If you are looking to improve your aggressive dinking during your next pickleball game, you should know how to hit it — but especially when to hit it. Pickleball coaches Barrett and Danea Bass will teach you about your pickleball footwork, how to speed up the dink, how to spin the pickleball, where to hit the ball, and when not to hit an aggressive dink.
Pickleball footwork
When choosing to hit an aggressive dink, your foundation will always be your footwork. A mistake players make when choosing to hit an aggressive dink is getting pulled off balance when they are dinking and then try to hit a really aggressive topspin dink right then. This becomes a panic shot, which will probably cause unforced errors.
Here is a cheat code: Hit an aggressive dink only when you are completely balanced and not in movement. If you’re dinking and get pulled off balance, you should be hitting a reset dink to the middle.
What you should look for is a dink that has you balanced on both feet. Then you can go for a more aggressive shot where you are going to hit the ball at your opponent’s feet or down the line. You will be able to aim it a little bit better because you’re on both feet and really balanced.
The dead dink
To hit the aggressive dink, it’s important to understand what a dead dink is. A dead dink is simply when the ball doesn't have much action or spin, and it's not really creating much pressure.
If the dead dink lands in the kitchen and close to the net, it’s a hard ball to do anything with it. But the further you get away from the net, especially when that ball doesn't have a lot of spin or bounces a little bit higher, that is a great time to hit an aggressive dink.
It’s important to understand when you have a dead dink versus having a dink that has a lot of spin, or is creating a lot of pressure. Having a dead dink will give you the opportunity to hit an aggressive dink.
The art of spin
An important mistake that pickleball players make is when they're wanting to hit an aggressive dink and want to use spin, but they just use way too much. You do not need a lot of spin for an aggressive dink. When you go for too much on spin, that's often when a lot of unforced errors happen.
When you’re at the kitchen line, you're only seven feet from the net and 14 feet from your opponent. So when you are dinking and using spin, a little bit is going to go a long way. You should instead be thinking about the placement of your dink.
Hitting the pickleball at the apex
One of the most important tips for hitting a successful aggressive dink is apexing the ball. Many players will contact the ball off the short hop — meaning the ball is hitting the ground and it's still traveling upwards when they make contact. If you hit the ball on its ascent it's much harder to manipulate it with spin and be aggressive.
Instead, you will want to let the ball bounce to its highest point (or apex) and start to descend or fall before making contact. At this point, the ball is decelerating, which will allow you to manipulate it a lot better.
To hit the apex of the ball you will want to get your feet behind the ball and allow the ball to get to its apex. You may have to rotate back off the kitchen line a little bit, but you don't want to keep getting pushed back. If you need to move back, you should rotate back, hit your dink, reset, and rotate back. When you let the ball get to its highest point or start to descend, now you can be much more aggressive with that shot.
Next time you're out dinking, try apexing the ball — this will allow you to have a lot more control and be a lot more aggressive with those dinks.