The pickleball dink, and how to hit one

A dink is a soft shot, hit from at or near the kitchen line, that drops into the other team’s kitchen low enough that they have to let it bounce and hit up on it. Hit it with a loose grip and a short lift from the shoulder, aim mostly crosscourt and at their feet, and keep dinking until one comes back high enough to attack.

What is a dink in pickleball?

It’s the softest shot in the game. Andrea Fogarty, writing for USA Pickleball, defines it in a single line: A dink is a shot that is hit from the kitchen line that bounces in the opposing kitchen. The kitchen is the non-volley zone, the 7 feet on each side of the net where you can’t stand to volley, and a dink is meant to land in it.

The rulebook never uses the word, which is older than pickleball: Merriam-Webster gives drop shot as its meaning, dates it to 1939, and calls it probably of imitative origin. You can hit a dink from anywhere a ball has bounced, inside the kitchen included, since only volleys are kept out of it; our kitchen rules guide has the details, and our glossary has the rest of the words you’ll hear at the line.

Why is the dink so important?

Because of the kitchen: rule 11.A of the 2026 rulebook says All volleys must be initiated outside of the non-volley zone, so a player at the kitchen line can’t step forward and take a short ball out of the air. A ball that lands in their kitchen has to bounce first, and a ball that bounces low near the net has to be hit up to clear it, which is hard to do with any pace. That’s why Fogarty calls the dink arguably the most fundamental shot in pickleball.

It’s also where a doubles point is headed from the first shot. USA Pickleball’s book Pickleball Fundamentals walks through the usual order: the receiving team follows its return to the net, the serving team hits a shot that lets it come forward too, and if that works, both teams are in position at the net to either volley or dink the ball. For the serving team that shot is usually the third shot drop, which lands like a dink but is hit from deep in the court. Our strategy guide covers how both of you get to the line.

At the top of the game the exchanges can run long. In the men’s doubles final of the PPA Tour’s Sacramento Open in April 2026, Ben Johns and Gabe Tardio won a 122-shot rally against JW Johnson and CJ Klinger, the longest in any PPA Tour final since the start of 2022 by Jim Ramsey’s count on the PPA Tour’s site. In his words, Yes, 101 dinks in one rally. The last run was 67 dinks long, until Johns sped one up and the exchange ended with a Klinger volley sailing long. Rec rallies at the line rarely last that long.

How to hit a dink

Start at the line, as close to it as you can stand without stepping on it, with your knees bent so you’re down near the height of the ball instead of bending at the waist. That’s pickleball.com’s stance, and from there the dink is a small shot. Most of the advice is about doing less:

• Hold the paddle loosely. Fogarty’s guide for USA Pickleball puts grip pressure at about a 2 on a scale where 10 is as tight as you can hold it, a notch looser than the 3 she suggests in another article for a third shot drop.
• Tilt the paddle face up a little, so the ball lifts over the net, and keep the paddle in front of your body at all times.
• Swing short, from the shoulder, with the arm fairly straight and the wrist out of it. Her advice in a USA Pickleball piece on pop-ups is a compact swing from your shoulder rather than flicking your wrist.
• Hit it softly. Fogarty’s reminder is that the lighter you hit your dinks, the more that will land in the kitchen.

Get behind the ball rather than reaching for it, by moving your feet and staying on your toes, as the pop-up piece puts it.

Research on the dink is thin, and the one study we found that measured it, a 2025 pilot by Edriss and colleagues in the Journal of Sports Sciences, filmed 14 men dinking and tracked their joints from the video. Knee angles did not differ significantly, but advanced athletes maintained continuous wrist motion after the ball hit, and the high-level players demonstrated more femur flexion, meaning their thighs were bent further at the hip. The abstract says the wrist kept moving after contact but not how, so it doesn’t settle whether that’s the flick coaches warn about.

Where to aim a dink

Into the kitchen, low, and somewhere awkward for the player who has to hit it. pickleball.com puts it as Aim for the kitchen, ideally at your opponent’s feet or into the corners.

Then keep it moving. Fogarty notes that Advanced players rarely, if ever, dink to the same spot more than 2-3 times in a row, and that switching between forehand and backhand, or between the middle and the sideline, can pull a player off the line or elicit a high dink that you can then attack. Jordan Briones’s case for aiming at their toes is in our strategy guide.

Don’t try to skim the tape. A dink that clears the net by a few inches more than you meant is usually still a dink, while one that goes into the net loses the rally on the spot. Pickleball Fundamentals lists that among the usual ways a rally ends: a player trying to keep a dink too low and hitting it into the net.

Should you dink crosscourt or straight ahead?

Mostly crosscourt, with a straight dink now and then to change the pattern. A crosscourt dink crosses near the middle of the net, which is the lowest part of it: 34 inches at the center against 36 at the sidelines (rules 3.B.6 and 3.B.7). It also has farther to go. With each of you standing in the middle of your half, a dink from kitchen line to kitchen line travels 14 feet straight ahead and about 17 feet crosscourt, by our arithmetic from the 7-foot kitchens and the 20-foot width of the court (rules 3.A.1 and 3.A.4.c). More distance gives the ball more room to come down inside the kitchen.

Across all their shots, pros go crosscourt more often than not. In a 2025 study of 6,839 shots from eight PPA Tour men’s doubles matches, Lozano and colleagues found that Cross-court play (54%) dominated over parallel play. That counts drives, volleys and everything else along with the dinks, so it says nothing about how often pros dink straight.

A straight dink is shorter and goes over the higher part of the net, which gives you less margin and the other player less time. It works when the player across from you has drifted wide or starts leaning toward the diagonal. The Dink’s advice for a crosscourt dinking battle is to Sprinkle in a straight-ahead dink to reset their feet.

The dink rally, and when to speed up

Keep dinking until one comes back that you can attack, and no sooner. The players’ name for that ball is a dead dink, which The Dink describes as a dink shot that sits higher than usual, has little to no spin, and gives you time and space to attack. A ball that stays below the top of the net isn’t one: you’d be hitting up at two players who are ready for it. Our strategy guide covers when to speed up and where to aim it.

Even the pros miss: in the first half of the 2024 PPA Tour, Ramsey found that Federico Staksrud and Hayden Patriquin were the only team to play a Doubles final (Sacramento Open) without hitting a dink into the net or wide, and added that It happened only twice last year. If nearly every team in a pro final misses at least one dink, the first job in a rec dink rally is to keep yours in and low.

A dink rally is a two-player job on each side. Agree before the game who takes the dink down the middle, and when either of you will speed one up; Tanner Tomassi’s habit, in the strategy guide, is to dink at least ten before either of you tries. Some pairs simply win more together, and it takes about 20 games to tell. Rally Trace keeps your record with every partner from the score you keep on your watch, free.

If you step into the kitchen to dink a short ball, step back out before the next one. You can stay in as long as you like off the bounce, but a volley with a foot still in the kitchen, or on its line, is a fault (rule 11.A.3), and a team that sees you in there will often hit the next ball hard at you.

Common dinking mistakes

• Flicking the wrist is the one Fogarty blames first for dinks that pop up. Our dinking drills start there.
• Reaching instead of moving leads to the same flick. On a wide backhand you may cross one foot over to get there, but her pop-up piece says you should never cross over on the forehand side, because Crossing your feet on the forehand pulls your dominant shoulder back.
• A tight grip makes the ball fly. If your dinks keep landing past the kitchen, loosen your hand before you change anything else.
• Aiming too low puts the ball into the net, which always costs the rally.
• Speeding up a ball that’s below the net usually hands the other team an easy counter. Wait for one above it, as the strategy guide explains.
• Hitting every dink to the same spot lets the other player settle in, and sooner or later they’ll attack it.

Dink drills for this week

Three sessions of about 15 minutes with a partner will cover it. The drills are published ones; the order and the times are our suggestion.

1. The first session is for counting. Dink straight ahead, then crosscourt, counting out loud and starting over after any miss or pop-up, and work toward the 100-ball dink rally in our drills guide.
2. The second is for aiming. Set out cones or towels in the kitchen as targets. In Braydon Unsicker’s version on Pickleball Effect, one set marks the main targets and another the safer ones, your targets if you get in a tough spot, and you keep at it until you are consistently hitting near the main ones. Mix in straight dinks once the crosscourt ones land.
3. The third adds a score: the crosscourt dinking game to five, where a ball in the net costs all your points, then Ashley Griffith’s dead dink drill, where one of you feeds a high dink on purpose and the other attacks it. Both are with the dinking drills.

On your own, a garage wall with a net line marked on it works for dinks too, as our wall drills describe.

To see whether it shows up in games, ask a friend on the bench to count your dinks into the net and your pop-ups for a game or two this week, and do it again in a month.

Seeing it in your own games

Rally Trace keeps the score from your wrist. Tap the side that won each rally on your Apple Watch, or keep score on your iPhone, and every game is saved rally by rally. Its page draws that rally log as momentum, so you can see the runs where a game turned, with heart rate and effort when you wear the watch, and your record builds with every partner and against every opponent. All of that is free.

Rally Trace Pro adds the share of rallies you won serving and receiving in every game, and your win rate month by month, so a month of work at the kitchen line has numbers to move.

What Rally Trace can’t tell you yet is how a rally ended. It records who won each rally, not whether a dink went into the net, so for now the bench count above is the way to track your misses. Swing tracking, reading your strokes from the watch’s motion sensors, is next. Download Rally Trace and score your next session.