The Three Pickleball Return Of Serve Targets That Set Up Every Point
- Placement beats power on the pickleball return of serve: a deep, well aimed shot pins the server back and buys time to reach the kitchen line.
- Coaches point to three targets: the deep backhand hip, the deep outside corner, and a jam straight at the server’s body.
- A scored cone drill turns return of serve placement from a guess into a repeatable skill, with most 3.5 players starting around 11 out of 30 attempts.
Most Players Waste Pickleball’s Only Guaranteed Free Swing
Every rec player gets one shot in pickleball where the outcome depends entirely on their own decision making: the return of serve. The ball has to bounce first, there is no rush, and the target is wide open. Most players still treat it like a formality, swinging just hard enough to get the ball back in play before sprinting to the kitchen line and hoping the point sorts itself out. Coaches who break down the shot say that habit gives away a real advantage. The return is the only shot in the game where a player knows the ball is coming, knows roughly where it will land, and gets a full, unhurried swing at it. Aiming for the middle of the court wastes that gift. Three specific targets, coaches say, do almost all the work of setting up the rest of the point before it even starts.
Why Return Of Serve Placement Beats Power
Placement controls how far the server has to travel before hitting a third shot, and that distance is an advantage a returner gets for free. A deep return pins the serving team back near the baseline while the returning side claims the kitchen line first. Power does none of that work on its own. A hard return that lands mid-court actually invites the server forward and makes their third shot drop easier to execute, handing back the exact advantage the returner was trying to build.
The target a player chooses, meaning the depth, the side, and the specific spot on the server’s body being aimed at, writes the script for the next two shots of the rally. A deep return forces a low percentage drop shot from more than 20 feet behind the baseline. A short one hands the server a drive they can rip at the returner’s feet while that player is still caught in the transition zone. Same swing, same effort, two very different points.
Target One: Deep At The Backhand Hip
The default target is the server’s backhand side, landing within three feet of the baseline, and it should make up roughly 70 percent of what a player returns. Most players below the 4.5 skill level have a shakier backhand than forehand, so aiming there until an opponent proves they can punish it is the standard approach. The hip placement counts for just as much as the side: aiming at open court lets a server step in and rotate freely, while aiming at the spot where the backhand meets the body cramps that same server and produces the kind of floating, off-balance reply that gets attacked at the net.
A 2025 peer reviewed study of elite racquet sport players found that consistency in shot selection predicted winning more reliably than variety did. For a Tuesday night league player, the practical takeaway is simple: pick the deep backhand target and hit it over and over rather than mixing in a new idea every point.
Depth counts for more than precision here. The advice from coaches is to aim for the last three feet of the court and accept that a handful will sail long. A deep return that lands at the server’s feet is worth more than a tidy one that drops safely at the service line: depth buys the two extra steps toward the kitchen that separate a balanced fifth shot from a scramble through the middle of the court. Adding some arc to the shot helps too, and a return with height hangs in the air longer than a flat, hard-hit ball.
Target Two: The Deep Outside Corner
The second target is the outside corner on the server’s forehand side, pulling that player wide and off the court entirely. This target works best when the server camps in the middle of their side or when their partner drifts toward the center. Unlike the deep backhand shot, the outside corner opens up the middle of the court rather than closing it off. When a server has to chase a wide ball, the third shot has to travel a longer diagonal line to avoid the returner’s partner, which is a difficult shot to execute cleanly from more than 20 feet behind the baseline. It is also the exact ball a returner’s partner should be hunting to poach.
Going down the line instead of crosscourt is a read rather than a fixed rule, useful when a server commits to the middle early or slides toward a partner after every serve. The tradeoff is that a down the line ball travels over the highest part of the net and leaves less margin for error, so it works best as an occasional change of pace rather than a primary shot. A returner missing more than one in five of these attempts should go back to the safer deep backhand target.
Target Three: The Body Jam
The third target, aimed straight at the server’s dominant-side hip, is the most underused of the three in recreational play, and it is also the one that frustrates hard hitting players the most. A jam shot creates a split second decision problem: the server has to choose forehand or backhand on a ball arriving at their sternum, and neither option lets them extend their arms fully. The result is often a mishit, a chicken wing motion, or a third shot that finds the net.
The jam is especially effective against players who rely on heavy topspin drives: those shots need room to build paddle speed. Taking away that space removes the drive as an option entirely. A player who normally produces a 65 mile per hour drive will instead generate a soft, high ball once the return arrives at their hip, and that floating reply is an invitation for the returning side to step in and attack it out of the air. Adding slice to the jam makes it harder still, forcing a low, skidding ball that the server has to hit up and out of a difficult position near the waist.
A Drill That Turns Placement Into A Habit
Coaches recommend a simple scored drill using a partner and four cones to build return of serve placement into muscle memory rather than leaving it to guesswork mid-match. Set two cones in the deep backhand corner, roughly three feet in from both the baseline and the sideline, then set two more cones marking the deep outside corner on the same half of the court. A partner serves ten balls, all of which should be returned to the backhand zone, with one point scored for each ball landing past the service line inside the cones. The next ten serves go to the outside corner target, and the final ten are jam returns aimed at the partner’s dominant hip.
Tracking the score across all 30 attempts turns the drill into a measurable habit rather than a vague intention. Most players around the 3.5 skill level start out landing roughly 11 of 30 in the target zones. Reaching 22 out of 30 is the benchmark coaches point to as the moment return of serve placement stops being random and becomes something a player can rely on heading into the kitchen line already on balance instead of lunging into position.
Why This Fits Into A Bigger Coaching Trend
Structured, targets-and-numbers coaching content like this return of serve breakdown has become a bigger part of how recreational pickleball players improve as the sport’s player base keeps expanding nationally. The Sports and Fitness Industry Association has tracked pickleball as the fastest growing sport in the country for several years running, with tens of millions of Americans now playing at some level. A large share of those players picked up a paddle within the last two or three years, which has created steady demand for exactly this kind of specific, drill based instruction rather than general tips.
That shift shows up in what gets published and shared inside the sport’s coaching community: less generic advice about watching the ball, more targeted breakdowns built around a single shot, a specific court zone, and a way to measure whether a player is actually improving. The return of serve is a natural subject for that treatment: it is a shot every single point in pickleball starts with, and it is fully within a player’s control before the server has hit a single ball back.
Putting It Into Practice
None of these three targets requires better paddle speed or a bigger swing. They require a returner to pick a spot before the serve even happens and commit to it. Players who spend ten minutes twice a week running the cone drill, rather than an hour of casual warm-up rallying, are the ones coaches say see the fastest improvement in this part of their game. The next time a return of serve feels automatic and forgettable, that is the moment to slow down, pick one of the three targets, and turn pickleball’s one free swing into the shot that decides how the rest of the point gets played.
Sources:
- The Dink, “3 Pickleball Return of Serve Placements That Set Up the Point,” https://www.thedinkpickleball.com/pickleball-return-of-serve-placement-3-spots-that-win/
