Right Side Pickleball: The Rules Most Players Never Learn

If you play the right side in pickleball doubles and your entire game plan is to keep the ball in play and let your partner handle the attacking, you are genuinely leaving a lot of offense on the table. That might have been acceptable thinking five years ago. It is not anymore.

The right side has evolved. Pro right side specialist Allyce Jones, featured in a breakdown on Mari Humberg Pickleball, lays out exactly what the modern right side player should be doing — and it goes well beyond resetting and staying out of the way. This article unpacks everything she covers, from positioning and middle ball decisions to stacking, mixed doubles adjustments, and how to figure out which side actually suits your game.

What Even Is the Right Side in Pickleball? (For Newer Players)

If you are newer to pickleball or doubles strategy in general, here is the quick version. In doubles pickleball, each player is responsible for roughly half the court. The right side player covers the right half from their perspective — which means their forehand is usually toward the sideline and their backhand faces the middle. The left side player is typically seen as the more aggressive, point-finishing role because their forehand naturally covers the middle of the court where most attacks happen.

For a long time, conventional wisdom said the right side was the simpler, more conservative position. You dink, you reset, you stay consistent, and you let your partner on the left close out the point. That thinking is outdated. The best right side players in the game today are creating offense, controlling middle ball situations, and making positioning adjustments that completely change how a point unfolds. If you have been treating the right side as a passive role, this breakdown is going to change how you think about it.

Why Your Strengths Should Determine Your Side

The first and most important thing Allyce makes clear is that there is no universally better side. Choosing a side should come down to matching your specific strengths to the demands of that position. Too many recreational players pick a side based on what their partner prefers or some vague idea that the left side is for stronger players. That reasoning falls apart quickly.

For Allyce, the right side fits because her forehand is her best weapon. She has a reliable cross-court forehand dink, strong forehand offense, and an effective lob from that corner. The right side lets her use all of those tools in high-leverage moments.

Here is the simple filter she recommends when you are trying to figure out which side suits you:

• Strong cross-court forehand dink? The right side probably favors you.
• Strong backhand dink and backhand drive? The left side is likely a better fit.
• Comfortable with both? Test each side in real games and see where you create more opportunities naturally.
• Struggling to cover wide court on the left? You might genuinely be better suited to the right, especially if you are on the shorter side.

Allyce is 5’2″. She makes the point that shorter players covering the left side have to manage an enormous amount of court. On the left, you are responsible for wide balls on your backhand side and balls cutting through the middle. That is a very demanding assignment when you physically cannot get to the wide ball quickly enough from a tight kitchen position. If you have been playing with a partner of different height and struggling with court coverage, this kind of side adjustment is absolutely worth testing.

The bigger takeaway here is to stop choosing your side based on social dynamics or habit. Start with an honest assessment of your actual game.

What Good Right Side Positioning Actually Looks Like

This is where most recreational players get things badly wrong. There is a persistent myth in recreational pickleball that you must stay glued to the kitchen line at all times. Watch women’s doubles pickleball at the pro level and you will immediately see that is not what is happening. The best players are constantly adjusting their position based on where the ball is and who has it.

Allyce lays out her positioning priorities in clear, practical terms:

• Take balls in front of you out of the air. Her preferred attack is a cross-body speed-up through the middle. Going down the line is riskier because most opponents have strong two-handed backhand coverage that makes down-the-line attacks easier to defend.
• Shuffle to load your forehand. She actively moves laterally to position herself for forehands rather than backhands whenever the situation allows it.
• Step back when you are off-ball. When her partner has the ball and is dinking cross-court, Allyce takes one step off the kitchen line. This gives her better reaction time if the ball gets elevated and needs to be countered aggressively.
• Reset your position after every exchange. She is not staying frozen at the line in a position that made sense for the last shot. She is continuously adjusting based on where the ball is and who currently has it.

That step-back habit is something most right side players never develop, and it costs them constantly. If you are glued to the line even when you are the off-ball player, you are making yourself a very easy target. Stepping off the kitchen line is not defensive or passive. It is a smarter default position that keeps you in a better athletic stance and gives you more time to react to attacks. It is also fully legal under the non-volley zone rules as long as you are not volleying from that position.

Most recreational players spend years at the kitchen line without ever questioning whether that position is actually serving them in every moment of a point. It usually is not.

How to Handle Middle Balls on the Right Side

Middle ball confusion is one of the most common and damaging issues in doubles pickleball at every level. The old rule was simple: the ball goes to the forehand, which typically meant the left side player in standard formation. That rule is outdated and it causes a lot of unnecessary errors and miscommunications.

Allyce and her partner Mari use a more nuanced system based on who set up the pattern:

• Ball coming from the left corner into the middle: Mari wants it. She set up the pattern by pushing the opponent there.
• Ball coming from the right corner into the middle: Allyce is the default.
• Ball landing in a true 50-50 middle zone: communication decides, but it usually goes to Mari as the left side player.

The key insight here is that the player who created the pattern should generally be the one to finish it. If Mari pushed her opponent into the corner and the opponent flicks the ball back through the middle, Mari is already reading that shot and tracking it. Stepping in and taking it from her breaks her rhythm and puts you on a worse timeline for the ball.

There is one specific situation Allyce warns about clearly. When your partner is dinking cross-court and has set up a ball that will come back through the middle, resist the urge to poach it just to prove you are a threat. Unless you can take that ball significantly earlier and redirect it to a place your opponent cannot reach, let your partner have what they worked to create. Random poaching destroys point construction and erodes your partner’s trust in your court awareness.

Middle ball confusion almost always comes from assumptions and a lack of pre-match communication, not from a skill gap. Have a direct conversation with your partner about who takes what before you start playing. It takes two minutes and eliminates a massive source of unforced errors. You can find a useful starting point for those conversations in this guide on questions to ask your partner before a match.

Two Types of Right Side Players: Which One Are You?

Allyce breaks right side players into two distinct categories, and understanding which one you currently are — and which one you need to become — should change your entire approach to the position.

The Aggressive Right Side Player sits tighter to the middle, plays forward on the line, and actively looks to create attacks. Think of how players like Gabe Tardio play the right side — taking up space, creating angles, and applying constant pressure on opponents. This player is not waiting for opportunities. They are manufacturing them.

The Ball Maker is the traditional version of the right side player. They keep a high percentage of balls in play, stay consistent, and trust their left side partner to finish points. There is nothing wrong with this approach in the right context, but if it is your only gear, you are limiting your ceiling significantly.

Allyce argues you need to be both depending on what the situation calls for. She describes one of her favorite patterns: she speeds up with her forehand directly in front of her opponent, the ball comes back to Mari’s forehand side, and Mari finishes it. That sequence is not ball-making. That is deliberate point construction, and the right side player is the one who initiated it.

Dinking with intention and earning your attacks before you take them applies just as much on the right side as it does on the left. You are not just keeping the ball in play. You are building something.

Does Your Side Change in Mixed Doubles?

Yes, and significantly so. Allyce plays about a foot further from the centerline in mixed doubles than she does in women’s doubles. The reason is straightforward: her male partner is going to take more aggressive, wider swings at middle balls, and she needs to give him the space to do that effectively.

If she is positioned too tight to the middle in mixed, he either runs into her trying to reach those balls or has to pass up on attacks he could be putting away. Playing right side with an aggressive male partner requires this kind of positional adjustment, or the partnership becomes a collision course at the kitchen line and a source of constant frustration for both players.

In women’s doubles, Allyce is more active on offense from the right side. She attacks more often, takes more middle balls, and is genuinely a co-creator of points rather than a support player. In mixed, she shifts toward the ball-making role and lets her partner be the primary aggressor. This is not a weakness or passivity. It is reading the situation correctly and adjusting to maximize what the partnership can produce together.

Mixed doubles strategy demands fundamentally different positioning decisions than women’s or men’s doubles, and the best players make those adjustments automatically without having to overthink them mid-point.

Stacking From the Right Side

Allyce and Mari always stack together. When Mari serves from the right side, Allyce is already standing on the right ready to take that position. When Allyce serves from the left side, Mari stands there. They prioritize getting into their preferred positions as quickly as possible, which is fully legal under the official pickleball rulebook.

On returns, they prefer on-court stacking over off-court stacking in most situations. The returner stays in their position, the non-returner signals the switch, and after the return lands they move into their correct sides. This keeps the returner’s visual on the ball clean without any distraction from a partner moving across the court in their peripheral vision right as they are trying to make contact.

Off-court stacking becomes the better option when the server is hitting a particularly heavy or aggressive serve. In that case, the returner benefits from not having to think about switching mid-exchange and can focus entirely on making a clean, effective return.

Allyce also notes that women’s doubles players tend to call “stay” more often than mixed players, which results in less stacking overall at the recreational level. She thinks that is a mistake. Missing returns or fourth shots because you are mid-switch is giving away free points. Learning to stack effectively removes those easy errors from your game entirely and lets both players operate from their strongest positions throughout the match.

The Roll Dink From the Right Side Corner

One of the most effective and underused shots in right side pickleball is the cross-court forehand roll dink from the right side corner. From that position, you have the full diagonal of the court to work with, which creates one of the sharpest angles available anywhere on the court. When you generate topspin on that shot, your opponent has to handle a ball that is dipping at their feet while also moving toward the sideline. That combination is genuinely difficult to manage.

The right corner is one of the best places on the court to generate this kind of stress with a dink. The angle you can create from there is steeper than almost any other position, and if your opponent is not comfortable with low topspin balls at their feet, you can run this pattern repeatedly and pull them out of position in ways that open up the middle for your partner.

Right or Left? Three Questions That Settle It

Stop guessing based on what your partner wants or what side you happened to start on the first time you played doubles. Start with an honest assessment of your own game and use these three questions to guide you:

1. Where is your strongest cross-court dink? If it is your forehand, that points toward the right side. If it is your backhand, you probably belong on the left.
2. How well do you put balls away? Left side players get significantly more finishing opportunities because of how the middle is covered. If you are a natural finisher, the left might serve you better.