Level Up with Coach Nick

1. The Four Pillars of Doubles Strategy

Every point in doubles is one team trying to do four things, and the other team trying to stop them.

You've probably already worked on two pieces of this without me naming them that way. Dinking is how you neutralize an opponent. Choosing the right third shot is how you pressure one. There's a bigger framework underneath both, and it's worth seeing the whole thing at once: be consistent, neutralize, pressure, and handle pressure. Every team that beats you is doing at least one of these better than you are.

Pillar 1: Be Consistent

This is the least exciting pillar and the one that wins the most points. At the rec and low-tournament level, points aren't won. They're given away. If you can get one more ball back than your opponent, over and over, you win more than your shot selection would suggest.

• Before every shot, pick the safer option unless you have a clear reason not to.
• Aim for the middle of the court more than the lines. The middle has the most net clearance and the smallest chance of going out.
• Don't manufacture a hard shot out of a rally ball just because you're bored of dinking. Boredom isn't a good enough reason to go for more.

Pillar 2: Neutralize the Opponent

This is what the dinking article was really about: taking a ball that could be attacked and turning it into a ball that can't be. That's not the whole job, though. Neutralizing also means surviving a hard-hit ball once you're already in trouble.

The shot you're missing from that article is the reset: when someone drives the ball at you hard, you don't drive it back. You soften your grip, let the paddle absorb the pace instead of adding to it, and drop the ball into the kitchen. A reset doesn't win the point. It just un-loses it, and buys your team time to get back to the net.

Pillar 3: Pressure the Opponent

The third-shot article covered how to pick between drop, drive, and drip. Pressure is the bigger idea behind that choice: making your opponents hit a shot they don't want to hit, from a position they don't want to be in.

Two ways to add pressure beyond shot selection:

• Serve placement. A serve deep to the backhand, or jammed at the body, is already pressure before the point has really started.
• Attack the middle. The seam between two doubles partners is where miscommunication lives. A ball down the middle is harder to read as "mine" or "yours" than a ball down a sideline, even against players with solid individual shots.

Pillar 4: Handle Pressure from the Opponent

This is the pillar most players never train, because nobody enjoys practicing being attacked. But if you can't handle pressure, everything else you've learned only matters until the first time someone hits the ball hard at you.

• Watch the pillar above from the other side: when the ball's coming at your body, soften your hands and block it, don't swing at it. A block with a still paddle face is a shot; a swing at a fast ball is a coin flip.
• Take a small step back and to the side rather than standing flat-footed and eating the ball off your chest.
• Get your paddle out and down early. Most players get handled by body shots because their paddle is still up around head height from the shot before.

Try this: Have a partner alternate feeding you dinks and hard drives at your body, no pattern, so you don't know which is coming. Your only job is to get every ball back into the kitchen, soft hands on both. That's the whole skill of handling pressure in one drill.

2. Singles Strategy: A Different Game

Doubles rewards patience. Singles punishes it. There's no partner to bail you out of a bad decision.

Almost everything in the first series and the pillars above assumes a partner standing next to you. Take that partner away and the game changes shape: more court to cover, no one to poach a ball you can't reach, and a serve-and-return battle that decides a much bigger share of points. If you've only ever trained doubles, singles will humble you the first time you try it. That's exactly why it's worth training on purpose.

Serve Deep

In singles, a short serve is a gift. It lets your opponent step in and take the ball early, on the front foot, with the whole open court in front of them. A deep serve pins them behind the baseline and buys you the time singles never gives you enough of.

Return and Run

Just like in doubles, you want to be moving forward after your return, but in singles there's more ground to make up and no partner already up at the net to lean on. Hit a deep return, then get moving immediately. A shallow return costs you twice: it's an easier ball for your opponent, and it steals the time you needed to close the court.

Stretch the Server

On return, don't just go deep down the middle out of habit. Go deep and wide, to either corner. Pulling the server off center opens up the rest of the court for your next shot, and a server who has to cover more ground has less time to set up their own next shot.

Drive the Third

The third-shot drop that's often correct in doubles is a much bigger gamble in singles. There's no partner up at the net to protect the space you're giving up by coming in slowly, and no partner to poach the ball if your drop sits up. Against most singles opponents, a firm, flat drive keeps them pinned back and buys you more than a drop would.

Volley to the Open Court

At the net in singles, the decision is simpler than in doubles: no "their body" versus "the middle," just whichever side of the court your opponent isn't standing in. There's no partner to cover the space you're not hitting to, so the open court is almost always the right target.

Try this: Play a few practice points that start from serve only, singles rules, and score yourself on one thing: did you serve deep and did your return pull your opponent off center? Ignore who wins the point. If both of those are true most of the time, the rest of your singles game will follow.

3. Shot Mechanics 101: Grip, Setup, Contact, Recovery

Strategy tells you which shot to hit. Mechanics decide whether you can actually hit it the same way twice.

Everything in the first two articles assumes you can reliably produce the shot you're choosing. That reliability comes from a repeatable sequence: grip, setup, contact, recovery. Pickleball is fundamentally a game of movement. The shot itself is a small part of a much bigger motion that starts before contact and doesn't end until you're back in position.

Grip

That loose-grip advice from the dinking article isn't dink-specific. It's the foundation under every shot you hit. A death grip locks your wrist and kills your feel for pace, which means every shot you hit comes out the same regardless of what the situation calls for. Hold the paddle the way you'd hold a bird: firm enough that it doesn't fly away, loose enough that you don't crush it.

Setup

Setup is getting your paddle to the right height and angle for the ball that's coming, adjusted for this specific shot rather than just the generic "paddle up" ready position. A ball at your shoulders needs a different paddle angle than a ball at your ankles, and that adjustment has to happen on the way to the ball, not at the moment you swing.

Impact Point

Make contact out in front of your body, not beside or behind it. Contact behind you means you've already lost control of the shot before you've hit it. You're reacting instead of directing. Watching the ball all the way to your paddle, rather than looking up at your target early, is what actually makes an early contact point possible.

Hitting Zone and Sensation

More feel, less force. The best players talk about "catching" the ball rather than hitting it, especially anywhere near the kitchen. That sensation, paddle absorbing and redirecting rather than striking, is what separates a controlled shot from a hard one that happens to go in.

Recovery

The shot doesn't end at contact. Recovery is getting your paddle back to ready position and your feet back to good court position immediately after you hit, not once you're done watching where the ball went. Players who stand and admire their own shot are almost always the ones caught flat-footed by the return.

Try this: Shadow-swing without a ball: grip, setup, contact, recovery, ten reps for a forehand dink, ten for a backhand dink, ten for a drive. Then do it again with a partner feeding real balls. The sequence should feel identical whether or not the ball is actually there.

4. Practice Like a Pro: Drills to Sharpen Your Game

A game teaches you to compete. A drill teaches you to repeat. You need both, but most players only ever do the first one.

Reading about a shot and being able to produce it under pressure are two different skills. These are drills I use often in lessons. Grab a partner, a bucket of balls, and work through the ones that target whatever's weakest in your game right now.

Distance Master

Rally cross-court, calling out "deep," "mid," or "kitchen" before each shot and hitting to that depth on purpose. Builds the touch to control distance, not just direction. That's the skill underneath both consistency and resets.

Deep Returns Rule the Day

Feed serves, return every single one deep past the baseline-ish line, no exceptions. Miss short on purpose a few times so you feel the difference between a return that pins your opponent and one that hands them the point.

Dynamic Dinking

Dink cross-court while shuffling a step side to side between shots instead of standing still. Most players' dinking falls apart the moment they have to move for it. This closes that gap.

Drop It Like It's Hot

One player feeds return-of-serve-style balls from the baseline; the other practices nothing but the third-shot drop, working to land it in the kitchen off both the forehand and backhand.

Yo-Yo Volleys

At the net, alternate one soft volley and one firm volley, back and forth, without telegraphing which is coming. Trains the pace control that separates a controlled net game from a paddle that only knows one speed.

Serve, Return, Drop / Serve, Return, Drive

Play out short points that start from a live serve and return, but the third shot is decided in advance: drop in one version, drive in the other. Removes the decision so you can groove the execution, then combine both once each feels natural.

Two Serve Points

Play full points to 2, switching servers after every point instead of every game. Compresses a lot of serve-and-return reps into a short amount of time. Useful when you've only got twenty minutes on the court.

Black Hole Returns / Black Hole Volleys / Gotta Drop It

Mark or imagine a "black hole" zone, the mid-court no-man's-land, and the rule is simple: nothing lands there. Returns must clear it deep, volleys must clear it or go to the kitchen, and any ball that would land in it gets converted into a drop instead. Trains you to stop feeding your opponents the exact ball they want to attack.

Try this: Pick the one drill above that made you wince a little reading it. That's the one your game actually needs right now.