Pickleball Coaches Are Teaching The Shovel Technique To Fix Overhead Defense
- A short, compact “shovel” motion aimed at an opponent’s waist is replacing the instinct to hit a perfect slice or a big swing when defending an overhead.
- The continental grip lets players switch between forehand and backhand defense without rotating their hand, saving critical time against a fast smash.
- Standing tall, taking a big backswing, and aiming for the sideline are the habits coaches say turn a defensible overhead into a lost point.
Most Players Try To Win The Point On Defense. That’s The Mistake.
Your opponent winds up for the smash. You panic, either swinging too hard or trying to thread a perfect dink back into the kitchen, and the ball pops right back up for another put-away. Coach Richard Livornese, who breaks down technique for recreational players on YouTube, says the fix has nothing to do with footwork or grip strength. It comes down to changing the goal entirely.
Instead of trying to hit something impressive off an overhead, the target should simply be a manageable ball back. Not a winner. Not a flawless reset. Just something that forces the opponent to play the next shot from neutral rather than finishing the point outright.
Livornese calls it the shovel technique, and it is built for exactly this moment: the split second when a smash is coming and most players have no real plan beyond hoping for the best. He notes the same reset in thinking applies to hands battles at the net, where players who try to win the exchange outright, instead of simply surviving it, tend to lose it. Survival first. Attack second.
What The Shovel Technique Actually Looks Like
The shovel is a short, controlled defensive stroke built specifically for returning overheads. Rather than taking a full backswing and trying to generate pace, the player uses a compact motion to redirect the ball toward the opponent’s waist.
Targeting the waist is the detail that makes the shot work. A ball aimed at the body forces an awkward position for the next shot: it is harder to attack cleanly from the hip than from a ball sitting up at shoulder height. The goal isn’t to win the point outright. It’s to make the following shot easier.
Livornese breaks the technique into four mechanics. Get low immediately by dropping the hips and bending the knees the moment an overhead is recognized, which creates a stable base and keeps the paddle ready to absorb pace. Use a short backswing: the overhead is already generating pace, and the defender’s job is to redirect it rather than create more. Shovel the ball with a scooping motion upward through contact, lifting and redirecting rather than driving. And target the waist, aiming for the midsection instead of the kitchen line, which buys time to recover.
The same motion applies on both the forehand and backhand side, short, controlled, and low to the ground. Livornese frames it plainly: it isn’t a glamorous shot, but survival shots win rallies.
Why The Continental Grip Changes Everything
Livornese specifically calls out the continental grip as the foundation for the shovel technique, and it makes a bigger difference than most players realize. The continental grip sits between a forehand and backhand grip, sometimes described as the “hammer grip,” a name that fits: it feels like holding a hammer with the paddle face square to the court.
Most players who picked up pickleball casually never settle into it, which means they are constantly rotating their hand when they switch sides. That rotation costs time a defender does not have when a smash is already on its way. With a continental grip, a player goes from backhand to forehand without changing anything, and the same short shovel motion works on both sides.
How To Practice It Without Wasting Court Time
Livornese’s practice progression starts with a partner feeding controlled overheads from the non-volley zone while the defender works on getting low and shoveling the ball back, focusing on the waist target rather than pace. Both sides need equal attention. The continental grip should make forehand and backhand feel similar, so both should be trained together from the start rather than favoring whichever comes naturally.
After each shovel return, the drill calls for an immediate recovery step, resetting the feet: the point is not over. The goal was only to get a manageable ball back, so the defender needs to be ready for what comes next. Pace should increase gradually. Once the motion feels natural at slower speeds, a partner can add more pace to the overheads, and the value of a short backswing becomes obvious as the ball comes in faster.
The Mistakes That Undo The Technique
Livornese lists several habits that work against the shovel technique. A big backswing adds time and error at the exact moment a player has the least margin for either. Trying to slice a perfect dink into the kitchen off a fast overhead is a low-percentage shot that asks for precision under maximum pressure. Standing tall kills stability and paddle position: getting low is what makes the shovel motion possible in the first place. Aiming for the sideline or corners raises the error rate for no real benefit, when the waist is already a wide, forgiving target. And gripping the paddle too tight, a common response to panic, stiffens the hands right when they need to be soft.
Cutting out those five habits, according to Livornese, does more for a player’s overhead defense than adding any single advanced technique.
Not The Same Shot As A Reset, But The Same Idea
The shovel isn’t identical to a reset, the shot that neutralizes a fast exchange by dropping the ball softly into the kitchen. The shovel targets the body instead of the kitchen line. But both shots come from the same place: the understanding that the first job in a defensive moment is to survive, not counter-attack. A failing reset usually breaks down for the same reason a failing overhead defense does, too much ambition at the wrong moment.
Recreational pickleball has leaned heavily on instructional content like this as the sport’s participation numbers have climbed into the tens of millions of American players over the past several years, and overhead defense sits near the top of the list of shots that separate players who survive fast exchanges from those who hand away easy points. A defensive shot doesn’t need to be spectacular to be effective. It needs to be repeatable.
What Changes Once It Clicks
Once a player stops trying to do too much on defense, Livornese says something clicks. Second and third chances start showing up in rallies that used to end outright. Fewer errors follow: the shots aren’t coming from desperation anymore, and that is how defensive skill compounds over a match. Players are not just surviving more overheads. They are getting back to a neutral rally more often, which means more chances to go on offense when the moment is actually right.
The players who defend overheads well aren’t doing anything magical. They have a clear goal, a compact motion, and the right grip. Livornese’s advice for anyone who freezes up when a smash is on its way is to give the moment a simple, specific job rather than an open-ended one: get low and shovel it back at the body. Replacing panic with a defined process, repeated enough times in practice, is what makes the motion automatic under real pressure. For anyone stuck bracing for the next smash and hoping for the best, that is a far more useful starting point than trying to guess their way through it.
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