Advanced Heavy Slice Return

Quick warning: with slice return you are basically allowing your opponents to generate more topspin off your backspin and get the ball dipping hard over the net. This is why a lot of pros generally don’t recommend it. Because if you mess up and pop the slice up too high, they can really wreck you at the net.

Priority Checklist:

1. Hit the ball in front of you instead of behind you or jammed up in your body.
2. Run in and contact the ball at it’s peak.
   • Account for the fact that your body is moving with forward momentum. So keep your swing tight and compact
   • Your swing is basically just from your shoulder to hip.
3. Attack the ball, knife it with your body, it’s an offensive shot. Run through the ball.
   • Make the opponents have to really lift up to get the ball over the net.
   • You take options away from your opponent/making it so they are forced to 3rd shot drive instead of drop
4. Lock your wrist. If you move your wrist, ball will float up.
   • You want your returns to be a laser beam instead of floaty.
5. Your follow through should be directly forward. It’s a lot more like an underspin drive than an underspin drop that floats.

• Your paddle should always be on the side of the shoulder it starts on.
  • Your paddle/arm should never cross over your body to the opposite side.
• Like a drive where you are just pushing the ball forward and you aren’t turning your hip and chest across your body for deception or rotation.

The key of course is to mix it up with regular returns, you’ll make the opponent have to constantly use their brain and adjust to the spin and cause “unforced errors”. It makes their third shot really hard to hit low over the net consistently.

• IMPORTANT: Knife the ball and keep ball low… with underspin, the bounce will be low too. Which makes it a lot harder for the opponent to hit a third and keep their third shot low. It’s great.
• Update: 1/22/2025: Rob Nunnery just released a video that agrees with exactly what I’ve written above.

At low levels 3.5 and below:

People have a tough time returning backspin and reading the spin on the ball and how much force they should put on it. So they often either hit too high which allows you to put it away at the kitchen, or not put enough force and it sails into the net.

At higher levels:

Like all things off-meta, it has the advantage of opponent not seeing it as much or often, thus catching opponent’s strategy off guard and throwing off their game the first few times you use it.

They might hit into the net, or too high the first few times you do it before they start adjusting, that’s free points.

Or you might find out that the opponent in front of you just sucks at returning against slices and has gotten away with it because no one used it well against them and they never practice against it. So you keep abusing that.

Because it’s off-meta

Even as a mix-up, it’s a viable strategy. Let’s say their strategy is to drop and then get to the net, but they are only good at driving against underspin… you can throw off their strategy entirely by suddenly slice returning, forcing them to drive high and play a fifth shot before coming into the kitchen.

They have to play your game. You dictate where the game is going to go.

It adds an additional thing they have to worry.

Instead of expecting a flat return every time where they know exactly what their strategy is for that and can pick and choose what they are going to do.

What To Watch For To Know You Have Your Opponents On The Ropes:

If your opponent starts dropping or driving high with big margin for error, high enough that you can putaway, keep slicing your returns. You are getting easy thirds.

If you see your opponent don’t come in right away to the kitchen like they usually do, you see they stay back and are not confident on their thirds, keep slicing. It means they have to hit one extra shot from the baseline and that means more % they miss. Every extra shot they have to hit to get to the kitchen is more % they miss.

If your opponent driving into the net like 1 out of every 3 shots, keep slicing. Unless 1 out of 3 of their other shots are also just straight up winners. If the 2 out of 3 of their other shots just get them to the net, this is advantageous for you. Keep slicing.

Only Slice Returning

Using it as your one and only return style, that will be harder to pull off because most pros will adapt to it and use the spin against you.

Mari Humberg does this, for both forehand and backhand.

She is so good at it that against some women teams, that it forces them to lob their serve to her so she has a harder time slicing it low with a lot of underspin.

Pros To Watch: Mari Humberg

• Should slices hard with both forehand and backhand. One of the only people to do it.
• She also slices on her drops on both sides as well.

Strategies and Patterns

This is the pattern Mari likes to do: She slices hard on the return, the opponent drives fast and hard and it goes higher over the net. She angles the putaway with her backhand, opponent barely resets it and ball flies high. She flicks it with her backhand and it goes across the court at a tight angle that is barely outside the kitchen. It’s a winner shot almost every time.

She does that all the time. You can tell she has seen that pattern a lot and know exactly what to do. Watch more of her games, and you’ll see she sets herself up for that backhand flick winner again and again.

Pattern: Deep slice that hits the baseline leading to attacker to step back and be forced to hit ball upwards in order to get the 3rd shot in. Easy putaway for you at the kitchen.

It’s already hard to keep the ball down and dip low when you are on your backfoot against a regular return. Against a backspin return, it’s basically impossible.

When opponents are tight, nervous, or frustrated, slice returns are very effective.

You also see her opponent get tight at the end of games like this one and they miss their return into the net on multiple points when the game score is at 10-8. Here is one example (and before this timestamp, there were a few more):

• I’ve also noticed that Mari prioritizes underspin and low over the net OVER depth.
  • Because if the return is high underspin and low over the net, even if it’s not deep, there is no angle for opponent to drive it up towards the net and make it dip as it’s crossing the net. They either have to drive hard and fast and it flies high so Mari and her partner can put it away. Otherwise it’ll go into the net.
    • OR opponent have to learn to drop it from mid court. And if they only know how to drive and can’t topspin drop, they are screwed.
      • Because even if they have a flat drop or backspin drop but not a topspin drop from midcourt, they are in trouble. It’s hard to backspin against backspin without popping the ball up a decent % of time.
  • If opponents are beating you with third shot drives, short slice return to make them come up to the kitchen. “Short slice returns are effective at levels below pro” – Ignatowich https://youtu.be/6sA0zu5OBZs?t=70
    • If someone hits a really had fast pace serve at you, Ignatowich will just bunt the ball back instead of slicing it because it’s really hard to slice fast serves and keep it down because your paddle face is open. Which means you could accidentally do a short high slice return which is worse return possible.
• Another thing I’ve noticed is that because opponents aren’t as confident that their ball will dip over the net and not sail high or into the net, they aren’t running in on their drop or drives.
  • This allows Mari to get a good spinny 4th shot out-of-the-air even if opponent’s drive dips over the net, because opponent’s aren’t crashing in. So if her 4th shots are a little high, it doesn’t get punished.

Great game with great POV of her slice returns from receiving end of it.

• See how low it goes over the net.

What she does against lob serves?

• If your opponent’s start lobbing their serve to you, you have already won, you should just drill/smash the ball back.
  • Of course Mari doesn’t do that, she continues slicing even on lob serves cuz her slices are just that good against people.

What she does against mens in mixed?

• She returns it wide to the women more. But she’ll return to the men sometimes and you’ll see the men mess p on it as well.

What she does against fast serves?

• Men’s serve a lot faster and harder, making it more difficult to slice. Against women, they don’t serve as fast (of course they still serve way faster than the typical players at your game, just not like 70 mph balls).

Pros to Watch: Tyler Loong

He still slices on his backhand, but drives return on his forehand.

Because he doesn’t slice with his forehand, it makes it so if his opponents aren’t good at returning underspin, they just hit to his forehand. Which is what he wants them to do anyway.