Master the Forehand Dink: The Complete Technique Guide for Pickleball Players
There’s a moment in every pickleball match when the game slows down. You’re standing at the kitchen line, the ball floats just slightly higher than you expected, and you have a fraction of a second to make a choice. Do you attack aggressively or do you reset with patience? This is where the forehand dink becomes more than just a soft shot over the net. It becomes a tactical weapon that can control the pace of play, dictate positioning, and set up winning opportunities.
Professional player Ryan Fu has spent countless hours perfecting this fundamental stroke, and his insights reveal why the forehand dink deserves more attention than it typically receives. In his detailed breakdown of the technique, Fu walks through the mechanics, positioning, and strategic timing that transform this understated shot into one of pickleball’s most valuable tools. The forehand dink won’t generate highlight reels or draw gasps from spectators, but players who master it gain something far more valuable: consistent control at the kitchen line.
Understanding the Forehand Dink for Beginners
Before diving into the technical details, it’s worth explaining what a forehand dink actually is and why it matters so much in pickleball. If you’re new to the sport or still developing your game, the dink might seem like an odd concept at first. After all, most racquet sports reward power and aggressive play. But pickleball has a unique feature that changes everything: the non-volley zone, commonly called the kitchen.
This seven-foot area on each side of the net creates a space where you cannot hit the ball in the air while standing inside it. This rule fundamentally changes how the game is played at higher levels. Instead of constant smashing and powerful volleys right at the net, players engage in what’s called “dinking rallies” where both teams hit soft, controlled shots that arc just over the net and land in the opponent’s kitchen.
The forehand dink is simply the version of this shot that you hit on your dominant side with your palm facing the net. Think of it as a gentle, spinning push that sends the ball on a low trajectory across the net. The goal isn’t to hit a winner directly. Instead, you’re trying to force your opponent into making an error, hitting the ball up high enough for you to attack, or creating an opening that you can exploit with a more aggressive shot.
What makes the forehand dink so important is that it’s one of the most common shots you’ll hit in any competitive rally. Once all four players establish position at the kitchen line, which happens in most points, the dinking battle begins. Players who can consistently execute quality forehand dinks control the tempo of these exchanges. They force opponents to hit from uncomfortable positions, they maintain better court positioning themselves, and they create more opportunities to transition from defense to offense.
For someone watching pickleball for the first time, the dinking rallies might look almost boring compared to the fast-paced action of drives and smashes. But experienced players know that these soft shot exchanges require incredible touch, anticipation, and strategic thinking. The forehand dink is where matches are often won or lost, even if it doesn’t look dramatic. Now that we understand the context, let’s explore exactly how to execute this shot with the precision that separates recreational players from competitive ones.
The Grip Question: Why Continental Matters More Than You Think
The foundation of any pickleball stroke begins with how you hold the paddle, and for the forehand dink, this choice carries consequences that extend well beyond the immediate shot. Fu advocates strongly for the continental grip, and his reasoning reveals a deeper understanding of how pickleball points actually unfold at the kitchen line.
The continental grip is essentially what you’d use if you were hammering a nail or shaking someone’s hand while holding the paddle. Your base knuckle of your index finger rests on the top bevel of the paddle handle, creating a neutral position that places the paddle face perpendicular to the ground when your arm hangs naturally. This might feel slightly awkward if you’re coming from tennis with an eastern or semi-western forehand grip, but the benefits for pickleball become clear once you understand the typical shot sequences at the net.
Here’s the critical insight that Fu emphasizes: the forehand dink is rarely an isolated shot. You dink, and then something happens next. Maybe your opponent returns it to your backhand side. Maybe they try to speed it up at your body. Maybe they lob over your head. The continental grip keeps you prepared for the most common response, which is a ball driven back toward your backhand side. As Fu explains in his video, if you’re already holding a continental grip when you dink, you’re immediately ready to execute a backhand counter without any grip change.
Compare this to players who use an eastern or semi-western forehand grip for their dinks. These grips do offer certain advantages. You can generate more topspin more easily because the paddle face naturally closes slightly, allowing you to brush up the back of the ball with greater effect. For pure forehand dink exchanges where the ball keeps coming back to your forehand side, these grips might feel more comfortable and powerful. But the moment your opponent changes direction or speeds up the ball toward your backhand, you face a problem. You need to change your grip mid-rally, and at the kitchen line where reaction time measures in fractions of a second, that grip change can be the difference between a solid counter and a ball that catches you off guard.
Fu does acknowledge one important exception to this continental grip preference. If you’re a player who uses a two-handed backhand for your counters and defensive shots, the grip calculus changes somewhat. With two hands on the paddle for backhand shots, you’re not as dependent on having that perfect continental grip for quick transitions. Your non-dominant hand can compensate and adjust, giving you more flexibility. In this case, using a slightly more eastern forehand grip for your dinks might work well for your game style.
The grip discussion might seem like a minor technical detail, but it reflects a larger principle that separates good pickleball players from great ones. Great players don’t just think about the shot they’re hitting right now. They think about the shot they’re hitting right now in the context of what’s likely to come next. The continental grip embodies this forward-thinking approach. It might sacrifice a tiny bit of topspin potential on your forehand dink, but it positions you optimally for the rally as a whole. This is the kind of strategic thinking that compounds over the course of a match, giving you small advantages on dozens of points that add up to significant results.
Paddle Position: Tip Down, Brush Up
Once you’ve established the proper grip, the next critical element involves how you position and move your paddle through contact. This is where many intermediate players stumble, often without realizing exactly what’s going wrong. Fu’s instruction here is deceptively simple but requires conscious attention until it becomes automatic: your paddle tip needs to be pointing toward the ground as you prepare to make contact with the ball.
Let’s break down why this seemingly small detail matters so much. When you’re executing a forehand dink, you’re trying to accomplish several things simultaneously. You want to generate enough topspin to bring the ball down quickly after it clears the net. You want to keep the ball low so your opponent can’t attack it. You want to maintain control so you can place the ball precisely where you intend. All of these objectives require that you brush the paddle face up the back of the ball, creating the topspin that gives you both control and the ability to keep the ball low despite hitting it upward over the net.
If your paddle tip is pointing upward as you make contact, you’re fighting against physics. To generate topspin, you’d have to somehow flip your wrist dramatically during contact, which destroys consistency and control. More commonly, players with the paddle tip up simply push the ball forward with backspin or no spin at all. These shots tend to float, hang in the air longer, and land higher in your opponent’s kitchen, giving them easy opportunities to attack. Even worse, without topspin to bring the ball down, players often net their dinks because they hit them too low trying to keep them from sailing long.
With the paddle tip down, everything changes. Now your natural swing path moves from low to high, brushing up the back of the ball and creating that crucial topspin. The ball clears the net with a lower, more aggressive trajectory, then dips down sharply into your opponent’s kitchen. This type of dink is much harder to attack because it stays below net height and forces your opponent to lift their return.
Fu also addresses another common mistake that even players with the paddle tip down sometimes make: rolling the paddle face over the ball during contact. This happens when players try to create topspin by closing the paddle face, turning it from perpendicular to the ground to facing downward. The intention is good but the execution creates problems. When you roll the paddle face over, you lose control of where the ball goes. Sometimes you’ll hit it into the net. Other times you’ll send it too high. The inconsistency comes from the fact that timing becomes everything. If you roll the face over slightly early or late, the ball goes in completely different directions.
Instead, Fu emphasizes keeping the paddle face open and facing the court throughout the entire contact and follow-through. You’re not trying to close the face or turn it over. You’re simply brushing up the back of the ball while maintaining that open paddle position. This creates topspin through the upward path of the paddle, not through closing the face. The result is far more consistent because you’re not depending on split-second timing of when you turn the paddle over.
Here’s a practical tip that Fu offers to help players maintain proper paddle position throughout the stroke: lead with the butt cap of the paddle rather than the tip. The butt cap is the very end of the handle, opposite from the paddle face. If you think about pushing the butt cap forward and upward as you execute the dink, it becomes nearly impossible to make the mistake of turning the paddle face over. Your wrist naturally stays firm and slightly laid back, the paddle face stays open, and you maintain the control you need. Conversely, if you lead with the paddle tip, your wrist tends to break forward, the paddle face closes, and you lose that crucial combination of spin and control that makes the forehand dink effective.
The Follow-Through: Finish on Your Side
The follow-through might seem like an afterthought. After all, you’ve already made contact with the ball by the time you’re following through, so how much can it really matter? But experienced players know that the follow-through both reflects and reinforces everything that came before it. If your mechanics through contact were sound, your follow-through will show it. If something was off in your swing, the follow-through will reveal that too.
Fu makes a specific and important point about where your paddle should finish after completing a forehand dink: on the same side of your body where it started. For a right-handed player, that means finishing on the right side. For a left-handed player, on the left side. This might sound obvious, but watch recreational players at your local courts and you’ll see plenty of follow-throughs that swing all the way across the body, finishing near or even past the opposite shoulder.
Fu draws a comparison to Rafael Nadal’s forehand in tennis, which is helpful for visualization. Nadal’s famous windshield-wiper forehand does involve significant racquet head speed and rotation, but the finish stays on his left side even with all that power and spin. The same principle applies to the forehand dink in pickleball, just with much less speed and power. You’re brushing up, finishing high, but keeping everything compact and on your side.
When players finish across their body with the paddle ending near their opposite shoulder, it indicates that they’ve taken the paddle too far behind their body during the backswing or they’ve swung with too much rotation through contact. Both of these tendencies cause the ball to pop up higher than intended. The shot loses its low, controlled trajectory and becomes attackable. Additionally, finishing across your body takes your paddle out of position for the next shot. If the ball comes back quickly, you’re not ready. You have to reset everything before you can respond.
The compact, same-side finish keeps your paddle in front of your body throughout the entire shot. You stay prepared for the next ball regardless of where it goes. Your weight stays balanced over your feet rather than rotating too much. Your eyes stay focused on the contact point and the ball rather than following your paddle on some sweeping arc across your body. Everything about the compact finish contributes to consistency, which is the ultimate goal of the forehand dink.
This same-side finish applies whether you’re hitting a straight-ahead dink, a crosscourt dink, or an inside-out dink that redirects the ball to a different part of your opponent’s kitchen. The temptation when hitting crosscourt is to swing across your body to guide the ball in that direction, but this sacrifices control. Instead, you’re simply changing the angle of your paddle face slightly while maintaining the same compact, upward, same-side finish. The paddle face direction determines where the ball goes, not sweeping your paddle across your body.
The Bigger Picture: Balance and Consistency Win
After walking through all the technical details of grip, paddle position, swing path, and follow-through, Fu brings the conversation back to two fundamental principles that matter more than any individual technical tip: balance and consistency. These might sound like generic coaching platitudes, but they represent the deeper truth about what makes the forehand dink effective in actual match situations.
Fu emphasizes that on every forehand dink he hits, he’s getting behind the ball and staying low throughout the contact. This isn’t about being athletic or having great footwork, though those things help. It’s about understanding that a shot hit from a balanced, low position with good positioning behind the ball will almost always be better than a shot hit while reaching, leaning, or off-balance, regardless of whether you’ve perfectly executed every technical detail of the stroke.
Think about what happens when you’re balanced and low. Your eyes are at a consistent level relative to the ball, making it easier to judge trajectory and contact point. Your body provides a stable platform for your arm and paddle to work from, reducing unwanted variables. Your weight is centered over your feet, allowing you to move quickly in any direction if needed for the next shot. You can focus your attention on the ball and your opponent rather than on maintaining your balance or recovering from an awkward position.
Contrast this with hitting dinks while lunging, while moving laterally without getting your feet set, or while standing too upright with your weight on your heels. Even if you somehow execute perfect paddle mechanics in these situations, the shots will be inconsistent because you’re introducing too many variables. One time you might be leaning slightly forward, the next time slightly back. One time your eyes are a few inches higher, the next time a few inches lower. These small differences compound into significant inconsistency in where your dinks land and how much spin you impart.
The consistency principle extends beyond just body position. Fu’s point is that doing the same thing over and over, even if it’s not technically perfect, will serve you better than trying to make constant adjustments or hit different types of dinks with different techniques. If you can groove one solid forehand dink technique and repeat it reliably regardless of the situation, you’re going to be more effective than someone who has five different dink techniques that they choose between depending on the circumstance.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work on technique or that all forehand dinks are the same. But it does mean that the path to improvement runs through repetition and consistency rather than through constant tinkering and variation. Master one approach, make it automatic, and then you can begin to add subtle variations for different tactical situations. But those variations should be small tweaks to a consistent foundation, not completely different swing patterns.
The forehand dink exemplifies a larger truth about pickleball that becomes more apparent the longer you play: the fundamentals matter more than the flashy stuff. A player with a rock-solid forehand dink, good balance, and consistent positioning will beat a player with a more powerful drive or a trickier spin serve but shakier fundamentals. The forehand dink is the shot that lets you control the kitchen, and controlling the kitchen is how you win points in pickleball once all four players establish position at the net.
Practical Applications: When and How to Use Your Forehand Dink
Understanding the mechanics of the forehand dink is essential, but knowing when to use it and how to integrate it into your overall game strategy matters just as much. The forehand dink isn’t a shot you hit just because the ball comes to your
