Transitioning from tennis to pickleball is becoming more and more popular. With a pickleball court about half the size of a tennis court, many tennis players find the switch to be just as fun to add to their routine while offering different challenges. If that’s you, here are tips to successfully transition from tennis to pickleball.
Adjust Your Basic Groundstrokes
While a tennis background can help with power shots, basic groundstrokes in pickleball require shorter swings and control. Remember that the Wiffle ball is not as bouncy as a tennis ball and the pickleball paddle is a hard surface as opposed to strings.
Your tennis swing may start from the back with a full follow through across your body, over your shoulder. Your pickleball swing should be a lot more compact to reduce errors and keep the ball in court.
There is also a wide variety of accepted grips in tennis such as the eastern, western, semi-western, or continental. In pickleball, you want to hold the paddle with a continental grip to be ready for volleys at all times. The good news is that playing pickleball will help improve with your volleys in tennis.
Remember The Two Bounce Rule
Once you serve the ball, you want to wait for a return. While you do want to make your way towards the kitchen line, you don’t want to run up immediately after serving. See where the ball is being returned to your side of the court. If your opponent returns the serve deep towards your side of the court, you will lose the point if you don’t let it bounce first or if it hits your body.
You also don’t want to have to walk backward toward the baseline and lose your balance. You want to be intentional about your third shot if the serve return is to your side of the court.
Move Up From The Baseline
In tennis, you may be used to playing from the baseline. The tennis ball is a lot bouncier so you may often stay further back to wait for the bounce back. However, the goal of pickleball is to make your way up to the kitchen net as soon as you can. You don’t want to stay at the baseline because of several disadvantages to doing so.
First, staying at the baseline makes it easy for your opponent to hit at your feet, which forces you to angle your paddle up, which then makes the ball easily smashable for your opponents. Second, it gives your opponent plenty of room and options to hit wide-angle shots that you may not be able to get to. And lastly, it is a challenge to hit balls from the baseline that are unattackable by your opponent.
In tennis doubles, one player is by the net while the other is at the baseline. In pickleball, you want both players to be at the net. Being at the kitchen line gives you the advantage of being able to hit the ball while it is in the air, dink, or volley back and force. If you’re staying at the baseline, you’re missing out on a variety of shots that will allow you to win the point.
Learn Drops And Dinks
Many players who just transitioned from tennis to pickleball tend to rip the ball every stroke. You will not be able to win games every time or move up in your pickleball skills this way. Every pickleball player, regardless of any sports background, need to learn to drop the ball and dink softly. If you watch the pros play, you will often see them dinking back and forth ten to twenty times before someone makes a move.
Pickleball is a game of unforced errors where you set up your opponent to make one or you end up making one yourself. This requires a lot of patience and waiting for the ball to get high enough to put it away. When you return a ball that is unattackable by either dropping or dinking, it creates a challenge to your opponent to eventually make unforced errors.
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Last Tips
There are minor adjustments that you need to make when transitioning from tennis to pickleball. The good news is that a background in tennis translates extremely well to pickleball that many of the top pros come from a tennis background. Once you learn the basics of pickleball, you will find the switch to be easy and more importantly, fun.
