A slice dink doesn’t have to be defensive. If you watch Mari play, she can really aggressively slice dink it with a lot of backspin. And it has so much backspin that it’s really hard to return it back with topspin.
Technique Priority Checklist:
- Just like with topspin dink, you want to pull people to the side and down middle. Like Mari Humberg says in the middle, she likes to go “cross, cross, and then middle”.
- As you can see here, she looks the same on all her dinks. It’s almost robotic.
- She is also not afraid to back off the line.
- “I trust it so much, I can dink from back here and still get it to drop in the kitchen. Now obviously I lose my leverage of the [being able to reach in for the backhand] flick when I back off. So my objective when I back off is to come back [to the kitchen line] as soon as possible”.
- You can see the slice dink gets really low and because it’s backspin, the ball stays low when it bounces.
- “I’m trying to knife it to where you have to get so far under it, and then you freak out because if you hit the ball high, you know I’ll attack.” – Mari Humberg
- Dinks are set up shots, as you get higher level, people don’t miss dinks into the net, but it’ll force them to pop the ball high up enough for you to attack.
- Keep Wrist Locked:
- Don’t break your wrist when slicing the dink. The slice isn’t created from wrist movement, use your elbow and arm instead of the wrist. The ones that pop up is from using the wrist.
- Most common mistake: you use your wrist to overcompensate for being out of position with your feet. So you try to use your wrist to fix it. Instead keep it even more simple when you are out of position, and lock your wrist in.
- Hit slow on the dinks
- Common mistake: people try to swing and hit too fast.
- Watch the ball all the way until contact.
- If you look forward too fast, you can shank it.
- My note: of course don’t stay looking at the ball for too long, because then if they suddenly jump and erne/speed it up at you, you won’t be able to react to their new position.
Slice dink is a variation, you want to have variations: don’t slice dink every time. have a slice dink, and also learn two-handed topspin dink. Imagine I have a heavy slice crosscourt, and people are recovering, then I heavy topspin over down the middle – Mari Humberg