It is never easy being a beginner in pickleball.
You have a lot of help from people who sometimes inundate you with advice.
Unfortunately, not all of it is good advice.
Today, I'm going to talk about some of the things that are hurting your play
the most, that I rarely hear mentioned on the court.
And it's not just hurting play for beginners.
Hey, everybody, I'm C.J. Johnson.
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When I was planning this video,
I wrote down the mistakes that I see made most often around the courts.
I sorted through them to pick the ones
that I thought were causing people the most amount of problems.
And I'm talking about problems in terms of getting better and moving up in levels.
They're not just causing beginner players problems.
The things I'm going to talk about today are causing people problems after they
move up in levels and it becomes even harder to change.
By the way, make sure you stick around to the end.
I have some additional videos that will help you to eliminate these mistakes.
One of the first mistakes that I see is a bad grip.
And when I say bad grip,
I say a grip that's more in the palm of your hand versus in the fingers.
When you are in the fingers, you have control.
When you have the grip in the palm, the tendency is to come
underneath the ball to begin with, which is an upward, high upward motion.
And then we have an extremely open paddle face.
So this is the problem that it causes when
you have a grip, that's too much in the palm.
What I recommend is a continental group so that your hand looks like this.
It's more in the fingers.
If you happen to look down and you have
a grip that looks like this, it's laying more across the center of your palm.
Make sure you hang out and at the end
of this video, I've got something just for you.
Mistake number two that I see is a poor footwork.
And I think there's a lot of ways
that there's poor footwork, it's movement up here at the line.
It's being flat footed.
But the most common problem I see is
either not using a split step or not knowing when to split step.
So I'm going to go to the back,
try and show you what I see, and then show you what it is.
I'd like you to do.
So I'm still running as the ball comes back to me.
What I need to do is the minute I see the person on the other side of the net
ready to hit the ball, I need to split step.
So I stop.
I split step.
I'm on the balls of my feet.
That allows me to move in either direction.
So we're going to play that again.
And this time I'm going to use this Split step.
Sorry. That's OK.
Let's do it again.
And now I'm up
and I'm ready to play, by using the split-step.
Another problem that I see is controlling
the height of the ball, which I think in most cases comes
from an inability to control the speed of the ball.
When a pickleball is losing speed, it doesn't bounce high.
Newer players tend to make strokes that are very long.
The longer the stroke, the more speed that you can add to the shot and
the higher the shot you may get.
One of my favorite drills to shorten
the paddle stroke is to have somebody stand where there's a fence works.
If somebody takes too big a back swing in the groundstroke.
As you come back to get prepared for a ground stroke,
the fence is here and it allows me to go back just a little bit
behind my legs and then I have to swing through.
I'm back and through, back and through.
If you think that long stroke is giving
you some problems, a fence can be your best friend.
The next thing I see is trying to do too much too soon.
Meaning when you first start out, if you can focus on the serve, the return,
and the third shot and making those consistent.
You're probably going to win more points as well as more games.
What I see too often is people as they
start to either learn how to dink or learn how to hit returns.
They try to put a lot of spin on it or try to hit it extremely hard,
doing more than they're capable of, which causes them to make mistakes.
Even if you haven't played pickleball long, you have heard or probably have
heard that you want to hit the return deep.
Now, you may not know why you want to hit the return deep so that it
causes the serving team difficulty with the third shot.
Now, what may surprise you is this.
Mark Rennison did some unofficial statistics back in 2018 at the Nationals.
And what he found is professional players
hit 79 percent of their returns towards the baseline.
Care to guess how many on the non-professional side?
Twenty nine percent.
So less than 30 percent of the returns were actually hit deep.
And that's in tournament play.
You'd be better served by trying to hit a deep return,
versus trying to put a lot of spin on the ball or a lot of pace on the ball.
Hit it a little higher if you need to.
That allows you some time to get to the net as well.
Work on that part of the game before trying to get to fancy.
One of the next problems that I see is
trying to attack shots that are not attackable, not being patient.
What do I mean by shots that are unattackable?
Shots that are below the net.
You have to do something typically top spin it up to get it up and over the net.
You'd be better off waiting for a shot that comes above the net to attack.
So let's run through Jeanie and I are
going to dink a little bit and you'll get a chance to see the ball bouncing.
When the ball's apex of the bounce is
below the net, that's much less attackable than when it comes up above the net.
We want to be patient on those.
What you'll notice, as Jeanie and I dink here,
the shot
the apex of the bounce is below the net.
What I see people tend to do here is to wait for a shot.
but it's still below the net and now try to attack.
So you're better off
waiting for a shot
slightly above the net to attack.
So, Jeannie, I'm going to have you give me a high one.
You see, that ball was up above the net and it's attackable.
Now I can attack at Jeanie.
I caught the ball about right here.
If I take it over tot he net it's about two or three feet above the net.
I have a better chance
of attacking that shot than I do of rolling something up from underneath.
Spend some time
working on this.
We're looking at the apex of the bounce
and think about shots that are attackable versus unattackable.
Now, this one I hear discussed a lot.
This one is staying at the baseline,
and I'm not just convinced that people don't know why that's a problem.
Yes, there are some instances.
There are some single players
who can play a great baseline game and that's good for them.
But for the most part, in doubles.
You want to play up at the net, and the reason why is time.
When you are at the net, you are taking away your opponents time to react.
You have closed the distance between the two of you.
When you stay back at the baseline they take your time away.
So here's an example of what that looks like.
Jeanie's at the net. I'm at the baseline.
I am not going to move in.
I'm going to stay back here.
You're going to see is she has all
the time in the world to react or to plan, and I'm reacting.
I'm just simply trying to keep the ball in play.
She is offensive and I'm defensive.
Go ahead, Jeanie.
I'm at her mercy this whole time.
She can drop it short.
She can hit it deep.
She has plenty of time to look at what I'm doing and choose the shot.
All I'm simply doing is reacting and keeping the ball in play.
I'm defensive.
She's offensive.
And that's a difficult point or a difficult situation to score any points
now that you understand the mistakes.
Here's a playlist that will help you to fix the things that plague you the most.
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