Why Do My Dinks Keep Popping Up?

The three causes, in order

1. You are standing too tall

This is the root cause and almost nobody blames it. If your body is upright and the ball is low, your arm has to reach down and scoop up. That means an open face and an upward path — a pop-up by design.

Bend your knees and get your chest down so your body is at the height of the ball. Now your paddle can move forward instead of upward. Your legs will burn. That is the sign you are doing it right.

2. The ball is getting behind you

Late contact forces an open face for the same reason. Contact in front of your body, where you can push through the ball.

3. The paddle face is too open

Usually a symptom of the first two rather than a cause. Fix your posture and contact point, and the face naturally squares up.

Push, do not lift

The feeling should be a push toward your target, not a lift over the net. Quiet wrist. If your wrist flicks at contact, you have lost control of the face — and the ball goes wherever the face was pointing.

Also: stop taking every dink on the rise

Taking the ball early sounds aggressive, but on a low dink it means contacting while the ball is still climbing, which sends it up. Let low dinks come to the top of the bounce and take them there.

A drill for this exact fault

Cross-court dinks with your partner, but with one rule: every ball must land in the front half of the kitchen. Do not count winners, count how many in a row stay below net height. Twenty in a row is a good target. It is boring and it works.

Final thought

If you fix one thing, bend your knees. Everything else follows. This is the first correction we make in almost every beginner pickleball lesson in San Diego, and we drill it in live kitchen exchanges at our weekly pickleball clinics in San Diego.