To excel in pickleball, understanding the nuances of play is crucial. Enter Morgan Evans, a renowned pickleball instructor, whose latest episode on SelkirkTV provides essential techniques for mastering pickleball, focusing on opponent scouting and serve returns.
Scouting Your Opponent: The Key to Strategic Advantage
In the "CoachME Pickleball Course" on SelkirkTV, Morgan Evans delves into the art of understanding and anticipating your opponent's moves. He emphasizes the importance of studying your adversary during warm-ups, noting their strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies. This assessment is crucial in forming a strategy to exploit their weaker points while bolstering your strengths.
Crafting the Serve Return: A Critical Element of Play
Beyond scouting, Evans guides viewers through the intricacies of returning the serve. This part of the game is where many matches are won or lost. Morgan offers detailed advice on positioning, timing, and choosing the right shot. His strategic insights include:
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Identifying the weaker third ball player: If you're better at handling pace, return to the player who is more likely to drive the ball. Conversely, if your strength lies in returning drops, target the player who prefers that style.
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Decision-making based on opponents' skills: Choose to return to the most threatening player to delay their advancement and reduce their chance of poaching.
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Team dynamics and fourth-ball play: If playing doubles, consider your partner's attributes. For instance, a partner with greater height and reach should ideally receive the third ball to maximize the chances of a successful volley.
Strategic Insights for Every Player
What sets Evans' teaching apart is his holistic approach. He doesn't just focus on the physical aspect of the game but also instills a strategic mindset in players. Understanding the "why" behind each decision is as critical as the "how." His methodology provides players with a mental framework to approach each match methodically, breaking down the overall objective into smaller, manageable tasks.
Where do you stand when returning a serve in pickleball?
How you are positioned, pre-serve, is very important. What position is going to give you the best opportunity to hit a successful return? For most of us, it will be the forehand that gives us the best opportunity to hit the shot we want. Many times, for those coming from sports like tennis, you would want to show your opponent that you are ready to hit the forehand or backhand. In this case, the serve will be coming extremely fast and you want to be ready to react quickly. In pickleball, there is a good chance we can cover the whole service box, even if we are tucked to one side or the other. If that is the case, then we want to shade to the side that allows us to hit the shot we want to hit. Assuming you want to hit a forehand return, then position yourself to hit a forehand 95% of the time. The only caveat to this positioning strategy is that you must be ready to move quickly if your opponent hits a perfect serve to the open area of the service box. As long as you are ready for this serve location, you will find yourself hitting the shot you want in the vast majority of instances.
Hit The Return Deep To Force a Difficult Shot
Once you are properly positioned to hit the return you want, the next issue to master is the depth of the return. It cannot be stated strongly enough. For you to retain the advantage as the returner, you must keep your opponent deep. If you hit a short return, you are allowing your opponent to move towards the net with momentum. To prevent this, you want a return that consistently hits the back third of the service box. The deeper the return, the better. The ideal shot has your opponent hitting their third shot at or behind the end line. Keeping the return keeps you in control of the point and forces your opponents to hit a difficult shot.
Hit It High To Give Yourself Time To Get To The Net
Another technique not used nearly enough is to return the serve with some level of altitude. In this instance, we are not talking about a lob, but a nice controlled, somewhat gentle, return, with some arc to its flight. By hitting a controlled, high shot you give yourself TIME to get to the net yourself. You don’t want to still be at the baseline or the transition zone when your opponents are about to strike the ball. You want to be at the net so your opponents see you and your partner ominously blocking all paths.
