FIX these 5 Errors in your Pickleball Strategy

There's only one type of shot that is guaranteed to end the rally and a loss to you and that's when you hit the ball into the net. For this week's lesson we have five errors and how to fix them. Let's get into it. Error number one that you're making is you're not respecting the most important part of the pickleball court. Now listen, we're all going to make mistakes when we play. You're going to hit the balls out of bounds, you're going to pop balls up, name it, you're going to make some mistakes. But most of those other mistakes, other than the disrespecting error, are not 100% guaranteed to end in a loss of the rally. Let's take an out ball for example. You hit a ball that's like going to land six or eight feet out of bounds. What happens a lot of times? Your opponent hits that shot. At least you're making to make a decision about whether to hit the shot. So it is not 100% guaranteed that you're going to lose the rally when you hit a ball that's going to sail out of bounds. And same thing with a pop-up. Think how many times you've popped the ball up and your opponent has missed the put-away. Or they've hit the put-away and you or your partner have defended it. Again, the pop-up is not 100% guaranteed for you to lose a rally. So while they certainly are mistakes, hitting a ball that's going to land out of bounds, popping the ball up, hitting a ball where you're not supposed to hit it or you don't intend to hit those are all mistakes. None of those are 100% guaranteed to end the rally in a loss to you. There's only one type of shot that is guaranteed to end the rally in a loss to you and that's when you hit the ball into the net. My guess is some of you are looking at your phone or your computer right now saying, duh Tony, I know I'm not supposed to hit the net. What do you want me to do about it? What's your point? My point is that you're not giving the net its due. You're not respecting it nearly enough. Popping the ball up sucks. Hitting the ball out of bounds, not great. But they're not the same as hitting the net. It has a different connotation to it, a different weight to it. If you watch pro players, pro players don't get upset when they miss balls like out of bounds and things like that. That doesn't drive them crazy. What drives a pro player crazy is when they leave a ball like a dink or a third or something like that in the net. You need to understand that the net has a greater value to fixing your game than those other things like pop-ups and hitting the balls out of bounds. I'm going to share with you a lesson that I learned during my tennis days. I got to give a shout out and credit to coach Eric Dobcha for this framing of the net. The way that he explained it was take all of the rallies that you lose and let's put them into three different categories or buckets. One are winners hit by your opponents. Two are shots that you hit that end up in the net. And three are shots that you hit that end up out of bounds. Now let's just let for simplicity let's give each a third. So a third of the rallies that you lose are winners by your opponents. A third of rallies that you lose are balls in the net. And a third of rallies that you lose are balls that you hit out of bounds. Imagine playing a game where you were able to take those net shots out of play. Those net errors out of play. You have reduced your lost rallies by somewhere in the order of a third. I know these are really rough numbers and you can play around with them but it really gives you a sense of the impact of just removing one part of the game. One part of your losses in a game from the equation. Your opponents can still hit their winners. You can still hit balls out of bounds. Just don't hit balls into the net and you have roughly a 30% improvement in your play. The way you're going to take the net out of play and give it the respect it deserves is by aiming your shots higher over the net than you do now. My guess is a lot of you watching this are aiming your shots around here or perhaps not aiming them at all. We're going to talk about that some more in error number five that we're going to cover in this video. But basically you don't want to aim your shots here close to the net because here what you're doing is you're risking these little fingers of the net getting involved and your ball landing in the net. Instead what you want to do is aim higher over the net than you think you should. Now how high? That depends. What type of shot are you trying to hit? How far are you away from the court? And what's your mechanical proficiency? How far are you away from the net? I'm sorry. And what's your mechanical proficiency? Here's a coaching tip for you. The farther back that you are from the net the higher you're going to aim to clear the net. As you get closer to the net you can bring it down but pretty much almost never are you going to want to aim here. If you want a super low hanging fruit way to improve your results give the net more respect. Take it out of play on your shots and your results will drastically improve. Error number two has to do with too much sidelines not enough middle. Whenever you're playing pickleball doubles you have a choice on your put away shots between going out to the left. Remember this is from my perspective as the hitter. You can go to the right right over there where the orange corns are or you can go down the middle. Those are your choices whenever you have a put away shot in doubles. What happens oftentimes is we get a put away and we decide to go out toward the sidelines like that either right to the left or to the right. Whenever we do that we're risking the sidelines. We're bringing those sidelines into the play. The sidelines now tempt what? The out of bounds. Right we're going to miss balls out of bounds. The middle on the other hand has no sidelines to it. Sure it has the baseline back there but that's on the entire court. I cannot avoid the baseline. I can however avoid those sidelines. Avoid the additional out of bounds by hitting more balls to the middle. The solution here is fairly simple. Hit more of your put away balls down in the middle of the court. Less of them out toward the sidelines. Now this is not to say never hit a shot off the sidelines. You can still hit some shots to the sidelines but my guess is that your ratio right now of shots between middle and sideline is weighted too heavily toward the sideline. You want to flip that around and go more to the middle than to the sidelines. Here's an extra coaching tip for you on going to the middle. Whenever you attack the middle in doubles you have the possibility for confusion between your opponents. But you'll see oftentimes you see the opponents have this hesitation in terms of who's supposed to get that ball. You'll see them sometimes clank paddles but oftentimes you see that ball sail through the middle with nobody reaching for it because they expect the other one to hit it. When you attack the sidelines there's absolute clarity on which player is responsible for that ball. That clarity does not exist in the middle. So take advantage of that by increasing your attacks in that middle zone. If you enjoy these kind of coaching tips that actually work in your play get this free strategy guide here that me and the Better Pickleball Coaching Team developed for you. I'll put a link up here as well as at the end of the video. Get this guide because these tips actually work. Error number three is a big one because it has to do with those easy putaways that we miss into the net or at the other extreme we miss it out of bounds. Now what's happening here? Is it that the shot is too difficult? The ball here is giving us trouble? Is that what we're missing those shots? Obviously that's a rhetorical question because the answer is no. It has nothing to do with the difficulty of the shot itself or the ball. The difficulty here is actually self-imposed. What's beating you when you miss one of those shots is you're actually beating yourself. So the question is what can we do about it? I like to use baking here to explain the right way to address this problem. Say you get a nice little juicy ball up here so you get a nice little sitter like sitting here right and all you have to do is put it in the oven at 350 degrees right nice little 350 degree shot gets the job done we won the round. But instead what we're doing is we're taking it and we're putting it in at 450 degrees or worse yet we're just taking a blowtorch to it and going nuts to hit the ball like that and creating all that extra risk. What you want to do with these shots don't try and do too much. You get a nice little juicy ball like this and all it needs is a little 350 degree pop like that. Just use a little 350 degree pop. Use that middle tip that I gave you on the last one and you're going to be perfectly fine. If you start missing those putaways ask yourself is there something I can do to better control my shots put it in at 350 degrees because my guess is the answer is yes and if you do that you'll miss them less times you'll feel better about your play and your results are going to improve. Back at the baseline for error number four because it has to do with third shot drops and when we start missing this particular shot. Now let's start from this premise the third shot drop is the hardest shot to hit and pick a ball. You're under pressure from your opponents you're back here at the baseline because of that two bounce rule and you're trying to get the ball to drop into a small area only seven foot deep over a net that's pretty tall when you think about the ratio of net to area you're trying to drop it into. So you're dealing with a pretty complicated shot to begin with. The difficulty here is that we're adding additional layers of complexity to a shot that's already fairly difficult to execute to begin with. What I'm referring to here is if you're trying to get that roll kind of third in right you're trying to roll your third or you're trying to get that underspin on your third you're adding more complexity to your shot right and what happens there is your shot will have more variability to it more variance to it resulting in more thirds hitting the net more thirds going out of bounds and also more thirds going where you don't want them to go into an attackable spot. One example I'll give you on an overly attackable type of third happens to be the roll third. So when you're rolling it right you're lifting up on it trying to get it to drop what can happen is if you don't have the right brush technique or the right timing you end up lifting it like that so you end up lifting the ball into an attackable zone. Pretty common mistake that we see on players trying to roll their thirds. What you want to do in these situations is simplify your third. So you're out there playing and you're trying to roll your thirds or underspin your thirds and you're not getting them in successfully. Consider going to a more flat third just a nice open paddle flat type of third to get your rhythm because a missed third is of no use to you. A flat third or a neutral third at least the ball's in play and you have possibilities. I could regale you with personal stories as a senior professional player of using flat shots including flat thirds successfully in games against very good opponents but instead why don't we look at some pro footage where you can see how the pros use flat shot technique in their play because they understand that a ball that's in play that ball that's alive is a lot more valuable than trying to hit a super sophisticated complicated shot and potentially missing it. If you enjoy learning from the best in the game and I don't just mean the best coaches in the game the best players in the game make sure you subscribe to this channel so you get notified of great breakdowns just like this one where you break down the top players in the game for you to learn from. Our fifth and final error has to do with not having sufficient mental clarity on our shots. Now I know we may not always feel this way but we actually all of us have the most powerful processing unit ever developed right up here between our ears. The problem is for a lot of us a lot of times we don't give it enough instructions on what it is that we want because your brain wants for you what you want for yourself it just doesn't know what that is. So if you get better at giving your brain clear instructions you increase the chances of getting the results that you're looking for. I'm going to share with you a technique that we use in our coaching through visualization to help players gain more consistency with their shots by providing their brain with clear instructions and it has to do with painting a line through in space and putting that into your brain now giving a clear instruction to your mind of the exact shot that you're looking for. Now the shot that you're hitting will have three different pieces to it. Piece number one is where you're making contact with the ball the point of contact. Piece number three or area number three is where you're aiming so in this case it'll be that orange cone there that is where we want the ball to land in this shot and area number two has to do with where we want the ball to clear the net. So once you have your point of contact you have where you want the ball to go and you have your space over the net you give your brain a clear instruction through a line that was a line of the shot that's the clearest instruction that you give your brain on the shot that you're looking for. By providing your brain that clear instruction there's no confusion no misunderstanding on the exact shot that you want. By providing your brain with clear instructions on where you want your balls to go you minimize the chance for mistake as well as increase the chances that the ball will actually go where you want it to. Speaking of clarity get your free strategy guide continue to learn more about pickleball and I'll see you next time. Be well.