Description: How and why to serve to exploit opponents’ weaknesses for pickleball.
Intended audience: Pickleball players who already know how to serve in ways that allow them to exploit the weaknesses of their opponents.
Technical objective: Potential topics include …
- Top spin serves
- Slice serves
- Lob serves
- Backhand serves
- Short serves
- Powerful serves
Tactical objective: Teach participants one of the above serves and give them concrete examples of situations in which this serve will be useful. For example, top spin serves against players who stand too close to the baseline, slice serves to players who return everything with top spin, lob serves when there is little room to back up, etc. And important secondary objective is to teach participants how to analyze their success/failures through the practice of charting opponents’ returns.
Warmup: 10-minute freestyle
Instructional segment: 45 minutes of pickleball drills with individual differential coaching.
Game segment: 30 minutes of serving games that emphasize the serve learned in this lesson. All players who miss their first serve get a mulligan.
Differential coaching: Not all groups who book this lesson will have the same composition. Not all students who participate in this lesson will have the same experience or abilities. Therefore the coach will make adjustments on the fly to tweak the lesson plan to best fit the group. The coach will also attempt to give each participant at least one thing to work on in order to improve moving forward.
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