The most simple and accessible way to get better at pickleball is to practice against a wall.
When the weather is inclement, there are no courts available, or you can’t find a drilling partner, a wall is an amazing alternative.
- Practicing on a wall can yield 12 times more touches
- 15 minutes of wall drilling is roughly equivalent to the amount of touches you will get in 3 hours of doubles play
Perhaps more importantly, you can control what types of touches these are going to be. If you want to practice your hand speed, resets, or even third-shot drops, the wall is going to be your best friend.
Setup: The best setup I’ve seen for wall drills is to put a horizontal piece of tape 35 inches off the ground. Create 3 squares evenly distributed along this line.
It can also be useful to tape a non-volley zone line 7 feet away from the wall.
My two favorite wall drills are moving volleys and a dink, speedup, reset pattern.
Moving volley drill:
- Hit the ball in the rightmost square
- Without letting it bounce, volley it in the middle square
- Volley the ball again into the leftmost square without letting the ball touch the ground
- Once you can comfortably do this, try to increase the difficulty by going in the pattern: right, middle, left, left, middle, right, right, middle, etc.
Related: How to React to Net Cord Drops
Dink, speedup, reset pattern:
- Hit a soft dink to the middle square
- Then let the ball bounce and hit a hard speed up into middle square
- Next, try to reset it softly back into the middle square. Continue this pattern by hitting a dink, speed-up, reset, dink, speed-up reset, etc…
For more drills like these, check out this video featuring Heisman Trophy Winner Danny Wuerrfel and Shea Underwood:
