Dinking, Some Additional Thoughts

 I saw a video on the two types of dinks.  I think it was called "Why you lose at dinking" or something of that ilk.  There was some good info there and I pass it along below.  Below that discussion I've provided some modest thoughts on how to win points at the kitchen line.

Per the video we have the lift dink and the push dink.

The lift dink attempts to bring the ball over the net with a high trajectory, lots of room for error.  What keeps this shot from being a disaster is that the ball does not / cannot land deep in the kitchen.  Think of it as being a lob over the net with no attempt at being long. There is no attempt to win the rally with this shot.  You are just keeping the ball in play.  Use it when you can't hit a push dink, or are out of position, out of breath and you want a bit of recovery time.

Push dink...  Now we are trying to score points or trying to make the opponents uncomfortable and setup a kill shot a couple of hits in the future.  This shot clears the net without a lot of space.  It also travels deeper into the kitchen and may well land beyond the kitchen line.  You can't hit this at any time, you need to have a ball that is up a touch and/or back from the net a bit so you have room to get over  the net with a flat arc.  The danger with this shot is putting it into the net, or hitting it too hard, or giving the opponents a high ball.  This is frequently hit cross court.  Though hitting it into the middle is pretty effective if you are hitting it from a kitchen corner.

Both these shots are hit with an arm swing.  Don't use your wrist to pop the ball if you can.  A controlled arm swing is preferred.

Here is the link to the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iO_CiTUGzE

 

How to win points...

Ok, you've mastered the two dink types and you are happy to dink and your opponents fear you.  How can we win points with all of this?  There are a couple of scenarios worth thinking about:

• Just keep dinking until they dump one in the net or they
  
• get bored and speed it up or
• they hit it hard and hit it long or
• they get clever and hit it too wide or
  
• out comes the lob, aka "the devil's shot"
•  If you want to be more proactive, you want to move your opponents around, side to side, use the middle of the court to reset, dink towards feet and finally...
• Wait for the pop up and smash it or roll it down the middle.

Basically it is a waiting game.  You are looking for an error.  Try to avoid trying for the hero shot -- yes we all do it, but less is more in this case.  We're all rec players and the errors will arrive.  It's your job to be ready to exploit them. 

I had a lot of dinking points this week and it made for a lot of fun points, imho.  Hard to run out of breath doing that, but also hard to get your steps in.