Learn Serving Strategy
It is often said that in pickleball if you’re serving you’re at a disadvantage. But this is pure baloney. It’s like tennis. As I stated earlier, the serving team has the advantage. Why? Even though the receiving team has the opportunity to come to the net first, the serving team can offset this apparent advantage by utilizing winning service techniques, as we will show. Here are some strategies you can use to insure that when serving you take control of the game.
The first strategy of serving is to simply get your serve in. It’s a no brainer. If you don’t get your serve in you can’t possibly win a point. So make sure you get your first serve in so you can at least contend for a point.
In doubles pickleball, based on what I’ve seen, points are rarely won or lost on the serve or the return of serve. It’s the third shot that is pivotal in most rallies. It’s on the third shot when you see one team or the other take the advantage. The third shot in most rallies is the most important shot of any doubles pickleball strategy. That’s of course if you don’t know how to hit a winning serve. If you can hit a deep serve to your opponent’s backhand or a deep serve with topspin or slice you can surely take advantage of a weak return and charge the net on the third shot.
So like tennis if you have a good serve you can use it to your advantage; however, if you have a weak serve you’ll most likely not have the advantage leading into the third shot. This reinforces the need for a good serve to get you off to a good start heading into the third shot.
Some pickleball strategists will tell you that it’s a good idea to mix up your serves in terms of velocity and location. Well, yes and no. It might be a good idea to mix up your velocity, which we’ll discuss later, but it’s certainly not a good idea to hit a short serve no matter what. A short serve enables your opponents to charge the net and ultimately gain an advantage, so be advised: keep your serves long. In fact, most advanced pickleball players practice over and over again hitting long serves that come as close to the baseline as possible.
Here are some principles to follow for effective serves:
· Once you get better, you can focus more on velocity, spin, and placement.
· Mix up your serves (velocity and location). It makes sense to mix up your serves but short serves make it easier for the receiving team to come to the net so the bulk of your serves should be deep. If you serve to the same location with the same velocity repeatedly you become very predictable giving an advantage to your opponent.
· Serve to your opponent’s backhand. In general, a player’s backhand is weaker than his forehand.
· Players don’t typically like to play higher balls so every so often mix in some lob-like high serves. This often can throw opponents off their game.
· A deep, firm serve to your opponent’s backhand is the go-to option for many players
· As your game progresses, practice sharp angle serves, heavy spin serves, and other non-standard serves on the practice court. These often have a lower probability of going in but can be effective to mix in if you are proficient at executing them.
Let’s take a look at a few videos that demonstrate some of the points listed above.
Fine-tune Specific Serving Techniques
You can learn these techniques by browsing YouTube channels for instructional videos. Needless to say, you first must understand pickleball doubles serving rules since most of us are playing doubles. Also, it doesn’t hurt to practice pickleball-serving drills. Here are a few fundamental principles or best practices for serving.
- Serve deep to your opponent’s backhand as often as possible.
- Serve line-drive hard shots, topspin, or slices.
- Serve occasional lobs that land high and deep.
- Serve sharp angle shots that force your opponent to run after the ball or receive it at an awkward angle.
Summing up
Pickleball strategy begins with a winning serve. In future blog posts we’ll talk about rallies, slams, dinks, third shots and so much more. Trust me, I won’t leave out the most talked about rule, the pickleball kitchen rule: everyone’s favorite. My goal is to make you a better pickleball player: gain the advantage – win the point. Learn how to hit an effective serve, and you will have mastered the first and most important pickleball strategy.