In the topspin technique you will keep your hitting arm fairly straight and move in a low to high pendulum motion from the shoulder. You can vary the amount of spin by changing the position of the paddle face. Having your paddle face perpendicular to the ground will apply topspin to the ball with a low to high swing. You can turn your wrist to have the paddle face more “closed” for additional topspin.

The advantages of topspin:

Hitting a drive with topspin has the main benefit of keeping the ball in the court. You can vary the amount of topspin on the ball. Players commonly choose to hit the ball with more topspin when hitting the ball long. When you hit the ball too hard with an open paddle face and no topspin the ball will sail long. By applying some topspin you can get the ball to curve back into the court and not travel as far.

Topspin will cause the ball to curve or dip in flight and drop into the court sooner than it would otherwise have done. This gives players who have spent time mastering pace, height, and spin the ability to hit the ball at the feet of their opponent from the middle of the court.

Topspin shots can also be used to hit balls into your opponent’s kitchen. Franky, these shots should be called “dippers” or “rollers” because in them you use your wrist to move or roll in order to apply additional spin. In order for the ball to land in the kitchen, or shorter in your opponent’s court, you must control the pace of your shot along with the height and the amount of spin.

A dink at the NVZ line can be hit with topspin, enabling you to hit controlled balls off the court or attacking balls at players up at their NVZ line.

It is possible to hit a topspin lob, but this shot has a small margin for error as the shot must be high enough to go over your opponent’s head and still land within the baseline.

You will want to develop a serve using the topspin technique. The serve requires the ball to be contacted below your navel and hit with an upward motion. Practice hitting the ball and focusing on how high the ball is as it clears the net - better height creates a deeper serve. Experiment with pace, height, and spin in order to deepen your serve. The same motion can be used to start out any rally during your warm up. Mastering this technique forms the basis for two very important Pickleball shots - the serve and the forehand groundstroke or drive.

The family of topspin shots are generally more offensive in nature because the spin curves the ball back into the court, allowing you to hit the ball hard. The negative side of this is that the technique is larger and therefore makes you susceptible to making more errors. The very best players use a balanced mix of power shots and defensive soft drop shots while they play the kitchen game.