One of the first things new players learn in pickleball is that they should try to return serve deep. Never mind that most people misunderstand why a deep return can be effective, it has become virtually axiomatic in most pickleball circles that you try to push your opponents as far behind the baseline as possible.
While deep return can be in effective tool, I think there is good evidence to suggest a short return of serve can be as good or even better. Let’s look at three reasons why:
Shortening the court. The distance from baseline to baseline is 44 feet. So if a player is hitting their third shot drive from their own baseline, they have 44 feet for their ball to travel in order to stay in play. But when you hit a return of serve short you pull your opponents forward, and every foot forward they move to retrieve the ball is one foot less territory they can aim at. If they’re hitting from the baseline, for example, they can take a pretty big rip at the ball and still keep it in the court. But force them to make contact around three-quarter court, and you’ve now reduced the distance they can hit safely. This makes them hitting hard riskier for them since the ball is increasingly more likely to land long as they get closer to the net.
Force the Drop
By playing a short (and low) return, you might make your opponents think twice about driving the ball. Since they have less court to hit through, taking a big swing becomes riskier.
Of course, the height of the ball also matters. If the ball you send as a return is short and high, your opponents can hit on a downward trajectory negating the risk created by the short court. So a short return ought to also be low enough to force an upward hit.
Shake and what? A second reason for returning short is that it keeps the opponents fairly close together in the limits the offensive move known as the ‘shake and bake’. For those who are not familiar, the shake and bake is when one person returns the third shot with a drive and their partner (the non-hitter) poaches across into the open court to intercept the volley. When the driver is far back behind the baseline, they become the obvious target for the fourth shot volley since they are far back and unthreatening, while their partner is creeping forward. This is exactly what the team using the shake and bake wants since it makes it more likely they know where the volley will be hit.
Shake and What?
Deep returns make it easier for teams to use a third shot / poach combination known as the shake and bake. A shorter return makes this tougher to pull off.
However, if the return of serve is shorter in the court and both players are about equidistant from the net, there is no obvious target for the volley and therefore the shake and bake becomes riskier and less effective to attempt.
Managing momentum. A third reason why a short return makes sense is that by forcing the opponents to run forward to hit the third shot, you increase the likelihood that they struggle with speed control when playing a drop.
Drops are hard enough to hit when you are on balance. If you are also sprinting toward the ball there’s a decent chance that your forward momentum adds too much speed to the drop, making it sit up high and easy to attack. A deliberately short and low return can challenge even strong players to take enough speed off the ball to keep it low and slow.
Momentum
A short return that makes an opponent run forward can make it tougher for them to keep their drop low and slow.
In conclusion, we are not saying that a deep return is a bad idea. The farther away your opponents are the less likely they are to do damage since their shot will have to travel over a longer distance and will give you and your partner more time at the net to react. This is good. That said, this doesn’t mean that a short return can’t be effective. Especially when it is done selectively and while keeping the ball low, a short return can be a great way to limit your opponents’ third shot options and possibly even cause them some trouble.