Let’s Get Ready to Ramble!

Fancy something to dink?

Today’s pickleball coaching session put on by the club was the second in a series of skills clinics led by PPR Coach Developer, UK, Heidi McCune and aimed at Improvers. What’s an Improver, you ask? Someone with a skills rating of 3.5.

What’s that you ask, again? Well, it’s a rating on this chart which you might well have seen a version of before, and is the basis for the DUPR rankings as well.

If you haven’t come across it yet, the USAP Skill Level Assessment takes all this a bit further. It asks you some quite searching questions about your game and how you perceive it, asks you to put in your self-assessment score on the USA Pickleball scale, and then spits out your ‘corrected’ score.

What’s good about it is that it asks you questions that make you think about your game. Responses to the question “How consistent and accurate are you at dinking the ball in the non-volley zone ‘kitchen'?” include:

• I can sustain medium-length dink rallies, but with limited ability to control height/depth

• I can dink consistently with moderate ability to control height/depth, but I may end the dink rally too soon due to lack of patience

• I can dink with high success at changing shot types while playing both consistently and with offensive intent

This was precisely the sort of area Heidi was working in today, taking us from answer 1 to answer 3, or at least starting the journey.

If there was one key takeaway from it all though, it was the importance of getting to the kitchen line. That is where the game is won; not being there is where the game is lost. This session was all about making sure you have the tools in your armoury to get there, and the lightbulb moment for me in particular was when she pointed out that the service return needs to be deep but should not necessarily be fast.

The logic here is this: You want your opponent on the baseline still, but you want to give yourself time to get to the kitchen line. A fast ball tends to come back fast, so hit a long, slow ball as the serving side still needs to wait for it to bounce before they hit the third shot. You want to be able to return and run, or even better return and ramble, so that you and your partner are both standing at the kitchen line while your opponents are still at the back of the court.

Or something like that anyway. We’ll see how that all goes on Monday night when the ‘Must. Hit. Ball. Hard.’ messages start firing in my hippocampus.

There was a lot more too. These are great sessions and something that can really help develop your game. £15 very well spent.

Introducing Dingle

Heidi also introduced us to the best pickleball warm-up game, Dingle. It’s confusing at first, but quickly addictive. Here’s how it goes:

1. Take four players and two balls

2. Dink cross-court at each other

3. At the first mistake, usually a net, shout ‘Dingle’

4. The game then turns into a normal rally with the remaining ball, though using approximately half the length of the court

5. The winning side gets a point

6. Either continue or swap in a waiting player with the player who made the last mistake tapping out

7. Honestly, it’s great

Everything you read and everything you watch tells you that dinking is the key to success at pickleball. Admittedly, there is a more power-centric game starting to feed through at the pro level, but dinking is always going to be a critical part of the game, especially at the level most of us are playing at and will aspire to. Playing Dingle is a great way of getting your dinking head on at the start of the evening, not eventually remembering about it at the end!

See you at the kitchen!