you're hitting a backhand slice. So next, we have the topspin roll drop. This is going to be a really wristy drop. You're going to use your wrist to generate topspin here. When I do the shot, my paddle is always finishing on the same side of my body. So when we hit a topspin drive, it looks like this, and our paddle finishes over our opposite shoulder. When we do this roll shot, we don't want that. We want it to finish directly up on the same side of our body, because this will absorb the pace from the ball. Throughout this swing, you want to keep your elbow pretty close to your body. If we let our elbow out too far away, we're going to lose a lot of that control. You also want to stay really low with your legs here, because that is going to keep the ball low. Now, number five is the backhand roll drop. When I think of this drop, I like to think of it as just a slower, wristier version of the backhand drive. You want to keep most of the feeling in your non-dominant hand. So when I do it, I pretend that I'm hitting a short, lefty forehand roll with my right hand there, just to guide it. However, on this one, unlike the forehand roll drop, we don't finish on the same side of our body, because that would be weird and awkward. So we finish through the ball a little bit. That's why you need to be really controlled with your wrist when you hit this shot. The best advice I've ever received on this shot is to choke up on the paddle with my left hand. I also like to put my finger here. This is going to give you a lot more controlled spin. Well, there you have it. There are five different drop techniques and my best advice for how to do them properly. Thank you so much for watching. Remember to like, comment, and subscribe. And also, as always, check below the description and pinned comment for my full Pickleball System Roadmap from Beginner to Pro for practice plans for every level, 20 plus drills, and a full strategic breakdown of every shot and tactic.