5 Pieces of Bad Pickleball Advice You Need to Stop Following Right Now
If you’ve spent any time at open play or rec games, you’ve heard the same tips recycled over and over. Red, yellow, green. Hit it high, you die. Always dink crosscourt. The problem isn’t that this advice was invented by bad players. The problem is that the game has moved on and the tips haven’t.
APP pro and coach Jilly B recently broke down the five worst pieces of advice she hears repeated on courts across the country. Her take is refreshingly direct: “Cookie cutter advice is not what you deserve.” She’s right. If you’re serious about improving, understanding why these tips fail in the modern game is just as important as knowing what to replace them with.
Let’s get into each one, why it falls short, and what you should actually be doing instead.
Why So Much Classic Pickleball Advice Has Aged Badly
Most of the tips that float around rec courts were developed when pickleball was played with slower paddles and softer hands at the kitchen. The game today looks fundamentally different. Modern foam core paddles generate significantly more pop with a shorter, more compact swing. That single shift changes what counts as an attackable ball, what counts as a safe dink, and how you should be thinking about positioning and counters.
When you look at pickleball paddles being released right now, a huge portion of the market is built specifically around power and speed. That’s the environment modern players are actually competing in, and old advice that was calibrated for a slower game is quietly costing people points every single session.
Here are the five most common offenders and what Jilly B says to do instead.
Bad Advice #1: Only Attack Green Balls (The Red, Yellow, Green System)
The red, yellow, green framework tells you to only attack balls above net height. Red means below the net, so never swing. Yellow means at net height, so maybe swing. Green means above the net, so attack. Jilly B’s assessment of this system is about as clear as it gets: it’s “like 2023 advice.”
The core problem with red, yellow, green is that it teaches you to judge a ball by its height when you should actually be judging it by its pace. Those are two different things, and confusing them leads to missed opportunities and poor decision-making at the kitchen.
Jilly’s replacement rule is straightforward. “It’s not so much the height of the ball, it’s the deadness of the ball,” she explains. A dead ball is a soft shot with little pace or spin that sits up and gives you time to set your feet and swing cleanly. That ball can be below net height and still be completely attackable if two conditions are met: the ball has no pace coming into you, and your weight is stable or moving forward so you can step into the shot with clean mechanics.
This is actually why Jilly tells her camp students to “hit worse dinks.” Not softer in a way that floats the ball up high, but more aggressive in a way that makes the ball dip sharply toward the opponent’s feet. A dink that dips at your opponent’s feet is much harder to attack than a soft, high dink that looks safe but just sits there. The safer-looking dink is often the more dangerous one to hit because it creates an easy dead ball for your opponent.
If you want to build the mechanics around this, studying attacking dinks at the kitchen is a solid starting point. The key shift is moving from a height-based system to a pace-and-position-based system. Once you make that mental switch, you’ll start seeing opportunities you were previously ignoring.
Bad Advice #2: Hit It High, You Die
This one is so embedded in pickleball culture that most people repeat it without thinking. The idea is that if you pop a ball up, you’re dead. The point is over. You might as well hand your opponents the rally.
Jilly B’s answer: “Take a step back, put your hands up, and counter the living daylights out of the ball.”
She openly admits that some of the easiest points she’s won at the professional level came off her own bad dinks. Why? Because at rec level, “99% of people are just going to hit it at you as hard as they can, which is kind of what you want.” Most recreational players aim for raw power rather than precise placement. That means the ball is coming straight back at your paddle, which is exactly where you want it if you’re prepared for it.
The counter itself doesn’t require elite athleticism. It requires positioning. Jilly’s formula after hitting a high ball is: step back one step to buy yourself reaction time, get your paddle up in front of your chest, and keep your weight forward so you can punch the counter rather than just absorbing the pace. “You don’t have to be young or have amazing reaction times or be a superior athlete,” she says. You need posture and readiness.
She points to Gabe Tardio as the model for what an effective counter looks like at the high end. His down-the-line forehand volley speed-up is controlled and angled downward, not blasted. Low, controlled counters are genuinely difficult to handle, far more so than a ball that’s just hit hard and flat.
The mindset shift here is significant too. Jilly wants her students walking onto the court thinking “I hope this person speeds up at me.” When you trust your counter, a high dink stops being a panic moment and becomes an opportunity. Once the mechanics are solid, you can start working on off-speed counters that land at your opponent’s feet and neutralize the exchange entirely. You can also pair this thinking with bad dink recovery strategies that most players never practice.
For Players New to Pickleball: What All of This Actually Means
If you’re newer to pickleball and some of this feels a bit abstract, here’s the simplest version of what’s being said.
Pickleball is a game played on a small court with a wiffle-like ball and a paddle. The kitchen is the no-volley zone right at the net, and a dink is a soft, controlled shot that lands in that zone. A lot of the strategy revolves around controlling the pace and placement of those soft shots.
The old advice was built around simple rules to keep beginners out of trouble. Don’t attack low balls. Don’t let them hit it high or you’ll lose the point. Always hit your soft shot crosscourt because there’s more room. Keep your paddle tracking the ball. Aim for the corners to win points.
None of these rules are completely wrong, but each one is oversimplified in a way that causes problems once your game develops. Modern paddles are faster and more powerful, which means the situations those old rules were designed for have changed. A ball that looks low and safe might actually be a sitting duck if it has no pace. A ball you hit high might actually set up a great counter if you’re ready for the return. The crosscourt dink often opens up a gap you can’t cover. Tracking with your paddle instead of your feet leads to reaching and off-balance shots. And aiming for the lines creates more errors than winners.
Jilly B’s point is that these simplified rules served a purpose early on, but they need to be upgraded as the game evolves. The better framework is to read each ball individually: how fast is it coming? Where is my weight? Where is the middle of the court? Those questions give you better answers than any color system.
Bad Advice #3: Dink Crosscourt When You’re in Trouble
The argument for the crosscourt dink is geometric. The diagonal is longer, there’s more court available, and the net is a bit lower in the middle than at the sides. More room for error means a safer shot. That’s the logic, and it’s not unreasonable for a beginner.
But Jilly B says the middle of the court is “the most undervalued and underprotected spot on the entire court,” and that the crosscourt dink mostly just gives you more room to hit the ball high without actually solving the problem you created.
Her take is pointed: “If you make the mess, you got to clean it up.” The easiest place to clean up a messy situation is right in front of you, not diagonally across the court. If you pop up a crosscourt dink, you “better have some Usain Bolt speed” to get into position to cover the response.
The rule she teaches is that after any crosscourt dink, good or bad, your job is to close the middle. If you hit a good crosscourt dink, look to take the middle away from your opponent. If you hit a bad one, close it even harder because that’s where the attack is most likely coming.
When you’re under pressure, the target should be the middle or just off-middle directly in front of you, outside of Erne range. That shot is lower risk, easier to recover from, and leaves less court exposed. She’s also clear about the panic crosscourt: it’s a shot that works at the professional level because players like Anna Leigh Waters have practiced it thousands of times in high-pressure situations. “We do not all have that shot,” Jilly jokes.
The panic crosscourt is something to earn through deliberate practice, not a default escape route. Interestingly, the same kind of mental pressure that leads to bad crosscourt dinks shows up in other areas of the game too. Serving yips come from the same place: tension leading to poor decision-making under pressure. The fix in both cases involves slowing down and staying soft.
For a more complete breakdown of why targeting the middle works strategically in doubles, the principles of middle targeting in doubles are worth understanding deeply.
Bad Advice #4: Track the Ball with Your Paddle
This one sounds technically correct on the surface. You need to get your paddle to the ball. So naturally, you move the paddle to follow the ball. But Jilly B says thinking about tracking with your paddle is “how I miss a lot of shots.”
When players move the paddle first, they end up reaching. The arm extends away from the body, the paddle drifts outside the center line, and suddenly you’re hitting from a position with no leverage, no balance, and no consistency. The better mental model is to move your knees and legs first and let the paddle come along for the ride because your body carried it there.
Watch Jilly’s footage and you’ll see her paddle moving across the court, but it’s not because she’s reaching. Her body is moving and the paddle stays right in front of her center line the entire time. Her belly button and paddle stay connected through each exchange.
She calls the area directly in front of your body the “cone of power,” the zone where your paddle stays tied to your center line and where you can actually generate clean, controlled shots. A useful cue she gives: imagine the butt of your paddle is connected to your belly button, or that someone tied your elbows together. Once the paddle drifts outside your center line, you lose your structure and your power.
There’s a second layer to this problem at higher levels. Players who are anticipating an attack start guessing early and showing which side they’re sitting on. At better levels of play, this becomes a chess match. “Who’s going to blink first?” she asks. If you commit too early to one side, your opponent just attacks the other. If you stay centered and patient inside your cone of power, you’ll find you have more time than you thought and your opponent has fewer easy options. If footwork is the weak point in your game, working through pickleball footwork fixes will make the lower-body-first concept much easier to execute.
Bad Advice #5: Aim for the Lines on a Putaway
Finishing a point at the lines feels satisfying. It looks like the right play. It’s what you see in highlights. But Jilly B’s position is that the middle is where most putaways should go, because “middle does truly solve the riddle.”
Her data point from coaching camps is striking: roughly 50% of her students’ unforced errors come from the net, and the other 50% come from overhitting. And crucially, most of those overhitting errors aren’t long. They’re wide. Aiming for the lines specifically invites the wide miss, which is the most common and most frustrating way to lose a winnable point.
The middle gives you the lowest part of the net and the most margin. It also creates confusion between opponents in doubles play, because neither player is clearly responsible for a ball coming straight through the center.
Corners still have a role, but their purpose is to stretch opponents and open up space, not to be the primary target on a putaway. As Jilly’s comedian friend puts it: “Spread them so you can find the hole.” The crosscourt dink fits into this same framework. Its job isn’t to win the point outright. Its job is to move your opponent and open up the middle so you can finish through it.
Understanding how to play the body rather than the lines shifts your entire approach to finishing points, and it’s one of the biggest percentage improvements most rec players can make without changing anything physical about their game.
The Summary: What to Actually Do Instead
Each of these five pieces of advice felt useful at some point, and most of them still contain a kernel of logic. The problem is that they’ve been distilled into simple rules that stop working the moment the situation gets even slightly more complex. Modern pickleball requires reading the specific ball in front of you, not applying a blanket rule.
Here’s the replacement framework:
Attack dead balls, not just green ones, whenever your weight is stable or moving forward. When you hit a high ball, step back, get your paddle up, stay forward in your weight, and trust your counter. When you’re in trouble, go middle or just off-middle directly in front of you, and close the middle after every crosscourt dink regardless of how it went. Move your lower body first in every exchange and keep your paddle inside your cone of power. Finish through the middle and use the corners to create the opening, not to go for the winner directly.
Take one of these ideas to your next session. Drill it until the new response feels more natural than the old one. That’s how you actually break a habit instead of just knowing you should break it.
The game keeps evolving. The players who improve fastest are the ones willing to question what they’ve been told, test it against what they’re actually seeing on court, and update their approach when the evidence points somewhere different. Jilly B’s five corrections are a solid place to start that process.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the worst pickleball advice for beginners?
According to pro coach Jilly B, the five worst pieces of advice in circulation right now are: only attacking balls above net height using the red, yellow, green system, believing that hitting a high ball automatically loses you the point, defaulting to crosscourt when under pressure, tracking the ball with your paddle instead of your lower body, and aiming for the sidelines on putaways. Each one made more sense in an earlier, slower version of the game and has failed to keep up with how modern paddles and tactics have changed things.
