These 5 Pickleball Beginner's Mistakes Are Ruining Your Game

Just recently I was at a park and I was playing with some beginner players while playing with them I gave them a few tips here and there and when I was done I identified five key things that they were doing incorrectly that they could do better and it's five things that most beginners do wrong So let's get right to it. Hey, I'm Kyle and this is the That Pickleball Guy YouTube channel If you're new here, welcome. I do tips I also share some of the journey that I'm on to playing pro pickleball and I'm gonna help you guys along the way Gosh I hated that. So I got the most beginner pickleball player I could find I typed in beginner pickleball player on Craigslist and this guy showed up. So I paid him a hundred bucks to come to my house So Danny's gonna help me. Danny, are you ready? I'm ready. What do you want to learn today? I don't even know how to pickleball. You want to learn the five mistakes that beginners make? Yeah, let's learn the first five You can't even speak English. Okay All right. So let's jump right in. All right, here's mistake number one. It's something I see so many beginner players do It's when they serve they serve and step in. I'll say it again. They serve and step in. That's bad Here's why okay when I serve the ball according to the rules, right? I'm gonna serve it the ball is gonna come back and I have to let the ball bounce before I hit it again, right? So I cannot serve it come in and hit it out of the air. I'd immediately lose the point So because of that I got to take that into consideration So if I serve the ball and I step in and they hit a good deep return I'm gonna have to back up and the moment I have to back up all of a sudden all of my weight is coming Backward and the moment my weight is coming backward I'm gonna have to pop the ball up which is gonna be high for an immediate put away and they're gonna potentially put the ball Away, or I might just miss wild if I'm off balance. I'm gonna have a much more difficult time making the shot so here's what you do instead instead of serving and stepping in what I want to do is I want to serve and Stay so I serve it Yikes mama have mercy It's not as easy as it looks. Yep. I want to serve and stay where I'm at So that my next movements can be forward So I'm either gonna serve and stay or serve and if it's a good return Maybe I take one step back to allow myself to move forward. So I serve it Stan now I'm gonna move in and Hit my next shot when you serve it don't serve and step in serve and stay serve and step in is mistake number one So you want to serve and stay on your serve mistake? Number two is players on their third shot in my opinion driving the ball way too much. So what does that mean? What's your third shot? Well, your third shot is after I serve it So Danny's back at the baseline when I serve the ball This is shot number one Danny is shot number two, and this is our third shot You have a couple options on your third shot One of them is the drive a drive is essentially you go to hit the ball hard, right? So I'm here and I hit a really hard shot. That's a third shot drive What I see a big mistake that beginner players make is one They're very bad at the third shot drive But they love to hit it because it's pickleball and everybody wants to hit the ball as hard as they possibly can So my encouragement to you is actually drive the ball way less just the other day when I was at the park I was playing with the guy and as I played this guy for the first time He hit eight balls third shots either out or into the net So he essentially gave up eight chances to win a point because he drove it into the net now Listen if you're a tennis player and you actually have a really nice drive ball Then I would say drive it until the person that you're playing against shows you they can handle it But for a majority of first-time players trying to rip every single ball is actually just a really bad strategy Here's what you should do instead. It's called a third shot drop the goal of the third shot drop is one That's your first shot second shot is to hit the ball in a way that actually lands in the kitchen Here's why you do that one your drive is probably horrible right now Okay, it can get better but it's probably not that good So you actually want to take a softer approach that will allow you and this is higher level stuff right here But it will allow you to get to that kitchen line. So I hit it ball comes back I dropped the ball into the kitchen and now I play What so many pickleball players have a lot of trouble figuring out early on is the soft skin Okay So it's the third shot drop the same guy that had just drove eight balls into the net or out just two games later I gave him the suggestion suggestion don't drive any balls this game just hit drops and in his fourth game He went 13 for 15 on drops turned into an absolute dropping machine So if his conversion on third shots was 13 for 15 on drops versus I think it was like 2 for 16 on his drives played the percentages play the shot That's gonna help you win more points because honestly what happens for a lot of beginners is they just lose points The other team doesn't win them They give away points whereas at the beginner levels if you just get the ball into the kitchen get to the kitchen line and then start dinking which we're Gonna talk about here in a moment The other team is gonna lose the point and then you're gonna win it that way Well, Danny, my beginner friend Danny is at the second Jensen. I think that actually it's irrelevant. He's not gonna pick a ball He's a beginner. He doesn't know anything. I'm just kidding. He's my friend. I'm just kidding. He's a paid actor Okay, so here's the third mistake. It's being sporadic at the kitchen line versus standing their ground at the kitchen line So here's what that looks like being sporadic at the kitchen line. So we're in a dinking battle here, right? So we're at the kitchen line and we're playing the soft game And what I saw a ton especially there night when I was playing was that every time The players I was playing got dinked to they took these sporadic movements. They were back forward back forward I'm gonna be a little exaggerative here, but honestly not really this is what I saw, right? They were here. Well daggone it That is what you saw. That's actually what I saw. I saw a lot of balls into the net Okay, here we go. So we're dinking But they're just not confident yet So they're back and they're forward and they're back and they're forward and they're back and they're forward Instead of being sporadic at the kitchen line stand your ground at the kitchen line And so what does that look like means you're dinking and if you can take one out of the air You do if you need to move you either move to the side or a slight backward diagonal movement There we go And you stay strong and part of the reason is number one You're on balance when you're strong at the kitchen line all this moosh motion around the kitchen line It's just throwing you off balance, which what it leads to honestly is pop-ups All right And all of a sudden they're gonna put the ball away now on the flip side as we're dinking another reason you don't want to Get backed off the kitchen line is if they ever pop the ball up you want to be able To smash the ball, which is maybe the most fun thing in pickleball Here's mistake number four taking unnecessarily monster big ginormous large swings Yeah So here's what happens a ton especially for beginners It used to happen to Danny and it used to happen to me all the time when we first started playing you see that Ball that looks like it's kind of high and all you're thinking is I'm about to annihilate this ball into the person That's in front of me. Maybe not that mean but you're gonna annihilate it somewhere on the court for a winner And so what end will end up what ends up typically happening is this right? The ball is not high enough And literally that happens you hit the ball and you get so frustrated like God, right because the ball literally hits the tape And it happens more than you might think Part of the reason why is because the ball is too low You're taking a downward swing and what's gonna happen We take a downward big swing is it's gonna go down directly into the net So here's what to do instead of taking these unnecessarily big swings Now if there isn't an overhead the balls above your head for sure crush the snappers out of it Boom right Danny just freaked out. He's not on camera right now, but he almost got hit right crush those balls Ah, but if the ball is around the forehead and below area Here's what you do instead you punch punch punch punch punch forehand punch backhand punch. It's not a big swing It's a punch. All right, and I'm gonna get a little bit lower as I go for that punch from here. Boom Boom, so I get my body low right and I can so I can still get a little bit of a downward motion But as I get low, I'm just looking to punch to remove air If you do this, you're gonna have a ton less errors into the net and you're gonna have way more good shots hits where your opponent's gonna have trouble hitting the ball back or They're gonna pop up another ball and then you will get the overhead that you really want. That's mistake number four. Oh Danny boy, welcome back Okay. All right. So here's mistake number five in here. You ready for this ready? Take a guess I haven't told you what this is yet. You know, take a guess at one of this. Oh Day two. Oh, that's okay long. Yeah, okay Here's mistake number five it's being closed-minded part of the beauty of pickleball is How simple it is yet? Honestly how complex it is as well because it's simple you can go out there and you can play you can have fun the first Time but as you get better and better and better just like anything in life The more you learn the more you realize how much you don't know And so I was out of the park recently and there was a guy there who'd been playing for maybe just a few months and he Definitely thought he was way better than he was and we made mistakes He thought he knew the correction for him but he actually didn't whereas this guy player number two super open and so my Encouragement to you the flip side of being closed-minded being open-minded, but the actual tip for you is get feedback seek feedback So if you're at the park with a bunch of people walk up to somebody After you play with them if there's a group of four and someone on your court is significantly better than you Just go up and ask him. What's one thing you saw me do or one thing you saw in my game? People love to help each other, right? They love to share everything. They know especially in pickleball. Everyone has every answer, right? I sometimes feel the same way about myself. I gotta like check myself and sometimes even ask you well, probably not you But ask me here's the second thing if you don't have a player in your court who is significantly better than you and say you're at a bigger complex look around and you're probably gonna find a player and just watch them and observe what they do watch what they With their drives watch what they do with their dink with their shot selection with their interactions with their teammates and just by watching and Observing you're gonna learn a ton that way and that's another way of getting feedback So don't be closed-minded be open-minded and you're gonna accelerate your improvement faster than you ever thought possible anything bad No, that's pretty good. Actually first compliments guys ever give me. I mean we just met but okay All right. So here's a bonus one. I said I was gonna be five mistakes. I'm actually gonna give you six The mistake is having paddle position low All right. So here's the thing back to my buddy player number two when we were playing at the park He was he was doing awesome, right? He was hitting great third shot drops He actually became a machine very quickly and he was doing an awesome job And then say the ball was a little bit high and he he had to reset it or we or I had to reset it To get us to the kitchen We did that and then when we got to the kitchen the mistake that he kept making Early on was he would get there and do all the hard work to get there and then he was playing with his paddle down Here and so if your paddles down here and somebody goes to hit a ball Close to your face, right? I got to move my paddle all the way from down here to up here Which is very inefficient work smart not necessarily hard here when you get to the kitchen line This is one of the first things that I learned when I started playing and it was game-changing for me Immediately was I got into a ready position Which was basically I'm down in the stance ready active ready to move and my paddle is right in front of my face now It's not in front of my face. So I can't see the ball necessarily, right? Even though you can still kind of see through it, but it's just a little bit down So anytime someone did speed up the ball, which when you're playing beginners people are gonna hit the ball hard all the time That's the way they play So if it's really really high above your head let it go out But if it's around your face area and all you can do is block it You want to have your paddle here so that as you go boom, I'm just here to boom boom Boom, so Danny and I are playing We're here playing we're gonna dink Paddle goes back up each time. I'm just ready. So anytime that somebody does speed it up. Boom You're ready for it sounds like I was pretty good for the first time playing That was a really good time. You've never played before never someone's got to pick you up That's so good. All right, so keep your paddle position high. So Danny, I'm gonna give him a challenge you cool with that Yeah, okay. So here's the challenge for you I just gave you six mistakes that beginners make and how to avoid them the next time you go and play Maybe it's this afternoon or maybe it's tomorrow or maybe it's the next day Write down two of these these tips ways to avoid these mistakes and then go implement these two things Don't try to do all six in the first time. It'll be too much to remember. You'll be overwhelmed Especially as you're just learning the game. You don't want to do more than maybe one or two things So do two things then the next time you go out add a third thing and then a fourth thing and then a fifth thing And so eventually you're doing all five of these things pretty naturally you're gonna find yourself winning a ton of games So in conclusion, here's a quick recap of the six mistakes mistake number one don't serve and step in serve and stay Mistake number two avoid too many third shot drives instead. Try a third shot drop mistake number three Don't be sporadic at the kitchen line, but stand strong at the kitchen line number four avoid Unnecessarily big swings at balls that are really not attackable that are around your face area or your chest area mistake number five being closed-minded And instead seek feedback so you can improve faster and then mistake number six is your paddle position Don't have your paddle down low have your paddle in a ready position. If you liked this video, what should they do subscribe? I mean, yeah, that's pretty good comment below one area of the game that you'd like me to make another video on and I'll do That so you can learn and get better at this game. It's game so fun. Yeah, I love pickleball. I'm really good Oh, yeah. All right. Thanks for your time. I'll Venmo you a hundred. Hopefully we're not still rolling You