Why Your Pickleball Speedups Fail (and How to Fix Them Like a Pro)
There’s a particular kind of frustration that settles in when you find yourself stuck in an endless dinking rally. You know the feeling: back and forth, back and forth, waiting for an opportunity that never quite arrives. Eventually, you decide to take matters into your own hands and speed the ball up, only to watch your opponent calmly counter-attack and put the ball away. If this scenario sounds painfully familiar, you’re experiencing what many players encounter at the 4.5 level—a plateau where consistency is no longer enough, but aggressive shots consistently backfire.
The reality is that most intermediate players aren’t failing because they lack the physical ability to execute speedups. They’re failing because of subtle technical flaws that sabotage their aggression before the paddle even makes contact with the ball. These aren’t dramatic, obvious mistakes—they’re small positioning errors, timing issues, and mechanical problems that compound into a pattern of failed attacks. The good news is that once you understand what’s going wrong, the fixes are surprisingly straightforward and can transform your offensive game relatively quickly.
Jack Munro, a respected coach in the pickleball community, recently worked with Zeyad, an Austin-based player with a strong tennis background, to diagnose exactly why his speedups weren’t working. What emerged from that session was a blueprint for understanding the most common speedup failures and, more importantly, how to correct them. These aren’t abstract concepts or advanced techniques reserved for professionals—they’re practical adjustments that any intermediate player can implement immediately to start finishing points instead of handing them to opponents.
Understanding the Speedup for Beginners
Before we dive into the technical details, let’s take a moment to break down what a speedup actually is for those who might be newer to pickleball or still developing their understanding of offensive strategy. In its simplest form, a speedup is exactly what it sounds like: a shot where you accelerate the ball, taking pace off a slow dink and driving it with more speed toward your opponent. Think of the rhythm of a typical pickleball rally—there’s usually a lot of soft, controlled dinking happening at the kitchen line, with all four players gently tapping the ball back and forth over the net.
A speedup is the moment when one player decides to break that rhythm by hitting the ball harder and flatter, typically aiming at an opponent’s body or a difficult-to-reach location. The goal isn’t necessarily to hit a winner on that single shot (though that occasionally happens). Instead, the speedup is designed to put pressure on your opponents, force them into an awkward defensive position, and create an opportunity for you or your partner to finish the point on the next shot. It’s an essential weapon in competitive pickleball because without the ability to speed the ball up effectively, you’ll find yourself stuck in defensive patterns with no clear path to winning points.
The challenge with speedups is that they require a delicate balance. Hit the ball too hard without proper technique, and it sails long or into the net. Hit it without proper placement, and your opponent easily blocks it back, often putting you on defense. Execute a speedup with poor timing or body position, and you’re actually making yourself more vulnerable rather than applying pressure. This is why so many players struggle with this shot—it’s not just about swinging harder, it’s about understanding when, where, and how to inject pace into a rally.
The Short Hop Problem: Why Taking the Ball Early Kills Your Offense
One of the most insidious habits that limits offensive potential is the tendency to short hop dinks. This is an especially common problem for players who come from a tennis background, where taking balls on the rise is often advantageous. Zeyad, like many tennis converts, had developed a pattern of hitting almost every dink immediately after the bounce, catching the ball as it was still rising. On the surface, this seems like a good approach—after all, it allows for remarkable consistency. You can keep twenty balls in play without missing, maintaining rallies and avoiding unforced errors.
However, this consistency comes at a devastating cost to your offensive capabilities. When you habitually take the ball on the rise, you’re making a fundamental choice about trajectory that limits everything that comes after. Because the ball is moving upward when you make contact, you’re forced to hit up on it to clear the net. Your paddle face must be angled to accommodate the ball’s rising path, which means you’re essentially locked into a defensive shot structure. There’s simply no way to generate downward pressure or drive through the ball when you’re meeting it on the way up—physics won’t allow it.
The correction that Munro emphasized is both simple and transformative: let the ball bounce and reach its apex before making contact. When the ball is at its maximum height, or even better, just beginning its downward arc, everything changes. Suddenly you have leverage. You can hit through the ball rather than just lifting it. Your paddle can be more vertical or even slightly closed at the top, allowing you to generate forward momentum and drive the ball with authority. This doesn’t mean you need to take every ball on the way down, but you need to have the option, and that option only exists if you’re willing to let the ball rise fully.
This adjustment requires a mental shift as well as a physical one. Many players feel married to the kitchen line, as if taking even one step back is a strategic defeat. In reality, giving up a foot or two of court position to gain proper ball height is almost always a worthwhile trade. When you take that small step back and let the ball reach the optimal contact point, the entire court opens up in front of you. Instead of being limited to pushing the ball back defensively, you can now choose to speed it up, angle it, or drive it with topspin. That tactical flexibility is worth far more than standing a few inches closer to the net.
The ‘See Paddle, See Ball’ Rule: Eliminating the Telegraph
Even when players understand that they need better ball position to execute effective speedups, many still sabotage themselves through excessive backswing. This was another key issue Munro identified in Zeyad’s game—his paddle was disappearing from his field of vision during the preparation phase of his speedup. This might seem like a minor detail, but in competitive pickleball, it’s essentially announcing your intentions to your opponents before you’ve even made contact with the ball.
Think about what happens when your paddle goes way back behind your body during your backswing. Your opponents can see this wind-up happening in real time. They recognize the pattern: big backswing equals incoming speedup. This gives them precious milliseconds to prepare, to adjust their positioning, to get their paddles up, and to mentally shift from offensive to defensive mode. You’ve eliminated the element of surprise, which is often the most valuable component of an aggressive shot. Additionally, that large backswing frequently leads to mechanical problems—the bigger the motion, the more opportunities for the paddle face to be misaligned at contact, resulting in balls that spray long or drift wide.
The professional approach, as Munro teaches it, is elegantly simple: you should be able to see your paddle and the ball at the same time throughout your entire shot preparation. This means keeping your paddle in front of your body, within your peripheral vision, as you prepare to make contact. The motion should be compact, controlled, and centered in front of you. If you need to check whether you’re following this principle, pay attention during your next practice session—if your paddle ever disappears from your field of view, your backswing is too big.
The natural question that follows is: if I’m not taking a big backswing, where does the power come from? The answer is your wrist. By keeping the overall motion compact and using a quick, explosive wrist flick at the moment of contact, you can generate substantial pace and, critically, heavy topspin. This wrist snap is what professional players use to create those deceptive speedups that seem to come out of nowhere. The motion looks almost identical to a regular dink until the very last moment, when the wrist uncocks and drives the ball forward with pace.
Think of it like a jab in boxing, as Munro describes it. A jab isn’t thrown with a huge wind-up that starts back by your shoulder—it shoots straight out from your guard position, quick and deceptive. The power comes from the snap at the end, not from a long, looping motion. That same principle applies to speedups in pickleball. The shot should look like a dink until it’s not, with the acceleration happening in a compact space directly in front of your body. This makes your speedups nearly impossible to read in advance, which dramatically increases their effectiveness even if you’re not hitting the ball particularly hard.
Placement Over Pace: The Setup Shot Mentality
Perhaps the single most important conceptual shift for improving your speedup success rate is changing how you think about the shot’s purpose. Most players who struggle with speedups are unconsciously treating them as finishing shots—they’re trying to blast a winner past their opponents with a single aggressive ball. This winner-or-nothing mentality leads to overhitting, poor shot selection, and a low success rate that makes players hesitant to speed the ball up at all.
The professional perspective, which Munro emphasizes repeatedly, is completely different: a speedup is a setup shot. It’s not the knockout punch; it’s the jab that sets up the knockout punch. This is the “one” in a one-two combination. Your speedup’s job is not to win the point outright but to force a weak return that you or your partner can then put away easily. Once you embrace this mentality, everything about how you execute speedups changes for the better.
Instead of focusing on raw pace—trying to hit the ball as hard as possible—you shift your focus to placement and creating awkward situations for your opponents. Munro specifically recommends targeting what he calls “jamming spots,” areas where opponents will struggle to make clean contact even if they react quickly enough. The dominant shoulder, often called the “chicken wing” area, is a prime target because it’s difficult for players to extend through the ball when it’s coming at their hitting shoulder. Similarly, shots that force opponents to reach outside their body or stretch uncomfortably are far more effective than harder shots hit right to their wheelhouse.
As Munro succinctly puts it: “With speedups, you always want to focus on place rather than pace.” A ball hit at 40% of your maximum power but placed in an awkward location will generate far more weak returns than a ball hit at 90% power directed at an opponent’s strong zone. Those weak returns—the pop-ups, the floaters, the balls that come back with no pace—are what you’re actually hunting for. Once your opponent gives you one of those defensive balls, that’s when you go for the aggressive putaway. The speedup created the opportunity; the follow-up shot finishes the point.
This approach also has a psychological benefit: it reduces the pressure you put on yourself. When you’re not expecting every speedup to be a winner, you can relax into the shot and execute it more cleanly. You’re not gripping the paddle tighter and swinging harder in an attempt to overpower opponents. Instead, you’re thinking strategically about placement, which leads to better shot selection, improved mechanics, and ultimately a much higher success rate. The paradox is that by trying less hard to hit winners, you actually create more winning opportunities.
The Triangle Pattern: Predicting the Counter-Attack
One of the more advanced concepts that Munro introduced during his session with Zeyad was the “triangle” pattern for predicting where speedup returns will go. This is the kind of tactical awareness that separates good players from great ones—the ability to anticipate where the ball is going before your opponent has even made contact. Understanding this pattern transforms speedups from a risky, unpredictable shot into a strategic play with predictable outcomes that you can prepare for.
The basic principle is straightforward: when you speed the ball up, your opponent becomes like a concrete wall, and the ball is going to bounce off that wall in a predictable direction based on where you hit it. If you speed the ball up down the line (straight ahead to the opponent in front of you), expect the return to come back down the line. The opponent rarely has the time or positioning to redirect a well-executed speedup cross-court, so the ball will deflect back in the general direction it came from. Similarly, if you attack cross-body, angling your speedup toward the opponent on the diagonal, expect the return to funnel toward the middle of the court.
This predictability is enormously valuable because it allows you to be in position before the counter-attack arrives. Instead of being caught flat-footed or reacting late to your opponent’s return, you’re already moving toward the most likely landing zone. You and your partner can coordinate your positioning based on the triangle pattern—if you speed up down the line, your partner knows to be ready for a ball coming back down that line. If you go cross-body, both players can shade slightly toward the middle, anticipating the funneled return.
This is what playing chess while your opponents play checkers looks like in practice. They’re simply reacting to the ball coming at them, doing their best to block it back anywhere over the net. You, on the other hand, have already calculated where their return is most likely to land and are positioning yourself to take advantage of it. This split-second advantage is often all you need to turn a neutral speedup into a point-ending sequence. You’re not working harder; you’re working smarter, using pattern recognition and strategic positioning to create advantages that your opponents might not even realize exist.
The triangle pattern also helps you understand when speedups are most likely to succeed. If you and your partner are both positioned where you can cover the predictable returns, it’s a good time to attack. If you’re out of position or your partner is caught moving the wrong direction, it might be better to wait for a better opportunity. This kind of tactical awareness—knowing not just how to execute the shot but when to attempt it—is what accelerates players through the rating levels.
The Path Forward: Incremental Improvement and Deliberate Practice
After working through all these technical and tactical elements with Zeyad, Munro emphasized something that applies to every player trying to improve their speedup game: you don’t need to fix everything at once. In fact, trying to implement all of these adjustments simultaneously is likely to create confusion and frustration. The path to improvement is incremental, focused, and deliberate. Pick one or two specific elements to work on in your next playing session, drill them until they start to feel natural, and then add another layer of refinement.
Maybe you start with just the ball position adjustment, consciously letting dinks rise to their apex before you make contact. You spend a few sessions getting comfortable with taking that small step back and timing your contact at the peak of the ball’s bounce. Once that becomes automatic, you add in the compact paddle work, focusing on keeping your paddle visible throughout your preparation and using your wrist to generate pace. Then you layer in the placement emphasis, consciously choosing to hit to awkward spots rather than just hitting hard. Each element builds on the previous ones, creating a comprehensive improvement in your speedup technique.
This approach also allows you to track your progress more clearly. When you’re working on a single technical element, you can notice when it’s improving and when old habits are creeping back in. You can ask a practice partner to watch specifically for whether you’re short hopping balls or whether your backswing is getting too big. This focused feedback is far more valuable than vague advice to “hit better speedups.” You’re addressing specific mechanical issues with targeted corrections, which is how real skill development happens.
The transition from being a consistent player to being an aggressive player—from someone who can keep the ball in play to someone who can actively create and finish points—is built entirely on these kinds of small technical shifts. It’s not about discovering some secret weapon or learning an exotic shot that nobody else knows about. It’s about refining the fundamentals of the speedup until they become reliable tools you can deploy confidently in competitive situations. Stop short hopping your balls, keep your paddle in your field of vision, treat your speedup as a setup shot rather than a finishing shot, and understand the triangle pattern for anticipating returns.
As you implement these changes, you’ll notice a cascade of positive effects. Your speedups will land in the court more consistently, which will give you the confidence to attempt them more frequently. Because you’re focusing on placement rather than pace, you’ll create more awkward returns from your opponents, leading to easier putaways. Your opponents will have a harder time reading when you’re about to attack, which means your speedups will be more effective even when you’re not hitting them particularly hard. And because you understand where the returns are likely to go, you’ll be in position to handle counter-attacks and maintain offensive pressure.
Why These Adjustments Matter for Your Overall Game
The impact of improving your speedup technique extends far beyond just that one shot. When you develop a reliable, aggressive speedup, it fundamentally changes how opponents have to play against you. If they know you can effectively punish high balls
