Pickleball is the one sport that just about anyone regardless of age or physical shape can play and play it well. Even if you’re just getting started with pickleball, you can get really good in no time with the right tips, training, and consistency. Here are pickleball tips for beginners that I wish someone told me when I first started learning how to play the game.
Must Know Pickleball Tips For Beginners
A lot of pickleball tips for beginners involve knowing the types of shots in pickleball and the strategies behind them. While they will be certainly helpful as you play the game more and more, it can all get pretty overwhelming as a beginner. So I would do these things instead.
Take Your Time To Learn The Right Touch
Before you even have to learn the rules of the game when you first start playing pickleball, the most important thing is getting the feel for how the ball hits. This includes how you will hold the paddle, how hard to grip it, and how hard you want to hit the ball.
If you have ever gone skiing or snowboarding, think of this time as spending a day on the bunny slope learning your balance. There is no rush to play a game right away. Spend some time figuring out what grip you like. The continental grip is usually taught to be the way you hold a pickleball paddle. However, there are no hard and fast rules.
You also want to hit the ball from all distances, starting from the kitchen line to the middle of the court and then from the baseline. Starting out with a short distance is important if you have never played a racket sport before. That way, you get a feel for a soft touch first and make your way up to harder hits from longer distances.
Minimize Your Movement
Once you learn how to play the game and how you want to hit your shots, the next thing you will want to keep in mind is your movement on the court. One of the biggest learning curves when it comes to any racket sports, including pickleball, is footwork.
Too many times, beginners in pickleball will move too much as they’re trying to swing. What happens when you’re moving your feet or your body too much as you’re swinging your paddle is you mishit the ball. This is because it takes more hand-eye coordination when the rest of your body is not still.
Instead, you want to stand in a low, athletic stance with a slight bent to your knees. You want to keep your upper body in a firm, straight position with your paddle up. If you’re moving up the kitchen line, you want to stop and be in your ready position as soon as your opponent is about to swing.
Why? Because if you’re still moving, it is easy for your opponent to aim at your feet or place the ball behind you. If you need to move to the left or right, take a step and shuffle to the side laterally. Don’t take several small steps when you can take one bigger step.
Minimizing your overall movement on the court will help you stay in control and increase your reaction time to be ready for the next shot.
Consistent Shots Are More Important Than Fancy Shots
If you’ve seen more seasoned players on the court or even watch the pros play, you may see fancy shots and wicked spins. While you may want to learn those shots right away, what’s more important is mastering the basic, fundamental shots.
Being able to make your shots consistently without the ball going into the net or going out of bounds is more challenging than it may seem. In fact, it is a skill that most intermediate players struggle with. So before you shift your interest to learning slices, tweeners, and ATPs, aim to consistently get your serves, returns, drops and dinks in.
Placement Over Power
A common mistake for so many beginners is thinking they have to overpower their opponents in order to win. They want to hit the ball as hard as they can or speed the ball up for a hands battle. But you will learn in pickleball that placement is more important than power.
I was shocked to see young, athletic players with a lot of power lose to older, less mobile players who are simply better at placing the ball. So you don’t have to be the fastest on the court or able to hit the ball the hardest.
Instead, you want to have the control to hit the ball to areas of the court that your opponents will have to move to. Make your opponents hit the ball in a position that they may not be as comfortable in, like their backhand.
More Pickleball Tips
Read Next: Must-Know Pickleball Shots To Level Up From A Beginner
Read Also: USA Pickleball Official Rulebook