Why Your Slice Return Has No Bite — And How to Fix It Fast

Your slice return floats. It sits up like a gift, and your opponent walks in and drives it right back at your feet before you even have time to think about moving to the kitchen. Sound familiar? You are not alone, and the problem is almost never about effort or athleticism. It comes down to three or four specific technical mistakes that players repeat every single time they attempt a slice return.

This breakdown is based on a session from Ed Ju on YouTube, where he worked directly with professional player Mari Humberg, rated 6.042 DUPR, to analyze exactly how she generates so much slice with so little visible effort. What they uncovered is genuinely useful for players at every level, whether you are brand new to the shot or have been struggling with it for years.

What Is a Slice Return and Why Does It Matter?

Before getting into the mechanics, it helps to understand what a slice return actually is and why it is worth learning in the first place. In pickleball, spin is everything. When you hit a topspin shot, the ball spins forward as it travels through the air, and when it bounces, it kicks up and accelerates toward your opponent. A slice, also called underspin or backspin, does the opposite. The ball spins backward as it moves forward, and when it bounces, it stays low, skids, and sometimes barely rises at all.

That low skid is the entire point. When you hit a quality slice return, your opponent is forced to deal with a ball that is rising from below the net. That makes it extremely difficult to attack aggressively. They either pop it up and give you an easy ball, or they try to drive it and send it into the net. Either way, you win the exchange before it even starts.

Mari Humberg has been hitting slice since she was seven years old, coming from a tennis background. But as she makes clear in the session, every principle behind her slice return can be taught and repeated. You do not need two decades of reps to start hitting a meaningfully better slice return today. You just need to understand what is actually going wrong.

Start With the Right Grip

Grip is the foundation of the shot, and if it is wrong, nothing else will work properly regardless of how hard you try. Humberg plays almost every shot in pickleball with a grip that sits between continental and eastern. Continental is the classic handshake grip where you shake hands with the paddle and that position is continental. From there, she shifts just slightly toward eastern, rotating the paddle a touch clockwise in her hand.

For the slice return specifically, she stays right in that same range. If you are already using a continental grip, you are already close enough to begin working on this. Anything between continental and eastern gives you the natural paddle angle you need to cut under the ball cleanly.

One additional detail worth noting is that Humberg now chokes up on the handle, a change she made about six months before the session to support her two-handed backhand. It is not required for slicing, but it is a good reminder that grip decisions affect every shot on the court, not just the one you are currently focused on. Small adjustments compound over time in ways that are hard to predict, so it is worth being intentional about your grip from the start.

Stop Using So Much Wrist

This is the single most common mistake players make when trying to develop a slice return, and it is also the one that is hardest to unlearn once it becomes a habit. Players see professionals hit heavy slice and assume the wrist is doing all the work. It is not. Wrist motion adds variability, and variability means inconsistency. If you are new to slicing or do not come from a racket sports background, adding extra wrist motion to your swing makes the shot harder to control, not easier.

Humberg is direct about this point: take the wrist out entirely. The slice spin comes from two things instead: the open paddle face and the direction of the swing path. Not from flicking at the ball. If you want more spin, you open the paddle face more. If you want more depth, you extend your swing further forward. Neither of those adjustments requires your wrist to do anything dramatic at all.

During the session, Ed was making exactly this mistake. He was trying to generate spin by snapping his wrist through the ball, and he was missing more shots because of it. The correction was almost immediate once he stopped trying to flick and started guiding the ball instead. If your return keeps going long, excess wrist involvement is almost always a contributing factor. Simplify the motion first and see what happens before adding anything back in.

The Paddle Path That Actually Generates Spin

Once your grip is set and your wrist is out of the equation, the next thing to understand is the swing path itself. This is the mechanical core of the shot. For topspin, you swing low to high, brushing up the back of the ball. For slice, you do the opposite: you cut across and slightly under the ball, moving forward and only slightly downward.

Humberg describes the downward angle as about one degree from straight forward. That is almost nothing. The paddle face is open and you are pushing through the ball, not chopping down on it. The word chopping is important here because it describes exactly what most players do when they first try to slice. Chopping means a steep downward swing that kills both your depth and your control. Pushing means a compact, forward swing with an open face that creates underspin naturally as a byproduct of the angle and direction.

Think of it as a push with a slightly tilted paddle rather than a chop or a swipe. That mental image alone will fix more technical problems than any detailed mechanical description. The ball does not go up because you are not swinging low to high. It travels forward with slice because the face angle and the swing direction are working together.

The exception is when the ball is sitting up high in your strike zone. If a serve bounces up and gives you a ball you can swing at more aggressively, you can increase the downward angle and generate a heavier slice. That is exactly how Humberg hits the drop shot version of this technique as well. But for a standard return of serve where the ball is below the tape or at mid-height, stay close to flat and forward.

Contact Point: Hit It Out in Front

Everything discussed above depends on one more thing going right: where you make contact with the ball. Humberg is emphatic about this. You need to be hitting the ball out in front of your body, not near your hip and not at your side. Contact point is not a minor detail. It is the difference between a shot that bites and a shot that dies.

During the drill, when Ed made contact too close to his body, the ball had no pace and no spin. The shot landed short and sat up. When he extended and hit the ball further out in front, the slice sharpened immediately and the depth returned. This is especially critical on the backhand side. You cannot generate a clean backhand slice if the ball is already past you. You have to get to it early and make contact while the ball is still out ahead of your lead hip.

If you find yourself consistently hitting weak or floating slices, check your contact point before anything else. Footwork is usually the culprit. Players who do not move their feet early enough end up reaching back or letting the ball get behind them, and no amount of technical refinement will fix a contact point that is fundamentally wrong.

How to Add Pace Without Swinging Harder

This is one of the most counterintuitive things Humberg teaches in the session and also one of the most immediately useful. On most shots in pickleball, you add pace by swinging your arm harder and faster. On the slice return, that approach backfires. Adding arm speed to a slice introduces the very variability you have been trying to eliminate. The shot gets sloppy, the contact gets inconsistent, and the underspin decreases rather than increases.

Instead, Humberg says to add pace by attacking with your body. She describes it as tackling the ball. Rather than increasing your arm swing, you move your entire body into the shot. The swing stays compact. Your momentum and body weight do the work. Ed tried adding pace the wrong way by increasing his arm swing, and the shot deteriorated. When he moved into the ball aggressively instead, the pace jumped and the slice got noticeably sharper.

The return of serve is a perfect place to apply this. Start your position a step or two further back than usual. As the ball bounces, move forward into it aggressively and make contact out in front while your body is still moving forward. Hit it compact, hit it early, and let your momentum do the heavy lifting. The combination of grip pressure and body mechanics working together is what separates a weak slice from one that genuinely bites off the court.

How to Practice the Slice Return Correctly

Knowing the mechanics is one thing. Building the muscle memory is another. Humberg recommends starting with hand feeding, either with a partner tossing to you or by tossing to yourself. The reason is straightforward: when you hand feed, there is no incoming pace to rely on. You have to generate everything yourself. That forces you to learn and own the correct mechanics rather than just redirecting someone else’s power.

Once you can produce a clean slice from a hand feed, returning a serve becomes significantly easier because the serve itself gives you pace to work with. The hardest version of the shot is also the most educational one, which is why it is the right place to start.

Use this progression when you practice:

1. Hand feed to yourself on the forehand side, focusing only on an open paddle face and a forward swing path
2. Have a partner hand feed from about ten feet away, still forehand side
3. Repeat both steps on the backhand side
4. Move to live serves at half pace, keeping the swing compact and contact out in front
5. Add full pace serves and focus on moving your body aggressively into the ball

Do not rush through the early steps. The hand feed drill exposes every technical mistake immediately. If you are chopping, the ball will die short and you will see it right away. If you are using too much wrist, you will miss more than you make. Structured practice like this is how players raise their level systematically, and the slice return is one of the fastest shots to sharpen when you approach it with intention.

Why the Slice Return Is a Tactical Weapon, Not Just a Safe Shot

The slice return is not just a neutral way to get the ball back in play. Used correctly, it is an offensive weapon that puts the serving team at a real disadvantage before the rally even begins. Here is what a quality slice return forces on your opponents:

• A ball that stays low after the bounce, making it difficult to drive aggressively
• Heavy backspin that reacts differently off the paddle than a flat or topspin shot, which disrupts timing and contact
• You already moving toward the kitchen line because your body attacked the ball on the way forward
• Depth that pins the server at the baseline and removes several of their best third shot options

Humberg demonstrated this in the session by returning full power serves from Ed and sending the ball back deep and low while simultaneously arriving at the kitchen line. His own power worked against him because the slice absorbed and redirected it. If you struggle against big servers, the slice return is one of the most effective tools available. Players who rely on positioning and technique rather than raw speed especially benefit from it because the shot rewards timing and mechanics over athleticism.

The slice return also sets up the third shot drop battle in your favor. When your return is low and deep with backspin, the server’s third shot becomes significantly harder to execute cleanly. And because the same mechanics apply to slice drops, transition slices, and slice dinks, every rep you put into your slice return is simultaneously improving several other shots. That is an efficient way to practice and one of the clearest paths to raising your level faster than simply playing more games.

Frequently Asked Questions

What grip should I use for a pickleball slice return?

Use a grip between continental and eastern. Continental is the handshake grip, and you shift just slightly clockwise from there. Anywhere in that range gives you the paddle angle needed to cut under the ball cleanly and generate consistent underspin.

Do I need to use my wrist to generate slice in pickleball?

No. Wrist is actually the primary thing that makes slice returns inconsistent. Mari Humberg generates heavy slice with an open paddle face and a forward swing path, no wrist snap required. If you want more spin, open the face more rather than adding wrist motion to the swing.

Why does my slice return float instead of staying low?

A floating slice return almost always means you are chopping down instead of pushing forward. The paddle path should go forward and only slightly downward, not steeply down. Open your paddle face and think about pushing through the ball rather than cutting under it aggressively.

How do I add pace to a slice return without losing control?

Move your body into the ball instead of swinging your arm harder. Humberg describes it as tackling the ball: you start further back, move forward aggressively into the shot, and keep the arm swing compact. Your momentum adds pace without introducing additional variability to the shot.

Can I hit a slice return on both forehand and backhand sides?

Yes. The mechanics are identical on both sides. Open paddle face, forward swing path, contact out in front of your body, and body moving into the shot. Humberg uses the same grip and technique on both forehand and backhand slice returns, which is one reason the shot is so efficient to practice and develop.