2 Pickleball Dinking Drills a Senior Pro Swears By to Control the Kitchen Line
If your dinking game holds up perfectly in practice but falls apart the moment a real match starts, there is a good chance the way you are practicing is the problem. Most players spend time at the kitchen line hitting cross-court dinks back and forth in a comfortable, low-pressure rhythm and convince themselves they are training. They are not. They are just hitting. Real improvement at the kitchen line requires pressure, movement, and decision-making baked into every drill you run.
These two drills come from senior pro Heather Lovett, featured on Cliff Pickleball on YouTube. Lovett carries a DUPR of 5.4 and won the 2023 APP Female Singles Championship in the senior pro division. She is not guessing about what works. She uses these drills herself, and the results show up in her game at the highest level of senior competition in the country.
What makes these drills worth paying attention to is not just who designed them. It is what they are built to do. Each one deliberately puts you in an uncomfortable situation, forces a quick decision, and demands that you execute a controlled, targeted shot anyway. That is exactly the environment you face in a real match, and that is exactly what most dinking practice fails to replicate.
Why Most Dinking Practice Does Not Transfer to Real Games
Here is the honest truth about the way most recreational and intermediate players practice dinking: it is too easy, too predictable, and too forgiving to actually prepare you for competition. You stand at the kitchen line, your partner stands across from you, and you hit cross-court dinks back and forth until you feel warmed up. Nobody is moving. Nobody is making decisions under pressure. The ball is landing in roughly the same spot every time. You finish the session feeling like you worked on your dink, but when a real opponent starts targeting your backhand side or pushing you off the line with a deep dink, everything breaks down.
The gap between comfortable practice and competitive performance is real, and it is wider than most players realize. A proper pickleball dinking drill does not let you settle into a rhythm. It makes you move. It makes you decide. It makes you produce quality shots when your feet are not perfectly set and your body is not perfectly balanced. That is what these two drills from Heather Lovett are designed to do, and that is why they are worth adding to your practice routine immediately.
The other piece of this that rarely gets addressed is the mental side. When practice is always comfortable, your brain never learns to process the game at match speed. You develop habits that work in low-stakes repetition but collapse when the pressure is real. Training under controlled discomfort is how you build the kind of automatic, reliable responses that actually hold up when the score is close and the opponent is making you work for every point.
What Is a Dink and Why Does It Matter? (For Newer Players)
If you are relatively new to pickleball or still getting your head around the kitchen line game, here is a quick breakdown of why dinking matters so much and why players spend so much time training it.
The kitchen, officially called the non-volley zone, is the seven-foot area on either side of the net. You cannot volley the ball while standing in this zone, which means that when both teams are positioned at the kitchen line, the rally becomes a soft, strategic exchange rather than a power contest. A dink is a short, controlled shot that lands in the opponent’s kitchen. The goal is to keep the ball low, make it difficult to attack, and force your opponent into an uncomfortable position or an error.
At higher levels of play, dinking is where most points are actually decided. Players who can dink with precision, move their opponents around the kitchen line, and stay patient under pressure win far more points than players who try to overpower their way through every rally. Learning to master the forehand dink and develop a reliable backhand dink is the difference between playing good recreational pickleball and competing seriously. These two drills are designed to accelerate that development by building skills under realistic pressure rather than in a comfortable vacuum.
Drill 1: Movement and Targeting Across the Kitchen Line
The first drill is structured around one of the most difficult and common situations you will face at the kitchen line: your opponent is consistently targeting your backhand side, specifically your left foot, while also moving you laterally across the court. This is not an exotic scenario. It happens in nearly every competitive match, and players who have not trained for it specifically tend to handle it poorly.
Here is how the drill is set up. One player stands on the right side of the court at the kitchen line. Their entire job is to dink to the left foot of the player on the other side of the net, using a targeting pattern that moves that player through three different zones on their side of the court. The player doing the moving practices covering each zone, recovering to a neutral position, and returning the ball back to the right side player’s backhand. The player on the right side focuses on keeping every dink deep and directed at the left foot, including push dinks that are designed to force the opponent slightly back off the kitchen line.
The critical instruction Lovett gives for the player doing the moving is to take every ball out of the air whenever possible. This is not optional. It is the entire point of the drill. When you let a deep dink bounce at your feet, you end up hitting the ball from a position where you have almost no control over the angle or the height. The result is almost always a floater that sits up in the attack zone and hands your opponent an easy put-away. Learning to short hop at the net like a pro is one of the fastest ways to stop giving away those free attacks.
This pattern is extremely common at the 3.5 and 4.0 level. Players back up when they should be stepping in, the ball bounces at their feet in an impossible position, and the resulting shot goes right where the opponent wants it. The drill trains you to recognize the ball earlier, commit to a decision faster, and execute it before the ball gets into that problematic zone near your feet and body.
The job of the player holding position on the right side sounds simpler, but it requires its own kind of precision. Consistently directing a backhand dink to a specific target from a fixed position takes real control. If the ball is too high or too wide, it becomes attackable, which defeats the purpose of the drill and gives the other player bad reps. If you want to build that kind of targeted consistency on the backhand side specifically, working through backhand dink drills alongside this drill is worth your time.
After working the cross-court angle for a set period, switch the target to the other side of the court. Lovett acknowledges that the cross-court dink is the higher percentage shot for most players, and there is a reason for that. The geometry of the cross-court angle gives you more net to work with and a longer landing zone. But relying exclusively on the comfortable angle is a crutch. The real skill is being able to put the ball anywhere on your opponent’s side of the court, not just the spot that feels natural. Training both directions in this drill builds that full-court targeting ability and makes your dinking game genuinely harder to read and anticipate.
A useful test to evaluate whether your dinks are actually good: if your partner can take the ball out of the air comfortably and set up a counter-attack with ease, your dink is not deep or targeted enough. Good dinks create a decision. They land near the feet. They push the opponent back or force them to reach. If your dinks are landing softly in the middle of the kitchen and sitting up invitingly, you are not making the opponent work. You are just keeping the rally going without any strategic purpose. Understanding dink placement is what separates players who survive kitchen rallies from players who control them.
Drill 2: Controlled Counters Behind the Kitchen Line
The second drill comes from PPA pro Alex Shoulder, and Lovett uses it specifically because she has identified a recurring pattern in women’s doubles and mixed doubles play: players habitually stand 1 to 3 feet behind the kitchen line instead of right at it. This is not always a mistake, but most players who do it do not know what to do from that position. They either panic and try to attack a ball they cannot attack, or they float a weak return that the opponent can put away easily.
This drill does not try to immediately fix the positioning problem by just telling players to move up. Instead, it trains them to handle the situation they actually find themselves in, which is a smarter and more realistic approach to skill development. If you play in women’s doubles or mixed doubles at any level, this drill addresses something you will encounter in nearly every game you play.
Here is how it works. Both players stand 1 to 3 feet behind the kitchen line, not right at it. Instead of trying to attack aggressively or win the exchange outright, both players focus on hitting controlled, competitive pace counters with short, compact strokes. The emphasis is on maintaining balance, keeping the ball in front of the body, staying tight and engaged through the core, and returning to a neutral ready position between every single shot. Players can run this drill straight ahead and cross-court to cover both angles.
The purpose is not to win the exchange. The purpose is to survive it, keep every ball low and controlled, and build the muscle memory for compact strokes under pressure. That distinction matters. Too many drills are practiced with a winning mentality when what is actually needed is a survival and consistency mentality. When you are behind the kitchen line in a real match, your job is to reset the rally into a neutral position, not to try a hero shot from a disadvantaged spot.
The key technical piece Lovett emphasizes is the brush-up on low balls. When the ball comes in low and you are standing behind the line, you have to get under it and brush up to clear the net. If you go flat on a low ball from behind the kitchen line, you are going to put it in the net nearly every time. That upward brush motion is what creates the clearance you need while keeping the ball from sitting up too high on the other side.
This drill also directly addresses one of the most overlooked problems at every level of recreational pickleball: balls hit directly at your body. When the ball comes straight at you, you have an immediate decision to make about whether to take it on your forehand or your backhand. That decision requires actual movement, not just a flick of the wrist. Most players freeze in this situation and end up taking the ball in an awkward, jammed position with no power and no control. Understanding how to handle shots at your feet and body is directly related to what this drill is building rep by rep.
There is also a physical conditioning component to this drill that is not a side effect. It is intentional. Staying in an athletic stance, moving back to a neutral ready position after every shot, and producing controlled strokes repeatedly over the course of a full set is genuinely physically demanding. Your legs will feel it. Your core will feel it. And that is exactly the point, because this is what your body needs to be able to do for an entire match without breaking down technically when fatigue sets in. Your lateral movement and overall court readiness improve every time you run through a complete set of this drill.
The Coaching Principle Both Drills Share
One of the most valuable things Lovett touches on during the session is something coaches know but rarely say directly: the same skill can be taught and learned multiple different ways, and different players respond to different cues and different frameworks. If you have been working on a specific part of your dinking game and the explanations you have received so far have not clicked for you, that does not mean you are incapable of learning it. It may simply mean you have not encountered the right cue or the right drill structure for how your brain and body learn best.
Both of these drills share a single underlying design principle: they make you uncomfortable in a controlled, purposeful way. Movement, decision-making under pressure, physical fatigue, targeting demands, and the need for compact strokes in difficult positions. That combination is what separates training that actually prepares you for competition from training that just makes you feel like you practiced.
If your dinking game is going to hold up when the match is close and the opponent is making you work, it has to be built under conditions that look and feel like a real match. Comfortable, predictable repetition has a place in the early stages of learning a skill, but it stops being useful once you have the basic mechanics down. At that point, the only way to keep improving is to train under pressure. These two drills from Heather Lovett provide exactly that kind of training environment, and they are accessible enough that any player with a willing partner and a court can run them today.
For players who want to go even deeper on the footwork and physical side of staying competitive at the kitchen line, these footwork tips for senior players are a natural complement to both drills and will help you cover ground without breaking down your joints over time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best pickleball dinking drill for improving kitchen line control?
The movement and targeting drill Heather Lovett uses is one of the most effective options because it combines placement pressure with lateral movement and decision-making in the same rep. One player dinks repeatedly to the opponent’s left foot while the other player practices moving through target zones and countering. This creates real game pressure rather than a comfortable, predictable exchange that does not transfer to competition.
Why do my dinks keep popping up when I am pulled off the kitchen line?
When you allow a deep dink to bounce at your feet instead of taking it out of the air, you end up contacting the ball close to your body with no room to control the angle or trajectory. The result is almost always a ball that rises into the attack zone and gives your opponent an easy opportunity. The fix is to commit to a decision earlier in the ball’s flight: either step in and volley it before it reaches you, or get low and brush up on it before it gets past a controllable contact point.
How far behind the kitchen line should I stand when doing counter drills?
Lovett recommends staying 1 to 3 feet behind the kitchen line for the controlled counter drill. That distance gives you enough time to read the incoming ball and set up your stroke properly while still keeping you in a competitive position in the rally. Standing much farther back changes the shot geometry and angles significantly, which defeats the specific purpose the drill is designed to serve.
Why is the backhand dink so much harder than the forehand dink?
The backhand dink requires more precise wrist and forearm control, especially when the ball is being targeted at your left foot from across the court. Most players instinctively lean toward an inside-out backhand motion in that position, which tends to produce a weaker, higher result that sits up for the opponent. Training the backhand specifically to target defined spots on the other side of the court is what separates consistent kitchen play from unreliable dinking that breaks down under pressure.
