12 Pickleball Mistakes a Coach Fixes Over and Over Again
If you keep making the same errors on the court and cannot figure out why, you are not alone. After thousands of hours of real coaching sessions, the same technical breakdowns appear at every skill level, in every part of the country, on every type of court. The serve is weak. The return pops up. The third shot drop flies long. The dink gets attacked. This is not bad luck. It is a pattern, and patterns can be fixed.
This article covers the top two technical mistakes across six foundational pickleball shots: the serve, the return of serve, the third shot drop, the third shot drive, dinks, and volleys. The insights come directly from Coach Jess at Athena Pickleball, built from real sessions with real players making these exact errors. Fix even two of these and your game will look noticeably different by next week.
For Beginners: What This Article Is Really About
If you are relatively new to pickleball, here is the honest truth about why most players plateau: it is almost never about effort. People practice for months and still make the same mistakes because nobody has told them exactly what to fix. Pickleball has six shots you will use constantly — the serve, the return, the third shot drop, the third shot drive, dinking at the kitchen line, and volleys. Each one has a short list of common errors that show up in almost every player’s game regardless of how long they have been playing. This article breaks those errors down one by one so you know precisely what to change and why it matters. You do not need to be an advanced player to benefit from this. In fact, catching these habits early will save you months of frustration.
The Serve: Two Fixes That Add Power and Consistency
Mistake 1: Facing the Net Head-On
This is the single biggest power killer on the serve, and it is also one of the most common things a coach sees in recreational players. When your hips point straight at the net, you have no kinetic chain to work with. The kinetic chain is the way power travels through your body from the ground up — legs push into hips, hips drive into the core, core transfers into the arm and through the paddle. If your hips are locked forward before the swing, that chain breaks at the very first link and you are left hitting with just your arm, which produces a weak and inconsistent serve every time.
The fix is a hip turn before you swing. Think of an imaginary tube on the ground pointing toward your target. Your hip points need to align with that tube, which creates a lane for your swing path and allows your back leg to load. From there you can coil and uncoil with real rotational force instead of pushing from a flat position. To feel the difference immediately, try this: stand facing the net and throw a ball with just your arm. Then turn your hips, load your back leg, and throw again. The jump in pace is obvious. That is the kinetic chain working. Once you learn to activate it on the serve, your depth and power become far more consistent without swinging harder.
The kinetic chain is not just a serve concept either. It shows up in drives and overhead putaways too, so building this habit early pays dividends across your whole game.
Mistake 2: An Inconsistent Toss
The serve is literally the only shot in pickleball where you have total control over every variable before you swing. Nobody is rushing you. Nobody is hitting at you. You set the ball, you swing, and you decide where it goes. So why do so many players sabotage themselves with a toss that goes to a different spot every single time?
When your release point changes, your brain has to recalculate the swing path on every serve. That recalibration eats into your consistency and your confidence. A locked-in toss means a locked-in contact point, which means a locked-in serve. Once your toss is reliable, you can start layering in spin, depth, and placement adjustments with real control. For a deeper dive into what else might be holding your serve back, this breakdown of serve mistakes is worth reading through carefully.
The Return of Serve: Are You Standing in the Wrong Spot?
Mistake 3: Standing Too Close to the Baseline
This is a positioning problem, not a swing flaw, but it costs players in two very specific ways that compound into a significant disadvantage on every return. First, if a deep serve comes at you and you are already close to the baseline, your first move is backward. That means your momentum is moving away from the kitchen, not toward it, which slows your path to the no volley zone considerably. Second, a ball you are chasing backward is harder to hit with any kind of pace, arc, or intention. You end up just trying to make contact rather than actually executing a return.
The solution is simple but counterintuitive: start further back than feels natural. When you do that, your first move on every return is forward into the ball, and you arrive at the no volley zone faster and with better momentum. The returning team has a real structural advantage in pickleball because they can immediately move to the kitchen after the return. Do not throw that advantage away by standing in the wrong spot before the point even starts.
Mistake 4: A Huge Backswing
Here is something players rarely think about: on the return of serve, the server is already giving you pace. You do not need to generate your own. A giant backswing creates timing problems, causes late contact, and regularly produces returns that go out or pop up. It is a lot of extra motion that adds risk without adding benefit.
The fix is a simple body turn into your dominant leg as soon as you read forehand or backhand. That rotation alone puts your paddle back far enough to execute a clean, controlled return. From there, push into the ball and keep your momentum moving toward the kitchen. You do not need to crush the return to win the rally. In fact, a ball with height and depth buys you exactly the time you need to get to the line and set up in a strong position. Check out these return placement spots that consistently help players win points off the return.
The Third Shot Drop: Stop Rushing It
Mistake 5: Running Into the Ball
Players get anxious on the third shot drop and charge it. This is one of the most common errors at the 3.5 and 4.0 level especially. When you rush toward a ball that still has downward energy, you short hop it at the worst possible moment — right when controlling a soft drop shot requires the most patience and feel. You end up fighting the ball’s momentum instead of working with it, and the result is almost always a drop that pops up and gets attacked at the kitchen.
What you want to do is feel the weight of the ball settling onto your paddle. Let it come up off the bounce, reach its apex, and begin to fall before you push into it. That timing gives you the soft energy you need for a quality drop. Slow your approach and let the ball do some of the work. You are not trying to hammer this shot. You are trying to place it gently into the kitchen so you can advance and take control of the point. For more on third shot drop accuracy, there is a solid drill-based approach worth adding to your practice.
Mistake 6: Reaching for the Ball
The moment you reach outside your body to contact a drop shot, your wrist gets involved. And your wrist is not your friend on a soft touch shot. Wrist involvement adds unpredictability and usually results in either too much or too little loft on the ball. Consistent drops come from a connected, stable swing through the shoulder — not from flicks and adjustments at the hand.
The fix is to use your footwork to get behind the ball rather than extending your arm out to meet it. Keep your contact point in front of your body, roughly between your feet, in the same zone you would use for a dink. A helpful mental image: think of your feet on two rails of a train track. You want to contact the ball in front of your dominant-side foot without letting your arm cross outside the rails or fall behind your trailing leg. Building this habit takes repetition, but once it clicks, your drops become dramatically more consistent. This third shot drop fix is a great place to start building that muscle memory with targeted drills.
The Third Shot Drive: Why the Unit Turn Changes Everything
Mistake 7: Approaching the Ball Head-On
Just like the serve, facing the ball straight on when you drive it kills your power source entirely. When there is no hip rotation to work with, you are relying almost entirely on the arm, and arm-only drives are weak, inconsistent, and leave you out of position after contact. The ball ends up with less pace than you intended and more height than you wanted, which is essentially handing the point to the other team.
The fix is called a unit turn. Think of your upper body locked inside a cast so that when someone rotates your shoulders, everything rotates together as one connected piece — chest faces the sidewall, paddle comes back naturally, and your back leg loads with potential energy. That stored energy in the back leg is where the power actually comes from. You push off, the hips uncoil, the shoulder drives through, and the ball takes real pace. One critical detail: stay down through contact. If you pull out of the swing early, the ball climbs and loses its angle. For more on adding power and spin to this shot, this breakdown of hip rotation in drives is excellent.
Mistake 8: Losing Your Spacing
Rushing your drive crowds your own contact point. When the ball ends up too close to your body or inside your hip line, the paddle face opens naturally toward the ceiling and control disappears. You end up either popping the ball up or pulling it offline, neither of which helps you in any scenario.
The fix is to complete your unit turn early, hold your back leg to resist the urge to step in too fast, and make contact out in front of your non-dominant leg. For right-handed players, that means contact in front of the left leg. From that position, you can stay connected through the swing and even brush up to generate topspin if you want to. Understanding why the third shot drive matters in today’s faster game is also worth thinking about, because the drive is not just an alternative to the drop — it sets up your drop later in the rally.
Dinking: Slow Down More Than You Think
Mistake 9: Accelerating Into the Ball
At the kitchen line, any acceleration adds power you absolutely do not want. Poking with the wrist or punching from the shoulder both send the ball upward into an attackable position. You only have roughly seven feet of net clearance on a straight dink. Adding speed to that equation works against you almost every time. The players who win dink exchanges are the ones who are the softest and most controlled, not the ones who hit harder.
Think of pushing your paddle through a thick substance — slow, deliberate, and forward. When the incoming ball has pace on it, you need to get even softer in response, not match the energy. The key mechanical point: set your wrist before contact and push forward from the shoulder with your knuckles moving forward rather than flipping upward. Any wrist flip and you have offered up a popup. This breakdown on why dinks pop up goes deeper on the exact mechanics behind this problem and is worth reading if dinking is a consistent weak point in your game.
Mistake 10: Letting the Ball Get Behind Your Body
Footwork determines dink quality more than stroke mechanics. This is one of those things coaches say constantly because it is genuinely true and genuinely underappreciated. When you shuffle late to a ball or let it drift past your hip, the only way to make contact is with your wrist — and your wrist in that situation leads directly back to mistake nine. The mechanics and the footwork problems are connected.
The mental cue that helps most players is to think of a half rainbow drawn between your feet. You want your belly button behind every dink. Lateral shuffles along the kitchen line keep the ball in front of you and your arms connected to your trunk, which is the source of control on soft shots. Reaching sideways disconnects your arm from your body and forces wrist compensation. Adding this footwork drill to your regular practice is one of the highest-return investments you can make if you play at the kitchen frequently.
Volleys: Is Your Elbow Costing You Points?
Mistake 11: Letting Your Elbow Drift Behind Your Body
On the forehand volley, when the elbow swings out and back behind the body, two things happen simultaneously and both are bad. The paddle tip drops, and you lose your connection to your core. A ball hit with a dropped paddle face goes up. A ball hit from behind the body goes wherever it wants. Neither outcome is useful in a fast exchange at the kitchen.
The fix is to keep your dominant elbow in front of you, comfortably to your dominant side, with your wrist laid back. That position keeps the paddle tip up and lets you drive through the ball with intention. For a high ball, you have the angle to put it away aggressively. For a low ball, you can drop the face slightly, get under it, and push from low to high with real control. Between points, keep your paddle up around your midsection — roughly the 11 o’clock position for right-handers. That ready position protects the middle with a backhand and keeps you ready for forehand volleys without any reset required. These volley fixes expand on this in more detail if you want to go deeper on elbow and wrist positioning.
Mistake 12: Reaching In and Poking at the Ball
When players feel anxious about pace coming at them, the instinct is to lunge forward with the arm. It feels proactive. It feels like you are doing something. But the second your arm extends out fully, the paddle face opens naturally toward the ceiling and the ball goes up. You have taken a defensive moment and made it worse by overreaching.
The fix is counterintuitive: let the ball travel a little more into your body before you contact it. Keep a stable base, hold your position, and angle the paddle face forward or slightly downward. That gives you real directional control over where you redirect the shot. Here is a clean framework for your volley setup that covers everything:
- Paddle up at your midsection between every single point, roughly 11 o’clock for right-handers
