Conventional pickleball wisdom dictates you play soft to get yourself out of hot water. Like when you’re deep behind the baseline, hitting off your back foot, for example.
Drop until you can work your way in, right? Wrong, says Tyson McGuffin.
Modern paddle technology has changed the equation for how we should think about baseline defense when the scales aren’t tipped in our favor. So throw out that old rulebook and try this instead.
✅ When your back is quite literally against the wall — when your opponent hits a penetrating serve return, let’s say — the odds of hitting a perfect drop-shot are not in your favor. The further back you are, the less likely you can drop it shallow back over the net. More likely, you’ll dump the ball short or sail a sitter high.
✅ So stop playing soft from here. Smash a drive instead. Modern paddles can compensate for less-than-perfect technique. You can get plenty of pace on one off-balanced drive to reestablish your positioning and your footwork and get yourself in a better place to effectively drop the next shot.
✅ Better yet, a drive here could result in a weak counter or a pop-up or even an outright winner from time to time. By flipping the script on this one simple scenario — a situation you'll find yourself in more than once in any given game — you’ve now gone from deep in trouble to pushing the pace from the mid-court.
When in doubt, says Tyson, “drive yourself out of trouble.”
