Fun Dink Exercise

Everyone will tell you that skill with dinks is important to a high-quality game. No doubt your pickleball club starts with kitchen dink rallies when first warming up. Some players will then escalate this into airborne kitchen rallies (popcorn wars). Many players don’t spend enough time with diagonal dinks. A fun exercise to really ‘get’ dinking, both straight across and with diangonal dinks involves two players.

Start with both players facing each other in the middle of the court, and dink back and forth. Gradually, the players each move to their left, aiming the shots are more and more diagonal. As soon as it becomes impossible to be any more diagonal, one player hits the ball rather high, perhaps ten feet up (3 meters), but on her own side of the net into the righthand side of the court. At this point, both players quickly run around the net posts, trading sides, and continuing the rally in a clockwise direction (as seen from above), until they are both in the middle of the court again. This can continue around the net for several rotations. Don’t forget to try it counter-clockwise also.

Obviously, both players should carefully avoid contacting the net when changing sides, since this could result in a broken net or an injury.