Member Training Tips

May 26, 2025

How to Develop a Strategy to Identify a Players Strengths or Weaknesses

Tip 1: Exploit your opponents’ weaknesses

Find your opponents’ weaknesses and exploit them. In the beginning of every game, one of your first priorities should be to find your opponents’ weaknesses. You can do this by making them hit a variety of shots and taking note of what they do well and what they don’t do well. Within the first several rallies, you should try to make your opponents hit drops, drives, dinks, counters, and speedups and pay attention to which shots they miss, which shots they make but execute poorly, and which shots they do well that make you uncomfortable. Once you find the shots that they aren’t good at, make them hit them as much as possible. This will be your baseline strategy, and there is no reason to change it unless your opponent makes adjustments and it stops working. 

Tip 2: Importance of making adjustments

As an advanced player, making adjustments throughout a game is key. Not making adjustments to your strategy is an easy way to give up points fast! Pickleball is like chess in the sense that strategy is everything. One of the main goals of strategy is to hide your weaknesses and use your strengths. You can assume that your opponents will be trying to do this. If you find one of their weaknesses, they may change their strategy to “cover it up”. If they do this, your strategy may be rendered ineffective! When that happens, you will have to adjust your strategy to pinpoint a different weakness, or find a way to re-expose the same weakness. Similarly, if your opponents discover one of your weaknesses, you will need to make an adjustment. You can make adjustments by changing which types of shots you hit, stacking, or adjusting your court positioning to hit more forehands or backhands. This is the ebb and flow of pickleball strategy!

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