I play pickleball almost every day. And the thing I notice more than anything else when a new player joins our sessions in Hoi An is this: how long they take to trust the dink.
Every player who comes from a power sport (tennis, badminton, squash) has the same instinct. Drive the ball. Attack. Finish the point. And that instinct will lose you rallies at the kitchen line consistently until you unlearn it.
The dink is the foundation of good pickleball. This is how to build yours.
What a Dink Actually Is (and Isn’t)
A dink is a soft, controlled shot played from near the kitchen line that lands in the opponent’s non-volley zone. The goal is to keep the ball low, forcing your opponent to hit upward, which takes away their ability to attack.
A dink is not a tap. It’s not tentative. It’s a deliberate, placed shot with topspin, shape, and direction. Done well, it controls the entire rally. Done poorly, it’s just a slow ball that gets attacked.
The players who are hard to beat at intermediate and advanced level aren’t always the ones who hit the hardest. They’re the ones whose dinks are too good to attack.
The Fundamentals
Grip Pressure: The Most Common Mistake
Most players grip too hard when they dink. A tight grip transfers too much energy and makes the paddle stiff through contact, so the ball pops up, attackable.
The right grip pressure for dinking is loose. Comfortable. Imagine holding a bird without dropping it or crushing it: that level of firmness. Your wrist needs to be relaxed enough to absorb the incoming pace and redirect it softly.
Go out and deliberately practise dinking with a relaxed grip before your next session. You’ll feel the difference in how the ball leaves the paddle.
Low stance, stable base
Your dink starts from your feet. Players who stand too upright when dinking are off-balance and reactive; they’re compensating with their arm rather than controlling with their body.
Bend your knees. Get your weight forward and centred. You want to be stable enough to dink the same ball five times in a row without adjusting your feet. If you’re moving your feet every time you dink from the same position, your stance is wrong.
Contact Point: Meet the Ball in Front
Contact the ball out in front of your body. If you’re reaching back to your hip or letting the ball get past you, you lose control of the shot direction. Every ball should be contacted with your paddle arm extended forward, in front of your torso.
This applies to forehand and backhand dinks equally. On the backhand especially, don’t pull the ball. Extend through the contact point.
Paddle face angle
Where the ball goes depends on your paddle face at contact. Small adjustments in face angle create big changes in ball direction and height, which is what makes dinking both controllable and deceptive.
A slightly closed face (tilted forward) keeps the ball low and drives it into the kitchen. An open face (tilted back) lifts the ball, useful for cross-court angles but risky if overdone.
Practice deliberate angle variations during warm-up. Know exactly what face position produces what shot.
The Patterns That Win Rallies
Cross-court vs down-the-line
Cross-court dinks travel over the lowest part of the net and have the most court to land in. They’re higher-percentage and harder to attack aggressively. Use cross-court dinks as your default: they’re more forgiving and keep your opponent moving laterally.
Down-the-line dinks are lower-margin but useful for changing the angle and pulling your opponent out of position. Throw them in selectively, not as a default.
Targeting the backhand
Most players are weaker on the backhand side when it comes to maintaining a soft dink rally under pressure. A sustained series of backhand-side dinks often produces the error or the pop-up that ends the rally in your favour.
This is particularly effective against players who favour forehand attacking. They either have to step around to hit forehands (opening the cross-court) or take a less comfortable backhand dink.
Speed-up bait
One of the most effective setups in the kitchen game is the speed-up bait: a dink that’s slightly higher than normal, but not attackable enough to be a real opportunity. Players who are itching to speed up will take the bait and drive a ball at you. If you’re ready, a block reset wins the point.
This is an advanced pattern but it starts with your dink being controlled enough to produce the right height on demand.
How Your Paddle Affects Your Dink Game
This matters more than most beginners realise.
Core thickness directly affects how much the paddle absorbs pace. A 16mm EPP foam core is softer and more forgiving than a thinner, harder core. It absorbs incoming pace better, which means your blocks and resets land more controllably in the kitchen.
Face material affects the feel of contact. T700 carbon fibre gives you more feedback at contact than fibreglass. You can feel exactly where on the face the ball hit and how the angle was, and that feedback is how you make adjustments over thousands of dinks.
A paddle with a responsive face and a controlled core is the combination you want for kitchen play. Paddles that are all-pop (thin core, stiff face) are harder to dink with because they fight you on the soft game.
A Simple Drill to Build Your Dink
The 50-dink consistency challenge:
Find a partner or a wall. Dink 50 balls in a row without any of them going out, hitting the net, or bouncing past the kitchen line.
This sounds easy. It isn’t, initially. Most players who haven’t specifically practised dinking can’t complete 50 clean kitchen-to-kitchen dinks without error on their first attempt.
When you can do 50 in a row on forehand, do it on backhand. When you can do 50 on both, introduce cross-court dinks. When that’s consistent, start working in speed variations and directional changes.
Boring drill. Massive results.
The Mental Side
The dink game requires patience that power players find deeply uncomfortable. There’s a version of you that wants to end the rally with a winner. The kitchen game asks you to suppress that instinct and trust that patient, precise play wins more points than forcing attacks from non-optimal positions.
The players who improved fastest in our sessions in Hoi An were the ones who committed to the dink game early, who accepted the discomfort of not attacking and learned to build points systematically instead.
That patience is a skill. You develop it the same way you develop any other skill: practise deliberately, fail, adjust, repeat.
The DINQ bundle includes a T700 carbon fibre paddle with a 16mm EPP foam core, the spec I designed specifically with kitchen play in mind. If you’re serious about your dink game, the gear should match.