I've gotten to practice dinking with Robo the last couple of weeks. He has some back issues that preclude play, but dinking and such is fine.
Robo has a very nice dinking motion and he has a very open paddle face at impact. Being of open mind and always willing to experiment a bit, I've adopted this style.
When I say "open face" that means the paddle face faces the sky. A neutral face would be parallel to the net and closed would face the court surface. Obviously if you are hitting a high shot towards someone's feet, the paddle is closed. Most other shots require that the face be open. This is due to having to lift the ball over the net. A lot of shots are hit from below the net level, and this is when the open face is required.
Getting back to dinking... Of course it is easy to get the ball over the net and hit it up to do that, but the big fear is hitting a pop up. Surprisingly, a face that is opened 45 degrees or more will produce less pop ups than expected. I tend to put some cut on these shots, which reduces the efficiency of the strike, and out comes a soft, arcing shot, that doesn't carry very far. Since it arcs quite high, it's very easy to get over the net.
Give this a try, it's made a large difference in my dinking game.
I have been on the road playing at different places this past week. Not a ton of dinking but some very effective shots. The best players hit a dink that is in between hitting it in the air or letting it bounce and by then it’s typically too late. I have experienced that the best dinks get the opponent moving and with dinks the middle, well placed, is still the riddle. It’s not the not how high over the net but all about how high is the bounce. Spin matters. So some observations from playing away from the Downs.
ReplyDeleteHi Mike. Thanks for the comment. I would agree with all of it. Probably need to explore "Defense to the Dink Arts" at some point. Maybe a Harry Potter scene. Might be fun to write. Dink on, Rich
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