5 Years Of Pickleball Return Lessons In 22 Minutes

I've been playing pickleball for over five years now and the one shot that I see consistently giving people trouble is the return of serve. Today I'm going to share with you literally everything I know about the return of serve so you can start outplaying your opponents. The main objective of the return is to hit it as deep as you possibly can. In an ideal world, I want my return to literally hit this baseline and the reason why is super simple. After my opponents serve and then I return to them, they have to let the ball balance before they're able to hit it. So the further back I can hit that ball, the further back my opponents will be making contact. So ideally we hit it as deep as possible for two reasons. Number one, if they make contact from further back in the court, I at the kitchen line naturally have more time to react. And number two, if they're making contact from further back in the court, it's a much harder shot than if they're making contact closer to the court. So think about maybe basketball, a three-point shot further back is a lot harder than a layup right next to the rim. So with that in mind, every lesson that we cover today is going to be an attempt to get this return of serve as consistently deep as possible. The number one mistake that I see people making on the return, and if I'm being honest, it's the reason that causes 90% of my own mishits, is popping up through your return and not staying low throughout the entirety of your return. So this happens all the time. We're getting ready to return the ball and we have this really nice low wide base. And then right before we make contact, we tend to stand up as we hit the ball and then try to run through it. The serve you just received is probably a really heavy top spin serve. So that ball is going to be staying low to the ground more than likely. And it's coming at you with a lot of pace and a lot of spin. And so in order to return this ball, you really have to be below it. And the second that you stand up, you make it that much harder for you to get below that ball and hit an effective return. But there's two more reasons why standing up is also harmful to your returns. So when you stand up out of your return, you're mainly relying on just your arm to generate all the force in your shot. If we were to stay low to the ground, we could utilize our legs to generate all that force. But instead we stand straight up and now we're only using our arm to generate the force. And the second reason is that when you are standing up as you're hitting your return, you're now adding an extra variable into the motion, which is me literally standing up as I'm hitting the shot. So now my paddle is already moving away from the court as I'm trying to start my motion. And my contact is probably going to be messed up as a result. Another reason why you might be standing up as you hit your return is because you're in a rush to get up to the kitchen line. So if the primary objective of the return is to hit it deep into the court, the secondary objective is to get up to that kitchen line as fast as possible. And this is for a very specific reason. The team that is at the net and pickleball controls the entire point. So from this position, I can hit down on the ball and I have way more angles to work with than if I was further back into the court. So if I'm able to get up to this kitchen line before my opponents do, I'm at an advantage. But while all of this is important, remember that the first objective and the most important is to hit the return deep in the first place. If you're so worried about making contact and then moving up into the court, you're probably not worried enough about your contact itself and are likely not hitting a good return. This is especially true in doubles. If you have a capable partner, they're going to already be up here at the kitchen line. And so they can defend pretty much the majority of this kitchen line. They're going to be way happier if you hit a deep return and are slow getting up to this line rather than if you hit a short return, but you get up to the line as fast as possible. Probably the simplest thing you can do to make your returns easier is to just stand further back from the baseline when you're receiving the serve. As we'll discuss later, where we're making contact with this ball in relation to our body is also extremely important. So we can set ourselves up for success by starting a couple feet behind this line. Remember that as the returner, we have to let the ball bounce. So if I'm standing on the line and the ball that they serve bounces on the line, I have to then back up to make contact and I'll probably be making contact around my body when in fact it's much better to be making contact in front of your body. So if I'm already behind this line, no matter where they hit this ball into the court, I can make contact in front of my body as my momentum is going forward. And then naturally I'll get up to the kitchen line faster while still being able to hit a good return. A common counterpoint to this statement is that if I'm standing so far behind the space line, how can I ever make it up to a serve that is short in the court? Well, there's really two answers to that. Number one, if they hit the perfect serve that barely lands like right outside of this kitchen line, but in the court, yeah, it might be tough to get to, but also remember that it's literally the perfect serve for them and it's extremely hard to hit. And more often than not, they're And the other thing is that if I am behind this line and they do hit the literal perfect serve, being an athletic person, I'm very likely going to be able to get to that ball no matter what. The court is small and any serve that is hit to me, we can probably get to. Something you need to consider on your return is the type of spin that you're applying to the ball. So if our opponent is likely hitting heavy topspin to us, you've probably seen that when you try to put heavy topspin back on that ball, it's really difficult to do. And the reason is because of spin continuation. So if they're hitting heavy topspin, the ball is rotating in this direction. So as the returner, this is the opposite direction from my topspin. When I want to put topspin on the ball, I'd have to literally stop all the rotation of the ball and then apply my own spin to it to generate true topspin, which is difficult to do if you don't have perfect contact or a paddle like the zero zero eight that has a lot of grit. So you can apply your own spin to the ball to overcome their spin. A much easier way to deal with this heavy topspin is to just apply your own backspin. So when they're hitting the ball like this, it's rotating the same direction as my slice would be rotating and my slice applies backspin to the ball. So if they're hitting truly heavy topspin, I can take all the spin that they're generating and just add more to it by hitting the proper type of return. But another thing to consider is that if I just return every single serve with a slice and it applies more backspin to it, when that ball gets back to my opponent, it's still spinning in that direction, which is the same spin as their topspin. So the more that I slice my return, the easier time they're going to have hitting a topspin drive back at me. So we really prefer a topspin return because it's harder to generate topspin on the third shot as the but for those really, really heavy topspin serves you receive, slice will be your best friend. As part of this series, I created a small book, which is over 40 pages long of literally everything I know about pickleball. That's the name of the book. If you sign up for my free newsletter, I'll send you this shorter version of the book. Plus show you how you can get the entire version of the book completely for free. Plus you'll be eligible for weekly $250 plus paddle giveaways where I give away paddles just like this one. And all you have to do is read the newsletter. If you're struggling with hitting your returns out of bounds, or your opponent has just a crazy good serve, the simplest thing you can do is aim for the dead middle of the court. So a lot of the time, we just struggle with getting our return to even go into the court. When you're having that issue, literally just aim for the exact middle of the court. That way, you give yourself the most margin around the entire court to miss. If you're aiming here, it's very unlikely that you're going to hit it exactly here. For me personally, instead of aiming at the dead middle of the court, I usually aim somewhere around this part of the court. So we're still in the middle. So I have a lot of margin left and right. But I also give myself a little bit of margin to the baseline. So if I do hit it a little bit too hard, it doesn't go out of bounds, it just ends up being the literal perfect return. And I also like aiming to the middle for a couple of more reasons. From the middle of the court, if I'm trying to attack, I really can only hit it hard down the middle. If I hit it hard to the sidelines, my angle is not very severe. It's not a very sharp angle. But if I were over here, so let's say I return the ball over here, now I can hit the ball extremely hard cross court and have a much longer distance and a much sharper angle to make contact with this ball. So the balls that hit the sideline on the return or around the sideline, you just have a lot more attacking opportunities because of where this ball is on the court. Plus, if you do return the ball to the middle of the court and you're playing doubles, you're going to make your opposing team have to make a decision who takes that ball. And as we all know, communication on the pickleball court is very hard. A common misconception is that you have to hit your returns hard and deep into the court. A really important thing to remember is that the harder you hit your return, the faster it gets to your opponent, which means they can hit their third shot sooner. So if I just hit the most powerful return I possibly can, I'm probably not giving myself enough time to get all the way up to this kitchen line before they make contact with the ball, which means a lot of the time I'll just be out of position. And that's why it's totally okay to take some pace off of your return to give yourself a better chance of making it up to the kitchen line before your opponent hits their third shot. The really important thing here is that if you are taking pace off your return, you're probably hitting it a little bit higher and you want to make sure that you're getting that ball as deep as possible. If you ever hit a very high, slow, short return, you're going to get crushed by your opponent's third shot drive and probably lose the point immediately. Probably the most important thing you can do on your return is make contact in the correct position. So when you're lined up to receive a serve, your first thought should be getting the return on the right spot of your body. So for me and the majority of people, that's going to be outside of our foot. And what I mean by that is that when that ball is coming towards me, I want a position to where if the ball is coming right here, let's say it's landing here. I want my feet to be on this side of it. So that ball is on the outside of my foot. It's a lot easier to swing free when that ball is lined up in this position than it would be if that ball was lined up like this, because now I'd have to swing all the way around and I have to contort my arm in a really weird way to make contact. But also you want to give yourself enough space to make contact in front of you. So while it is on the outside of my foot, it also needs to be slightly in front of me. So about here is where I like to receive my serve and make contact on my return. That way the ball is in front of me. It's on the outside of my body. And then my natural drive is just the perfect spot for me to make contact on that return. And the exact same thing is true on the backhand side. If the ball is coming at me right here and I'm with my backhand, I want it to be on the outside of my body, but also in front of me so that when I hit my backhand, I'm making contact in the most powerful and stable part of my motion, which is right about here on the outside of my body and right in front of me. Because we're trying to get this ball to set up in relation to a certain part of our body, but our opponent is hitting a very hard serve, we don't have a lot of time to make that movement or make those adjustments. Really you only have one or two steps and there's a couple of common scenarios that you're going to be in. So it's really important that you go ahead and practice these movements so that when those scenarios arrive, you're going to be prepared for that return. So the first two common scenarios are balls that already land right on the outside of your feet. So if I'm set up like this and the ball lands on the outside of my foot, all I have to do is just turn my hips and now I can make really easy contact. Same thing here on my backhand. If it lands right here, I can just turn my hips and then I'm ready for that two-handed backhand return. However, if it lands slightly further away from my body, I need to be prepared for that one as well. So if I'm lined up here and it lands closer to that tee, what I'd probably do is just do one quick shuffle and then make contact and move forward. On my backhand, same thing. If it's over here, I might just do one quick shuffle, make contact, move forward. It's important on both of these though that when you do that shuffling motion, sometimes you might not just stop right there. There might be a few micro adjustments that you do to make sure you're in the exact right position. So I do this one big shuffle step and then I might do a couple like tinier movements just to make sure that I'm lined up in the exact right spot. The other place where you might receive serves is directly in front of your body. If that ball is truly directly in front of your body, a really simple movement is to just do a really small shuffle step to the left. That way you can take it with your forehand. So ball is coming to me, I just go like this and I can take with my forehand. Pretty simple. Now the one place where you need a little bit of a different style of footwork is if it lands on your left foot. So for me as a right-handed player, this place is pretty awkward because either A, I have to really step around this ball to make contact with my forehand or B, it forces me into hitting a backhand when I might not be comfortable with the backhand in the first place. So to get over this, you can use this footwork technique to avoid it. So when I'm set up in this position and the ball is coming to my left foot, all I have to do is take my right foot, place it behind my left, and then put my left foot out and now I'm in the exact perfect position to make contact. So really quick, it looks like this. Ball is coming here, now I'm ready. So one quick motion, you can prepare to hit a forehanded return, but the problem with this is that when you do this, it's going to take you away from the kitchen line and that means that you're going to be slower getting up to that kitchen line to prepare for the third shot that's coming back at you. But it might be okay because remember the number one point here is we want to get this ball as deep as possible and if you're going to get the ball deeper with your forehand than you will with your backhand, then it's probably worth it. So maybe through practicing those different footwork techniques, you've discovered that going to your forehand side is much easier than going to your backhand side or vice versa. Well, the good news is you can set yourself up in such a way on your return that you get more balls to your forehand or more balls to your backhand. All you have to do is stand on different parts of the service box left or right. So if I want more balls to my forehand, I'm going to line up further over here on this side of the court. That way the majority of shots that come to me are going to be to my forehand so I can utilize that footwork technique and my forehand shot to actually make the return. When you do this though, it will be difficult to get to balls that are really far over here around the tee so you're going to need a couple of steps to get there. So now instead of taking one shuffle step, you might have to take one, two, and then prepare to hit your forehanded return. Another way that I use this concept a lot is when I'm trying to work on a specific shot. Like for example, I just got this paddle a few days ago and now I'm trying to work on my two-handed backhands with it because it feels a little bit different. When I'm lining up for returns, I'm not lining up on the right side of my service box. That way I can make sure that every shot that comes to me, I can take with the backhand and so I can get more reps and rec play. As you get better though, this entire dynamic shifts. So now as a 5.0 player, I'm not really thinking too much about am I hitting on the forehand or am I hitting with the backhand. I'm more so thinking about where am I going to end up at after I make this return. So this is especially true in singles where I'm trying to get to that kitchen line as fast as possible. On this side of the court, when I'm on the left side of the court, I want to be making contact primarily with my backhand. And the reason why I think this is true is because when I make contact with my backhand, my momentum carries me naturally into the middle of the court. So I'm able to get there a lot faster and defend more balls easier. Same thing on this side. I want to take more balls with my forehand. So as I make contact, my momentum carries me through so I can finish in the center of the court. If I'm making contact with my backhand over here, more than likely I'm finishing away from the center of the court and that's going to draw me over to this side of the court. And then just like we talked about before, if I am over here and that ball does get hit to my left foot, when I take this motion with my feet, I'm forcing myself to hit a forehand from literally the far corner of the court, which means that it's very difficult for me to cover the entirety of the rest of the court. So it's probably smarter as you get better to work on hitting most shots from this side of the court with your backhand and most shots from this side of the court with your forehand. While we're talking about singles, one of the most effective returns you can hit is a short angle return. So your opponent just served and then after they serve, they probably take a couple of steps back behind the baseline. So they're lined up pretty far behind the baseline. If you can hit a short angle return on the return, it is okay to hit it into the kitchen. So if you can aim somewhere around this area of the court or the same thing on the other side, what it's going to do is force your opponent to run up to that kitchen line to then hit their third shot drop. And as they're running, they're probably making contact somewhere really low to the ground. And so from this position, you really can't be offensive. So maybe if your opponent is just consistently hitting really hard third shot drives from the baseline, hitting that short angle return will make them run up and then try to be offensive from this position where they really can't. And if they get this ball over the net with any pace at all, you can easily just poke it for a winner immediately. Usually on any given team, there is one partner who is the better player or at least the better poacher. And so a really effective strategy is to hit all of your returns to that player specifically. So they're forced to hit the third shot drop and can't poach as freely. One of the reasons why a bad return is so threatening is because it sets up your opponents to do a shake and bake where one player drives the ball and the other partner runs up and takes it out of the air. But your opponents don't have to be running a shake and bake to achieve the same effect. All they really need is just one partner who is the better poacher. So if I were to hit my return down the line and then this person hits a third shot drop right in front of me here, and then I try to dink it back to them or hit it just a little bit too hard back to them, then he could come up to this kitchen line and then step over and poach that ball, taking it out of the air, which is a ball that wasn't intending for him. It was going to his partner, but he's able to step across that line and take it out of the air and apply pressure to us. Usually on any given team, there is one partner who is the better player or at least the better poacher. And so a really effective strategy is to hit all of your returns to that player specifically so they're forced to hit the third shot drop and can't poach as freely. When your team is returning, there's going to be a time where you're not the active returner, but you're still a part of the team. And from this position, you have three different jobs to do. Number one is you want to be watching the serve to see if that ball lands in or out. And it's your job to make that call either in or out. As the returner, it's really difficult to be looking for the ball that lands in or out while thinking about hitting a really good return as well. It's much easier to let all that burden fall on the person that's currently doing nothing so they can make that call for you so you can just focus on hitting the proper return. The second thing you need to be aware of is where your partner is hitting the ball in the court. So if they hit this ball all the way over here to this right sideline, I want to be stepping over here in anticipation of that ball coming down this right sideline and then trusting my partner to come up here and fill this gap after he's returned the ball. Same thing if he returns the ball down this sideline, I want to be aware of that so that I can step over and cover the middle more knowing that he's going to fill the gap where he just hit that ball. But I wouldn't know where to position myself laterally if I wasn't first turned around and watching him hit his return. And then the third thing you need to be aware of is where they're hitting that ball vertically in the court. So if they hit a really short return with a little bit of height to it, it might make sense for me to take a couple of steps back in anticipation of my opponents driving that ball at me. And if they hit anything other than that, well then I can stay up here at this line. But it's important to see the type of return they hit because it gives me information about what type of position I need to put myself in so that we can be the most effective as a team. One of the most annoying things you can do in pickleball is be on the returning team but not be the active returner and be standing right here crowding this tee. And the reason this is annoying is because it's totally possible for my opponent to hit a ball that comes directly at my body and still lands in the court. So effectively I'm just blocking my partner's point of view for no reason whatsoever. And if they were to hit a ball that was somewhere over here, I'm still able to be hit by that ball which happens all the time. So the ball is coming this way, my partner returns it, and it hits me, but we just lost that point all because I was standing in the wrong spot. So to fix this, I'd always recommend doing this. Stand about maybe one or two steps away from that middle line and then one step off of it and then turn your hips to face your partner. That way whenever they hit that ball and my partner then makes contact, all I have to do to get up to this line is take one step and now I'm positioned wherever I need to be to respond to the return that he hit, recognizing that they're going to hit a third shot maybe down the sideline or maybe cross court. The most frustrating thing that any pickleball player experiences is hitting a ball into the net. And this is especially true on your return when it's the first shot that you're hitting in a rally. So it's way better to err on the side of caution and hit this ball maybe higher than you're thinking that you should just to make sure that it clears the net. And sometimes when you do hit this ball high on your return, it's going to carry and go out of bounds. That's not really okay, but at least you're aiming for the back part of the court, which is the ideal place to aim your returns in the first place. If the ball sets up high and your opponent has a really easy third shot drop, that's better than just ending the point immediately. Thanks for watching guys. If you found this video helpful, please consider subscribing and make sure to sign up for the free newsletter so you can get this entire book for free. Plus be eligible for weekly pal giveaways. And if you liked that video, YouTube really thinks you're going to like this video next, so you should click on it. Thanks for watching. See you in the next one. Peace.