MASTER the Backhand Flick with Pro Pickleball Player Richard Livornese Jr.

Richard here with the Pickleball Clinic, and today we're going to be taking a deep dive into the backhand flick. So the backhand flick is going to be one of the most interesting, fun, dangerous shots in pickleball. This is because, especially as the left side player, the player playing with their forehand in the middle if you're a righty, you get a lot of dinks to your backhand side. And it's harder, obviously, to create offense off the bounce on our backhand side. So oftentimes we end up looking for offense out of the air. The best, most efficient, dangerous, and hardest shot for our opponents to deal with is the backhand flick. So today we're going to give you some tips and tricks to help you guys master this shot. The first thing we're going to cover with the backhand flick is positioning. First and one of the most important things is to be on the kitchen line. Any shot where we're looking to take a ball out of the air, the easiest way to make it harder for yourself is to back up off the line. So we're firstly going to make sure that we're up on the line. The next thing is we're going to make sure we have an athletic stance. The key for this is getting a little bend in our legs, feet just wider than shoulder width, and then to make sure we have our maximum reach we're going to push our butt back, shoulders forward, chest out. This allows us to get a few extra inches of reach which makes this shot a lot easier. There's a few things we want to look for with the ball we receive to know if we should be hitting a backhand flick. The first and most important is the height of the ball. If the ball is net height or above, it is a green light. Obviously, we are looking to flick and attack this ball. If the ball is below net height, and especially below knee height, we are definitely not going to attack those. When the ball is between our knees and the net in this area, these are our yellow lights. These are the balls that as you get better at this shot, you can attack them. You've probably seen players like Ben, J-Dub, top pros attacking balls out of this zone. This is because they execute the technical side of this shot perfectly. The next thing we're gonna look for with the ball is how wide and short it is. So if the ball is coming more at us, it's gonna be an easier ball for us to reach and flick. When the ball is shorter and wider, it's harder, and maybe a ball we have to move and dink instead. So now that we know we've gotten a ball that's attackable, it's in the yellow or green zone, and it's coming towards us not too wide, the next thing is what do we do with our paddles? First step most important with the flick is getting the tip of our paddle down. This is because the tip of the paddle must be below the ball in order to generate power and spin. The next thing is going to be loosening our wrist. So if my wrist is tight, you can see this is as far as I can get the paddle. I don't have a lot of motion here. When I loosen it, I can now flick my wrist a lot further. The last thing is the actual execution of the shot. So I load my wrist, everything in here, my forearm and wrist is tight. And then as the ball comes, I point my paddle to my target. So if I'm aiming to the middle of the court, I'm pointing that way. If I'm aiming down the line, I'm pointing that way. If I'm going cross court, I'm pointing that way. Wherever the tip of my paddle points at the end of the shot is where the ball is going to go. So be very deliberate with your follow through with this shot. Where we want to hit this shot, there are a few different options. The first and most effective option is going to be the right shoulder on my opponent. Makes it really tough for him to hit this ball, and it's not a powerful counter. The second spot is once I've opened him up, I'm going to go just off his left shoulder. This is far away from his body, tough for him to counter, and it's tough for his partner to come over and help him out. The third spot will be cross court, which we will go over later. What you'll see here is as I change my spots, Matt has to cover multiple locations. Whenever you can make your opponent cover multiple spots, that's going to be the toughest for them. As I'm hitting this ball with Matt, you can see how he's sliding to the middle every time, and Aaron's kind of a sitting duck. This is the setup that I'm looking for when I wanna execute my backhand flip. Now, once I can get a ball out of the air, I'm gonna be looking for the gaps. And as you can see, there's a few. The line behind Aaron is tough for him to cover. The middle of the court, there's this hole where Matt kind of has to slide into. And if Matt starts doing a good job on that ball, I'm going to show you guys the most effective flick in pickleball. So you can see that Matt was on that ball. So an adjustment I will make is I'm going to change my location for the next shot. The problem that my opponents have and what makes this shot so hard is there are three spots I can go almost just as easily as each other. I can go behind Aaron, down the middle, or into Matt. There are only two of them and they have to cover three locations. This is what makes this shot so challenging. So as you can see after Matt filled the gap on the last shot I changed my shot to go into his body and because he was sliding he gets jammed up. With the backhand flick the biggest thing I would say is get good at hitting all three locations. Once you can do that this spot almost becomes unhittable for my opponents. They either have to make sure every ball is really short or just stay away from it. Good examples of this are JW Johnson and Ben Johns. Whose opponents stay totally away from this area unless the ball's short because they do have all three locations and that wreaks havoc on their opponents. Bonus ball. If people do figure out somehow whether it's that your flick isn't at that top tier level or maybe you're just playing against one of the best players and they are able to actually cover all three, the way that I've seen it covered is the left side player slides into the middle of the court to cover a lot, then there is a ball to beat this. And that's going to be the fourth option, which would be a flick dink cross court for a winner, which I've seen a couple of people do. Mari Humburg is one of them who does it really well. J.W. Johnson's done it a few times, it's a tough ball, but it does beat that shot every single time. So as you guys can see, against two really good players, being able to flick three, possibly even four directions, it makes it very hard for anybody to cover. If you can add this shot to your game, you will level up immediately. If you want to see more great content like this, Subscribe to our YouTube and join our Facebook group at The Pickleball Clinic.