Pickleball Tips for Left-Handed Players

Mastering Pickleball: Essential Tips for Left-Handed Players

As a left-handed pickleball player, you come with a unique set of challenges and, conversely, advantages that can make or break your game. Since most of the population is right-handed, as a lefty, you have to get used to all kinds of crazy angles and strategies that work against you. If you can figure out how positioning and tactics work for a left-handed player and play to your natural left-handed strengths, you’ll score a lot of points. Lefties naturally serve and return from the left side of the court.

Friends playing pickleball in an outdoor court in a sunny day

Understanding the Left-Handed Advantage in Pickleball

In pickleball, left-handed athletes have a strategic edge that allows them to create challenging shots. If you watch any pickleball match from an overhead view, the left-handers can go across the diamond or court with trajectories and spins that right-handers never show. The right-handers expose their defenses by closing off the expected angles. Left-handers can tweak their form based on feel to make their drives look how they want.

Key Pickleball Techniques for Left-Handed Players

Mastering specific techniques is crucial to performing well in pickleball. Having the proper grip will help you control the ball and get the power you want. The continental grip is often the grip most coaches will recommend because it allows you to do everything: block, attack, etc. Take the time to become proficient at different types of serves, such as the slice serve, lob serve, or the topspin serve as this will allow you to baffle your opponents.

African players converse and smile after a pickleball game, standing on the court. Concept of friendship, African ethnicity, and sportsmanship.

Being left-handed is an advantage. A left-handed player will be able to hit a sharp, powerful cross-court forehand that many right-handed pickleball players have not seen. As a left-handed player, you have the natural ability to hit your forehand right down the line. Hone in on this technique and use it. It will force the ball to bounce in such a way that will make it difficult for right-handed players to anticipate.

Strategic Positioning on the Court

Left-handed players can use the fact that the game is a little different for them to their advantage. Many left-handed players that I see play on the right-hand side of the court in doubles. This allows players to again hit better angles that right-handed opponents may not see as often while also allowing left-handed players to hit their forehand more often. Recognizing the importance of where you position yourself in pickleball also brings up the fact that you are going to have to do some guesswork on shot placement. To position yourself correctly more often than not, you will need to anticipate where the ball is going to go. Work on practicing how to read an opponent’s body language before they hit the ball. Look at the angle of their paddle and try to anticipate where the ball is going to go.

Developing Winning Pickleball Tactics

Many right-handed players are not used to returning a serve or spin put on the ball by a left-handed player. This has the potential to create more confusion and errors on the part of the right-handed player. Lefties should direct the ball down the right-hand side of the court, to the right-handed player’s backhand. The right-handed player’s backhand is usually the player’s weaker side. The left-handed player should use angles on the court that are not common to right-handed players, opening up the possibility of scoring points.

Practice Drills for Left-Handed Players

Here are some pickleball drills you can work on to make you a more confident player, using that lethal lefthander’s shot that nobody practices for. These are skills that you can work on against a wall or with a partner:

• Forehands and backhands: If you have a wall you can hit against, make your only goal to see how many straight times you can hit a forehand or backhand shot.
• Volleying and dinking: In order to get better at volleying, you are going to need to work on reflex, as this is a close to the net strategy. Otherwise, you need to know how to place those dinks at odd angles so that you are setting up for an aggressive put-away shot.

I do urge all players to do as much drilling as possible. There is no other way to perfect strategies than to figure out new ways to challenge your right-handed opponents. The more you practice against right-handed players, the better you will become.

The article gets into all the fantastic things we can do as left-handed pickleball players. The angle of our shots and the spin we can generate naturally is different and can confuse the other team. We have a leg up before stepping on the court and we need to further practice and push these advantages. Work on things like cross-court points to generate these tricky angles as well as developing a fabulous backhand so we can become truly fearsome. Hone into these things in practice and working on developing them can bring up your game.