How to dink in pickleball

A dink is a soft shot hit from near the non-volley zone that lands in your opponent's non-volley zone. That is the whole definition. Its purpose is not to win the point — it is to give your opponent nothing to attack, so that eventually they pop one up and you get a ball you can hit hard.

It is also the single shot that separates players who have been playing three months from players who have been playing three weeks, and it is almost entirely a patience skill rather than an athletic one. That is good news: you can learn it at any age and any fitness level.

Why the soft shot beats the hard one

When both teams are standing at the kitchen line, a hard shot arrives at your opponent already at chest height with pace on it — which is exactly the ball they want. A dink arrives low, slow, and below the height of the net tape, so the only way to hit it hard is to hit up on it, and hitting up into two people standing seven feet away is how points get lost.

So the dink rally is a waiting game. Both sides trade soft shots until one of them floats slightly high, and that ball is the one that gets attacked. The player who is comfortable waiting wins. This is the core of doubles strategy and it is covered from the tactical side in singles vs doubles.

The technique, step by step

1. Get to the kitchen line first. You cannot dink from mid-court. Toes just behind the line, not on it — standing in the zone is legal, but volleying from it is a fault. See the kitchen rule.
2. Bend your knees, not your back. Get low by sinking your hips. Bending at the waist puts your head down and your balance forward, and you cannot recover from there.
3. Paddle out in front, face slightly open. Contact happens in front of your body where you can see it, not beside your hip.
4. Push, do not swing. The stroke comes from the shoulder as a small lift. There is almost no wrist and almost no backswing — if you take the paddle behind your body, the shot has already gone wrong.
5. Loose grip. Squeezing transmits pace to the ball. A relaxed hand absorbs it. This is the hardest part for anyone from tennis or racquetball.
6. Aim to land it in the kitchen, and let the arc peak on your side of the net so the ball is falling as it crosses.

Where to aim

Start with cross-court and stay there until it is boring. It has the most room for error, it keeps the ball away from the opponent who is closest to you, and it gives you time to recover.

The three mistakes

1. Hitting too hard. Almost every beginner dink that gets attacked was hit too firmly, popped above the net tape and arrived at a comfortable height. The fix is grip pressure, not swing size — loosen your hand and the pace disappears on its own.

2. Standing too far back. Dinking from three feet behind the kitchen line means you are reaching down for balls that have already dropped, which produces high replies. Get your feet to the line between shots.

3. Getting impatient. Six dinks in, most new players decide something has to happen and drive a ball that was never attackable. Nothing has to happen. Let the other player make that decision.

How to practice it alone

Dinking is unusually easy to practice without a partner, because the shot is small and repetitive:

• Against a wall. Stand about seven feet back and dink softly, keeping every ball below a marked height on the wall. Ten minutes of this does more than an hour of hard hitting.
• Into a target. A towel or a target net on the kitchen floor gives you a landing zone. Our training aids roundup covers rebounders and targets, several of them under $30.
• With a partner, cross-court only. Two players, one diagonal, no winners allowed. Set a target of twenty in a row before anyone is permitted to attack.

More structured drills, including ones you can do in a driveway, are in beginner pickleball drills.

Does the paddle matter?

For this shot specifically, yes — more than for any other. A dink asks the paddle to absorb pace, and that is exactly what a thicker core does. A thin, springy paddle gives energy back to the ball, which means you have to actively decelerate on every dink. It is learnable on any paddle and noticeably easier on a control-leaning one. See control vs power paddles and our core thickness guide.

When to stop dinking

When you get a ball above net height. That is the signal — not a count, not frustration, not the sense that the rally has gone on long enough. A ball you can hit downward is the ball the whole exchange existed to produce. Take it, and then get straight back to the line.