The purpose of this article is to help players who already have quite pickleball basics but don’t come from a background of tennis where they’re used to hitting accurate and powerful ground strokes. There are a lot of excellent players who come from other sports and they quickly master the volley, the short game, the strategy, but their game is hitting the wall because they don’t have accurate powerful ground strokes.

Here is a strategy to stabilize their ground strokes. To remind you, we always want to have a forward field of vision and ​Pickleball Paddle position. It’s important in pickleball that we are aware of this field of vision and that we’re always making contact in this field of vision. We can keep the ball in our peripheral vision we can keep our opponents in our peripheral vision and see which way they’re moving.

Pickleball lessons in Coeur d’Alene can give you in-depth instruction on groundstrokes.

Our opponents love it when we move out of our field of vision and stretch so that we have a blind spot that they can exploit. Think of a hula hoop that roughly is our field of vision. We don’t have time for a huge backswing but we compensate with a long quick follow-through. The correct athletic stance has the key points that the knees are slightly bent in the same way that they would be during a squat or as if he was about to jump. Your weight is on the balls of the feet, not in the heels or toes, and perhaps most importantly is keeping his paddle around chest height and out in front, looking to make contact in this peripheral field of vision that we previously talked about.

Most pros and higher-level players prefer the continental grip on the ​Pickleball Paddle. Try to make contact around the front knee. Your legs should be slightly bent and your back foot is turned slightly so that you can push off of it and generate force by rotating your hips.

Pickleball coaching in Coeur d’Alene is for people that want to dive deep into pickleball.

On the backhand side we see much of the same thing — slightly bent legs contact point in front of your forward leg and weight on the balls of your feet. For players unfamiliar with ground strokes, this might feel very unnatural. That’s where we can use a broom to get a little more comfortable. The sweeping motion of a broom is super similar to hitting a ground stroke with the main difference just being the hand position. This can be demonstrated how that would look on both the forehand and backhand side by literally using a broom to sweep the court. After that it can be transitioned to a smaller version of a broom handle and performed the same sweeping motion.  Finally flipping over your hands and holding it like you would hold a pickleball paddle.