Paddle Angles

 When I'm not at the PB court I am frequently found at the driving range.  There is much to practice in life...

What you get from golf clubs is a fixed angle to the ball.  Then, of course, the golfer screws that all up by not presenting the club to the ball properly.  But there are some parallels to this in pickleball that we might find useful.

When dinking is taught, the current theory is to freeze wrist and elbow and swing with the arm.  This puts the paddle into a fixed state of loft and with an arm swing ought to provide more consistency.  The "wrong" way to do it would be to move the wrist close to impact.  This is OK, but when you move the wrist and how much you move it are additional variables and make the shot more complex.  So an unbiased observer might cautiously state that, the more wristy shot is not for the faint of heart.  If you have this shot, fine, but it might not be the best way to learn to dink without any paddle sport background.

Let's go one more step with this paddle angle and golf stuff.  The golf swing is likened to a sidearm ball throw with emphasis on leading the action with the body and doing the throw late in the swing.  If you were tossing a ball around in the backyard, you would probably have a nice long motion with plenty of body even if you were not throwing the ball very far.  

PB ground strokes are much the same.  Ideally, you want to get in position to hit a ball, then there is a chain of events that use the lower body to shift weight and provide a nice solid platform to rotate the upper body and finally bring the arm through to hit the ball.   Your weight should be on the foot closer to the net before you hit the ball.  The added benefit to this is that your momentum should be moving forward and that will make it easier to follow a good shot towards the net of required.

I might suggest that the angle of the paddle is important here as you need to clear the net with its initial trajectory.  Getting the ball to land in is another topic, but first let's get the ball over the net.  Its height and how fast the ball will be going are the output of the paddle angle and the swing speed.  Whatever spin you might put on the ball is more important to control where the ball lands, than where and how it crosses the net.  

If you golf I would suggest think of putting the paddle in the face angle of a eight iron (say 35 degrees to the sky) or so, to ensure that you will drive the ball over the net.  If you are hitting a drop shot, then you want to toss a pillow into the air, with a nice high follow through and a paddle angle that is maybe sixty degrees open.

This all applies to the serve too.  Whether you bounce the ball and hit it or you hit it right from your left hand, you want your body to be doing some movement and the strike should be pretty close to your body; don't be reaching towards the net to hit it.  If you're off balance after the serve, check where you are hitting the ball and whether you are using your body.  This is the easiest shot in the game, there is no pressure to get it low to the net and not a lot of pressure to hit it deeply.  Oh, we'd prefer deep to shallow, but for rec play, being in is all that is needed.  I see a lot of new players struggle with this, so jump back to the fundamentals and make sure you're not making this shot a difficult one.