Spin Generation and Paddle Control

 If you watch Angel or Jose Marie, they have a smooth and efficient service motion.  The paddle seems not to be controlled as for a hit, but more like a swing.

If you play golf for example, the club is designed to hit the ball as long as you don't interfere with it much.  This, the physicists tell me, is due to the weight and length of the club.  A baseball bat will not swing in this automatic fashion and the forearms have to rotate to help the hitting motion by "squaring the bat."  You might notice that baseball players have big forearms.

Also, long drive golfers have the same problem and can't swing like a normal player.  They have longer clubs, or at least they did, there are new rules to limit length, but once upon a time they were quite long and also required some forearm "work" to square the club.

How does this affect us students of the game of pickleball?  The racquetball player has this flipping motion.  If this is to create more speed or is required to square the racquet, I don't know.  

I've been playing with this with a pickleball paddle and I think that the less wristy you are with the paddle, the more speed you will get out of it as you get a snap to propel the ball.  I find it difficult to trust this swing, so it's an effort, but it seems to work.

Spin...

One of the things I've noticed in dinking is that when I expect to see topspin on a ball hit with my forehand, it comes out as a sidespin to the left.  Which means I'm closing the paddle and wrapping it around the ball -- the paddle is pointing a bit to the left of the target line.  So my forehand dink is a lot like the above topic in that I'm getting in my own way by closing the face of the paddle.  I'm fighting this tendency.  I would like to have a forehand roll and the sidespin instead of the topspin is a problem.

I can see this when dinking but not so much with ground strokes, however I'm sure I'm doing there too.  Today I hit a bunch of ground strokes where I was able to properly produce topspin.  As a third shot, a medium speed top spin shot is quite effective as it will dip below the net level.

So watch the spin you are producing when dinking.  Make sure you are producing what you want to and change wrist/paddle angles and strokes to make it so.