3 Pickleball Shots You Should Never Hit (And What to Do Instead)

Some shots in pickleball feel completely natural in the moment. They feel safe, controlled, or even clever. But a handful of them are quietly working against you every single time you step on the court. If you have been playing for a while and keep wondering why certain situations always seem to fall apart, there is a real chance these three shots are the reason.

This breakdown comes from Tanner Tomassi on YouTube, and the advice is sharp, direct, and immediately applicable. No filler, no vague tips. Just three specific shots to cut from your game and the exact replacements that actually work.

Understanding which pickleball shots are hurting you is one of the fastest ways to improve without adding a single new skill. Sometimes the game gets better not because you learned something new, but because you stopped doing something that was quietly costing you points every rally.

Why These Three Shots Keep Hurting You

Bad habits in pickleball are stubborn for one simple reason: they feel comfortable. You repeat the same mechanics over and over, and each time the point goes wrong, you blame your timing or your footwork or your positioning. You rarely blame the shot itself. That is exactly the problem.

These three shots are not just slightly suboptimal choices. Each one is actively giving your opponents an easier path to winning the rally. They all feel like they should work, and that feeling is exactly what makes them so dangerous to your development as a player. Once you understand the mechanical reason each one fails, the fix becomes obvious and the improvement tends to be immediate.

Cutting bad habits starts with identifying exactly which shots to eliminate and understanding the specific reason why each one works against you. Let’s go through all three.

Shot 1: The Bounce Serve

The bounce serve is probably the most common serve you will see at recreational and intermediate play. Players bounce the ball, let it rise back up, and swing through it. It feels easy and repeatable. The problem is that it is actively draining power from your serve before the rally even begins.

When you let the ball bounce and make contact on the way back up, you are fighting the physics of the situation. The ball is already losing energy as it rises, and your body has no good mechanical position to generate force into the shot. You are forced into a lower contact point than you would otherwise have, which flattens your trajectory and removes any real pace or depth from the serve.

The result is a slow, sitting serve that is extremely comfortable for your opponent to return. They get a clean look at a ball that is easy to push deep, and you start the rally immediately on defense even though you did nothing tactically wrong. You just gave them a free, comfortable return off the very first shot of the point.

It is worth noting that for beginners and casual players, the bounce serve is perfectly fine. It is simple, reliable, and easy to get in consistently. But once you start playing at a more competitive level, the volley serve is where real power and serve effectiveness come from.

What to Do Instead of the Bounce Serve

Drop the ball directly from your hand and make contact while it is still in your ideal strike zone. This one mechanical adjustment unlocks your ability to use your back leg for momentum, which is where real serve power actually originates.

When you drop and drive into contact, your body can rotate fully through the ball. Your back leg pushes off, your hips open naturally, and the paddle accelerates through a clean, efficient path. That entire sequence of movements is simply not possible when you are working off a bounce. The bounce removes your ability to time your body’s movement with the ball drop in any meaningful way.

Here are the key mechanics for building a more effective serve right now:

Hold the ball at waist height or above and release it cleanly without adding any spin or downward force on the drop
Load your weight onto your back foot as the ball drops and prepare to drive forward
Push off your back leg through contact, letting your body’s momentum transfer into the shot
Keep the contact point in front of your body so you are hitting through the ball, not just under it
Follow through fully rather than guiding the shot, which will naturally add depth and pace

If you want more depth and power on your serve immediately, this is the fastest single change you can make. You can also explore more detailed guidance on proper drop serve mechanics to make sure your technique lines up with current rules and best practices.

Shot 2: The Drop Volley

The drop volley sounds smart on paper. You are at the kitchen line, a ball comes at you, and instead of exchanging pace you absorb it and let it die just over the net in the kitchen. In theory, your opponent cannot reach it and you win the exchange. In practice, it almost never works out that way.

The core problem with the drop volley is that it gives your opponents a free, controlled path directly to the non-volley zone line. The ball sits up just enough, even when executed well, to give the opponent time to move forward comfortably. Now they are right beside you at the line with all the time in the world to reset, dink, or attack. You wanted a reset that would neutralize them. What you actually got was an invitation to come forward under no real pressure.

The drop volley also requires almost perfect touch to work even occasionally. The margin for error is extremely thin. If you hit it slightly too high, they attack. If you hit it too short, it clips the net. If the timing is slightly off, it pops up into a comfortable strike zone. It is a low-percentage shot that demands a lot and delivers very little even when it goes right.

Why the Drop Volley Fails So Consistently

The instinct behind the drop volley often comes from the same place as a pop-up dink. Players try to do something too clever with the ball rather than keeping it simple and controlled. The goal should not be to stop the ball dead. The goal should be to redirect it with purpose in a way that creates real pressure.

A sharp crosscourt dink that stays low and lands near your opponent’s feet is far more effective than a drop volley that invites them forward. A well-executed reset that keeps them back and forces another exchange is a much better use of your touch. You are keeping them at a distance and controlling the pace of the rally rather than handing them an easy approach.

If you are at the kitchen line and need to handle a hard shot coming at you, here is a more effective framework:

Soften your grip pressure slightly before contact to absorb pace naturally without needing to manufacture touch
Keep the paddle face slightly open and push through the ball low, aiming for a trajectory that stays below net height on your opponent’s side
Target your shot near your opponent’s feet rather than short in the kitchen, which forces them to hit up on the ball and reduces their attacking options
Stay balanced and composed at the line rather than watching where your reset lands, so you are ready for the next ball
Think in terms of keeping your opponents back and making them hit up, not in terms of finishing the point with one soft touch

Players who work on their dink, drop, and reset mechanics together tend to see the fastest improvement in this area because these three shots are deeply connected. When your reset becomes reliable and your dink placement improves, the temptation to reach for the drop volley essentially disappears. You have better options available and the confidence to use them.

Shot 3: The One-Handed Backhand Speed Up Off the Bounce

This is the shot that quietly costs intermediate players the most points, and it is one of the hardest habits to identify because it genuinely feels like an attack in the moment. You get a ball on your backhand side, it sits up slightly, and you fire it back with one hand off the bounce. It feels aggressive. It feels like you took control of the rally. But almost every time, it is a gift to the other team.

The mechanical reason this shot fails is straightforward. When you attack off the bounce with one hand on the backhand, your control window is extremely small. The contact point is hard to repeat consistently, your wrist ends up doing the majority of the work, and the paddle face angle through the swing is nearly impossible to stabilize under real match pressure. The result is a shot that either pops up into a comfortable strike zone and gets crushed back at you, or goes wide and long before your opponents even have to move. You beat yourself.

Understanding contact point consistency is directly relevant here. The one-handed backhand speed up fails at the contact point level before it even reaches the tactical level. You can have perfect intentions with the shot and still lose the rally because the mechanics simply do not support what you are trying to do.

What Makes the Two-Handed Backhand a Better Choice

Adding your non-dominant hand to the grip changes everything about control and repeatability on the backhand side. Two hands stabilizing the paddle face through the swing means you can actually commit to the speed up with confidence rather than guessing at the angle and hoping it lands. The two-handed backhand speed up also lets you generate topspin far more efficiently because you are not relying solely on wrist snap to create rotation.

The non-dominant hand pulls the paddle through contact, creating a cleaner, more repeatable stroke that stays low over the net and drives into the opponent’s body or hip with real pace. Instead of a flick that goes anywhere, you get a controlled drive that puts your opponent on the defensive. That is the difference between a shot that creates pressure and a shot that hands the point away.

Here are the specific adjustments to make immediately:

Place your non-dominant hand on the grip below your dominant hand before you begin the swing, not during it
Keep both hands relaxed leading into contact and firm up through the actual strike zone to control the face without tensing early
Let your non-dominant hand do real work through the shot, pulling the paddle forward actively rather than just riding along passively
Aim for your opponent’s hip or shoulder rather than a corner until this shot becomes automatic and your accuracy improves under pressure
Work on this shot during drilling before bringing it into match play so the mechanics are grooved before stakes are involved

Looking at how top pros handle backhand mechanics at the professional level is genuinely worth your time. The patterns you see at the top of the game reflect what actually works under pressure, and the two-handed backhand speed up is everywhere in elite play for exactly the reasons described here.

For Players Who Are New to Pickleball

If you are relatively new to pickleball or still getting your bearings on the court, here is a plain-language version of what all of this means and why it matters for your game right now.

Pickleball has a learning curve that is steeper than it looks. The court is small, the ball moves fast, and a lot of shots that feel smart in the moment actually put you at a disadvantage. The three shots covered in this article are things that a huge percentage of recreational players do regularly without realizing they are hurting their own chances of winning.

The bounce serve is the serve where you drop the ball, let it bounce off the ground, and hit it on the way back up. It feels easy and controlled, but it actually makes your serve much weaker because your body cannot get into a good position to swing hard. The fix is to drop the ball from your hand and hit it before it touches the ground, which lets you step into the shot and drive it with real power.

The drop volley is when you try to barely tap the ball over the net so it lands just inside the kitchen and dies. It sounds like a great idea, but it usually just gives your opponent time to run up to the net and put you in an even worse position. Instead, you want to keep the ball low and aimed at your opponent’s feet, which forces them to hit up and gives you a much better chance of controlling the rally.

The one-handed backhand speed up is when you try to attack a ball on your backhand side using only one hand. It is very hard to control and almost always goes either too high or out of bounds. Using both hands on your backhand gives you much more control and lets you actually put pressure on your opponent with that shot.

None of these fixes require advanced skill. They require awareness of what you are doing and a willingness to change a habit. Most players see improvement in their very next session after making these adjustments.

How These Three Fixes Connect to Each Other

Each of the three shots on this list shares a common underlying problem. They all feel like they should work, and they all fail for the same fundamental reason: they sacrifice mechanical advantage in exchange for a shortcut that never pays off the way you hope.

The bounce serve skips the momentum your back leg can generate. The drop volley skips the pressure that a well-placed, low, directed ball creates. The one-handed backhand speed up skips the control that a second hand brings to the shot. In each case, you are giving up something real and important in exchange for something that feels convenient but costs you points.

Once you cut all three shots from your game, you will notice something interesting start to happen. Your opponents will begin to feel like they are under more pressure even when you are not doing anything dramatically different on the surface. That is because you are no longer handing them free advantages on a regular basis. You are no longer starting rallies with a weak serve, inviting them to the net with a drop volley, or popping up backhand speed ups that they can attack at will.

Cleaning up your shot selection is one of the clearest indicators that you are genuinely ready to move up a skill level. It is not always about adding new shots to your arsenal. Sometimes the fastest path to improvement is removing the shots that are quietly working against you, and doing it with full understanding of why they fail.

Work on these three changes in your next session and pay attention to how much