Pickleball Drills: Practical Exercises to Improve Movement, Control, and Shot Consistency (The Complete Pickleball Series)

Most people who play pickleball twice a week never practise.

They turn up, they play, they go home. A year later the same shot is still missing.

That is not laziness. Nobody tells you what to work on, and standing on an empty court with a bucket of balls and no plan is a miserable way to spend an hour. So you play instead. Playing is more fun, and it teaches you almost nothing about the one shot that keeps costing you points, because you only meet that shot six or seven times a night and never get to try it twice in a row.

This is a library of 192 pickleball drills for the shots that actually break down.

Sorted by what you have, not by what you wish you had

Most pickleball training books assume a partner, a free court and a spare hour. This one is organised around what is actually available to you today:

• Wall Drills — 40 drills needing nothing but a flat wall or a rebounder
• Solo Drills — 7 drills with no partner, no wall and no court
• Machine Drills — 39 drills for any ball machine, with settings written as slow, medium and fast instead of dial numbers that only fit one brand
• Partner Drills — 106 drills for two players and a court

Find the chapter that matches your afternoon. Then find the drill that matches your problem.

What the drills cover

• 40 dinking drills, including crosscourt, targets and dink-to-attack patterns
• 29 volley drills across block, punch, roll and swing volleys
• 21 reset drills for the transition zone, where most rallies are quietly lost
• 21 third shot drop drills, from a wall you feed yourself through to full-court progressions
• Serve placement, return depth, footwork, split steps, lobs, overheads and speed-ups

Every drill in the same format, so you can run it without reading a paragraph first

• Players, difficulty and time, so you know what it costs before you start
• A description you can set up from the words alone
• A variation for when it stops being hard
• Coaching cues for what to watch while you do it

No diagrams anywhere in this book. Every drill is written to be run with cones, tape, a wall and whoever you can find. Nothing here needs a court diagram to make sense.

Written for beginners and improving intermediate players, roughly up to the 4.0 level. If you are already competing above that, you will find little here you have not met before.

Two hundred drills is more than anyone needs, and you are not meant to work through them. Pick the shot that is costing you points, run three drills from it twice a week, and let the rest sit there until something else breaks.