How to beat younger pickleball players without hitting harder

If you keep trying to overpower younger players, you're playing the wrong game. Today, I'm going to show you three smarter strategies to turn wisdom into weapons. As a 48-year-old playing at the open level, I'm usually the oldest person on the court, by a long shot. But there's a reason that I'm still competing and winning matches against kids sometimes half or a third as old as I am, because I'm not trying to out-athlete these younger players. I'm actually embracing the game of pickleball and the chess match that makes it an equalizer for so many different types of players. So while they're playing with power and quickness, I'm playing with placement, strategy, and a little bit of wild. So today, I'm with three awesome ladies, and we're going to be at the kitchen line breaking down strategies and moves that create real pressure without needing any extra power. Let's get into it. First, I really want you to release the idea that you're playing a game that is going to overpower anyone. We're not playing the role of bully anymore. We're playing the role of strategic mastermind. The sooner that you can accept this, the more dangerous your game is going to become. So for this first strategy, it's really a fundamental of pickleball, and that is that while your opponents may have the ability to hit the ball really hard, you're going to be working with this one solid foundation, which is make them hit up, all right? When we can get balls at their feet, we create opportunities, we build points, and we make it happen for ourselves rather than just trying to bulldoze the situation. Finding their feet equals attackable balls, and engineering attackable balls means you win more. All right, so I'm going to give you two balls, and I want you to just handle them however you handle them, and we'll just talk about it after. Next one, here we go. Which of those was more difficult or uncomfortable for you? The second one. Okay, and why do you think that is? Because they were lower and softer. And you were reaching a little bit towards your feet, right? It's harder because I've hit down on the ball, and you have to hit up. So it's a more awkward position when the person that you're playing against has to be reaching towards their feet. This creates a situation in which they have to hit the ball up, and then we get a ball that we can then attack. What we're observing in this demo is that it's just a little bit harder to handle balls that are going to come low. Now, speed ups work too. It's not that they don't work, but when we're playing players that maybe can handle us with their reflexes and their power, we're looking to build points a little bit more and scale it up so that we're actually creating the opportunities. So what we're going to do now is we're going to play some points, and we're going to use that dinking as a way to put pressure on one another. Rather than speeding up off the bounce, you can only attack if you create that pop-up from an aggressive dink at your opponent's feet. So this is the test match, right? This is about working points rather than trying to bully your way through them. I love taking away speeding up off the bounce in these kinds of drills because it reinforces this idea that placement and patience is actually going to yield you better attackable balls. You have that one for sure. Everybody's doing a really good job here moving the dinks around, keeping them low, putting the pressure, and leaning in and looking for those opportunities that they're getting from those well-placed dinks. And we both want that opportunity there. I stole it from you. So last rally here, and everyone continues to do a really great job of keeping the balls low, getting that great arc, and here Monique hits a super aggressive backhand roll, setting me up for a great put away. Very nice. That was a good one. This next concept is honestly one of the biggest differences between players who are more experienced and are really using their wiles versus people who are just trying to manhandle their way through points. So experienced players know that if they take time away, if they get you off balance, if they move you, that they will force an offensive position for themselves. They're really good at toying with their opponent's positioning, and then they attack. This idea that we are moving test pieces around on a board, spreading them out, getting them off balance, taking time away, and then attacking, this is a sign of a truly experienced player who really understands how the game works. So let's talk about how we are adding time and pressure. I'm going to give you a little bit of a demo about what I mean. All right, so I want you to just hit this dink back to me and then hit the second one after that, okay? Okay, good. Let's do one more time. Okay, so make note of that. All right, here we go again. The difference between the two of those, second one I took the first, the second dink out of the air, or my dink out of the air, shortening up a little bit of the time that you had, right? You feel a difference? Okay, let's do one more time. Okay, so a little less time to think versus backing up off the line, you have a little bit more time, right? So one of the things that we're looking to do when we're playing people who are maybe quicker is, there's two ways that we can control the point and put pressure. One is the placement of the balls, but then also taking time away. So what we're doing here is by hitting that volley dink, I'm taking time away, I'm putting more pressure on her so she has to move a little bit quicker. So in addition to taking time away by taking balls out of the air, what we're also doing when we're playing is we're looking to create space on the court so that we can then attack balls more comfortably. All right, so let's talk about what happens when I pull Monique wide. So if we're dinking and I pull Monique wide and we stop for a moment, what happens over there? Yeah, we open up some space, right? And her partner has some capacity to close that space, but not 100%, right? So I'm essentially just trying to open up the court. Smarter players are going to open up the court, create those spaces, and then look for that time that they can attack into those open spaces versus you two standing right there and I just decide, okay, I'm just going to try to bully my way through the middle. All right, so we're going to up the ante a little bit and we're going to add in the volley dink pattern. So adding in a volley dink in order to kind of keep you on the ropes and keep that pressure so that we can find the opening. So another pattern that we can think about doing is that if you come back cross court off of that first dink, I've hit an aggressive dink, I'm keeping the pressure here, I'm going to volley dink back where you came from. So now instead of just going right to the middle, I'm kind of faking you and putting you back in that same position. And then from there, if you manage to reset that ball middle, what Kerry's going to look to do is change the direction of the dink and send Lori out wide. And once we've got you split, now we've now created this double jeopardy where the middle is even more open. So we're taking time away, moving you out, maybe moving you out a second time, get the other person moving and then split and attack. So this last one might be one of the most underrated concepts in doubles pickleball. Everyone wants to hit that sexy cross court angled winner, but one thing that's maybe a little less sexy but very effective is the strategy of hitting balls towards the middle. You see this even at the pro level. Middle often causes confusion. You may have heard middle solves the riddle because middle balls, they're rude. There's a few reasons why middle balls are so effective. So one is that the middle ball, it takes away the angle of your opponents. If a ball comes towards the middle, from the middle of the court, these two players, they have some angle, but they don't have that ability to really pull you off the court the same way that coming from closer to the sideline gives you. So if I hit a ball to the middle here, Lori, I want you to just try to find an angle here. Yeah, it's sort of to the outside third of the box, but it's not going to really have anybody particularly running. Versus if I give you something over here, right, you got more space, more room, more time, you can get it a little bit sharper. So it's something that gives your opponents the chance to get you running and splitting like we talked about in the last strategy. So the second piece is that it forces a communication breakdown where we're not really sure whose ball it's going to be. And so even if they get it over, sometimes it just creates a pop-up or it creates something that's a little bit easier to handle. And then the third reason why hitting to the middle is going to be effective is finding that inside foot of our opponents. When we find the inside foot, that's generally a very hard dink to hit. It's something where they've got less space to get it in the kitchen with it being still effective. And it's kind of an awkward position. So if we can create that ball towards the middle to that inside foot of Lori, she's now a little bit jammed here and that generally will make for a tougher ball for her. Our goal here when we're trying to win these rallies is that we're trying to be efficient, maybe move less, and keep ourselves in position while putting the pressure on them. And the middle dinking is something that is actually a very, very effective strategy. If I'm playing a team and I'm really feeling like I'm being run over or bullied, starting to slow it down to the center of the court is frequently a really, really great strategy to pull you out of any hole that you're in and actually get you back on top. All right, let's take a look at some middle dinking heavy points. Just a quick note about that too, when you're in a defensive position, resetting that ball back into the middle, it not only gets you back in the point, but it now creates that double jeopardy of them having to deal with that inside foot. All right, let's take a look. So this drill is just focusing on finding a lot of middle dinks here. And you can see that I'm squeezing pretty hard from the left side of the court, hunting for that ball that I can attack off of those awkward middle dinks that Kerry's hitting at Monique's left foot. Focusing on the middle doesn't mean that you're only hitting to the middle, but it just means that it's one strategy. There you can see there was a little confusion in the middle. A little bit of that confusion in the middle, right? But finding that inside foot creates just enough awkwardness that often it will yield something usable. So you can see here there's quite the inside foot battle going, but then I found that middle. It's good. Lots of really good ball movement here, keeping the dinks low. Monique manages to survive that attack. We're back in it. And then we'll see where this aggression that Kerry starts to throw out at Monique's inside foot. We'll see what yields here. Oh, a miss. All right, last rally. Great dink, good response by Lori. Oh. Here are some of the concepts that we covered today. Hit to the feet. Don't simply rely on power. Think about spreading your opponents out and creating space so that you can attack. I want you to think about reaching in and using those volley dinks to apply pressure and take time away from your opponents. And then finally, control the middle. If we take our angles away from our opponents, it gives us an advantage and keeps them on their toes guessing. None of this requires you to hit harder. None of this requires you to move much faster. Younger players might have speed, but experienced, some may say wiser players, know how to control the point. And honestly, that is a much more dangerous skill. If you want more strategies on how to outthink your opponents rather than outrunning them, hit that subscribe button below. I will see you on the court.