The Soft and Hard side of Pickleball

This series of lesson plans deal with handling balls at two ends of the spectrum. On the one hand, players need to be able to manage to play against Bangers — those power players who look to speed things up from anywhere.

On the other side of things, players must learn to be comfortable sending and receiving dinks. We’ve even got a lesson plan of some of our favourite miscellaneous drills and games!

We wrote clear descriptions of each of the activities. But for even more fun, we added a few examples below as GIFs. Enjoy!

*for full transcript of this audio, click here.

PLAN #1: How to Beat Bangers. The focus here is about handling speed — whether it’s coming from the baseline or up near the kitchen. Intermediate players love this straightforward, practical approach to playing against the power game!

PLAN #2: Dynamic Dinking. When opponents play soft and low balls up near the net, your players better be able to handle them without popping up the ball. This series of teaching points, games and drills will help your players keep the ball low and slow.

PLAN #3: Mixed Bag Drills. Enjoy this smorgasbord of fun and fast-paced drills and games. Use these in a single lesson or work them into any on-court session you choose! Players will get to work on their serves and returns, drops, drives, soft game and more!

WARM-UP MENU

In each lesson plan, we allocated time for the warm-up. We created a “warm-up menu” and recommend choosing a sample from it to start off each of your lessons.