In today’s blog we’re going to talk about how to capitalize on your opponent’s dead dinks.
In a previous video we talked about dead dinking. Basically, a dead dink is a dink that you hit that has little to no spin on it, it sits up a little high and it does not press or put any stress on your opponents at all.
These are definitely things that we want to stay away from. We also want to do the most we can to force our opponents to hit us dead dinks.
When you’re a beginner and moving up through that intermediate phase, you’re going to notice that dinking is super important and also consistency is king.
You want to be really consistent with your dinks and you always want to make sure that you make as many dinks as you can so that your opponent can make errors.
The only thing with this is, once you move into more advanced levels of play you don’t want to just hit these dead dinks, like we talked about earlier, back to your opponents.
What we’re going to do in this blog is go over three things that you can do with your opponent’s dead dinks.
To start off, we want to say that the absolute worst thing that you can do when you receive a dead dink – a dink with no spin that doesn’t press you or stress you – is to send it back a dead dink.
Let’s go over the three options that you have available to you when you receive a dead dink.
Option #1 – Hit An Offensive/Aggressive Dink
The number one thing that you can do when you receive a dead dink is to hit an aggressive or offensive dink.
You do not want to hit another dead dink back at them because you just wasted that opportunity.
What you’re going to focus on is that you’re going to want to make them move wherever they’re leaning.
Let’s say they are in the middle of the court, you want to hit it way to their forehand, closer to the sideline or towards the middle of the court, make them hit a backhand and reach.
You’re going to be moving them around laterally left to right. You also want to force them to volley the ball as well.
You want to experiment and send them deeper dinks and more shallow dinks and mix it up. You really want to make you opponent work really hard and keep moving them laterally to the left or to the right as well as up and back.
Also, try to use different spins so that they don’t get the same ball every time.
Option #2 – Hit An Attack (Using Pace/Speed)
The second thing that you can do when you receive a dead dink is to attack.
These dinks are sitting up a little bit high. You’re going to put a little bit of topspin on it to try to keep it in or jam your opponent on their dominant side.
Try to get them to do that “chicken wing”.
Attacking is a really good thing to make your opponents feel uncomfortable and you want to constantly put that in your game so that your opponents don’t know what’s coming.
Option #3 – Hit an Offensive Lob
The third thing that you can do when you receive a dead dink is to hit an offensive lob from the non-volley zone.
Both height and depth are important when hitting lobs.
Remember, these dead dinks are not pressing you in any way so you should be set up for the ball and that means your accuracy for any of the shots you hit is going to be much better than if you were stressed or pressed in any way.
To summarize, these are the three things you can do: you can hit offensive and aggressive dinks, you can speed it up and attack them or you can lob them.
When you have these three different options and your opponent has to be worried about all of them it makes it really hard for them to know what you’re going to do next.
We hope you guys really enjoyed this blog and we’ll catch you on the next one.