Four Pros, Four Different Third Shots

Updated October 8, 2026

Four of the best players in the world were asked, in public, in the last eight months, what to hit on the third shot. They gave four different answers — and two of them flatly contradict each other on the same ball.

The third shot is the only shot in pickleball where the serving team is guaranteed to be behind. You are at the baseline, they are at the kitchen, and the point does not get better until you fix that. Every coaching site on the internet will tell you to hit a drop. Watch what the pros actually say, though, and the picture is much less settled.

What follows is what named professionals have said about this shot in 2026, who disagrees with whom, and how to decide which camp your own game belongs in. Nothing here is our invention — each position is attributed to the player who took it and the outlet that printed it.

The disagreement worth building your game around

Start with the ball almost nobody teaches well: the short return that lands in the transition zone rather than deep.

The conventional decision rule keys off court position. A short return means you get to step inside the baseline, so you have a shorter distance to cover on the way in — therefore drive it, take time away, and follow it. The Dink published exactly that framework in April 2026: a short return, in its words, means you “lean toward the drive,” while a deep return pushes you toward the drop.

Christian Alshon, a 2026 PPA gold medallist, says the opposite. Breaking down mixed doubles footage for The Dink in January 2026, his instruction on a short return was to drop it softly, not drive it. His reasoning: “A short return is usually low, and if you try to hit it hard, you’ll either overhit it out of bounds or pop it up.”

Both of those are defensible, and they are not a semantic difference. The conventional rule reads where you are standing. Alshon reads how high the ball is. On a short, low, skidding return those two inputs point in opposite directions, and you have to pick one.

Our read: Alshon is describing the failure mode most 3.5 and 4.0 players actually experience. A short return feels like an invitation, the swing gets big because the ball is close, and the contact point is below the net. That is how a drive ends up in the tape or sitting up at chest height for a player who is already at the kitchen. If you are not sure which rule applies to you, the height rule protects you from the more expensive mistake.

Ben Johns pushes it flat

Ben Johns, world No. 1 in men’s doubles, does not slice under the drop and does not roll topspin over it. He pushes through the back of the ball with a flat face, from a neutral grip, knees bent and torso upright, with the paddle kept inside his lead leg on the backswing so the motion never gets long.

The reason he gave The Dink in August 2026 is about the shape of the mistake, not the shape of the shot: being “a touch early or a touch late just means the ball lands a little deeper.”

That is the whole argument for the flat push, and it is a good one. A sliced drop that is mistimed pops up and you lose the point immediately. A flat push that is mistimed lands at the opponent’s feet or a foot past the kitchen line, which is survivable. He is not choosing the technique with the highest ceiling. He is choosing the one with the highest floor, which is what you want on a shot you hit thirty times a match.

Drive it at half pace, then drop the fifth

There is a whole school that solves the third shot by refusing to solve it.

Instructor Nicholas Wade, in a June 2026 Dink video, teaches a deliberate 50% drive rather than a drop: closed stance with the feet pointed toward the sideline, a compact backswing shaped like a small letter C, weight moving forward from the legs, loose wrist. The drive is not meant to win the point. It is meant to force a defensive pop-up so that the fifth shot is the easy drop, hit from mid-court instead of the baseline.

Johns himself has a shot built for exactly that follow-up, which he calls the shuffle drop — struck from behind the body, paddle head above the wrist, wrist locked in flexion, contacting the side of the ball rather than the back. It exists because a third-shot drive very often means the fifth shot is the one that has to be soft.

If you have ever felt that your drop is fine in drills and falls apart in games, this pattern is worth stealing. The problem is usually not the technique. It is being asked to hit a touch shot from 22 feet away while sprinting.

The hybrid: neither one nor the other

PPA and APP pro Richard Livornese Jr. offered a third answer in January 2026 — a topspin-heavy ball that keeps pace on it but lands at or just behind the kitchen line, hit from a low position with the body moving forward in a straight line. Not a drop, because it has pace. Not a drive, because it dips.

PPA pro Roscoe Bellamy describes something similar in his own list of shots to add in 2026: a ball at 40 to 50 per cent power that lands low and slow at the feet of opponents who are still moving forward. He needs a deep serve to make it work, because the shot depends on the returner being pushed back far enough that they are approaching rather than waiting.

This is the shot that has genuinely changed the most in the last two years, and it is the hardest of the three to learn. It also explains why players who come from tennis often look better on the third shot than their kitchen game says they should — a heavy dipping ball is a familiar object to them.

Jack Sock: there is no correct technique

Jack Sock, the former ATP top-ten player now on tour in pickleball, teaches two drops and declines to rank them. There is the scoop, his own preference — an upward brushing motion, compact, aimed at placement rather than pace, and explicitly “not a full ground stroke.” And there is the topspin groundstroke version, a half-swing brushing up and over the ball.

His governing rule, given to The Dink in August 2026, is the most useful sentence in this entire piece: “whatever gets the ball down and gets you moving forward is the right shot.”

On the drive, he is more prescriptive. Tighter swing rather than a full one, because repeatability under pressure beats maximum pace. Contact slightly in front of the body with the face slightly closed. Closed stance when there is time, open stance when the ball arrives fast. And a trajectory rule that applies to every third shot regardless of type: “The lower you keep the ball over the net, the harder it is for your opponents to do anything aggressive.”

He is also clear about when not to drive — out of position, short on time, or facing an awkward incoming ball. Which brings the argument back around to Alshon.

The drop is not dead, whatever the internet says

It is fashionable to claim the modern power game has killed the third-shot drop. The counting says otherwise. In a Major League Pickleball playoff match between the Dallas Flash and the New York Hustlers, tracked by the Bite Size Pickleball newsletter, the teams combined for 27 third-shot drops against 12 third-shot drives. At the top of the professional game, the drop is still better than a two-to-one favourite.

What has changed is that the drop is no longer the default. It is one of three or four options that pros pick between on every point, and the picking is the skill.

How to use this

You do not need four third shots. You need one you trust and a rule for when to abandon it.

• Build the flat push first. Johns’ argument about the forgiving failure mode is the right one for anyone below 4.5. A long drop is a playable ball; a popped drop is a lost point.
• Use ball height, not court position, as your trigger. If the ball is below the top of the net when you make contact, you have no room to swing up through it. Take the soft option regardless of where your feet are.
• If your drop collapses under match pressure, stop hitting it from the baseline. The half-pace drive into a fifth-shot drop is not a compromise. It is a documented professional pattern.
• Keep it low, whichever you hit. This is the only point all four agree on.

If you want to see the players named here in their current standings, our Player Rankings page carries the PPA world ranking and the independent singles ratings side by side. For the shot that comes immediately after this one, see our guide to what the kitchen actually is and why so many faults happen there. And if you are wondering whether your paddle is helping or hurting your drop, the numbers that matter are in swing weight and twist weight, not the static weight on the box.

Sources. Every quotation above was published by the outlet named beside it, transcribing video its own team recorded — we did not conduct these interviews. Christian Alshon, mixed doubles match analysis, The Dink, 29 January 2026. Ben Johns, push drop, The Dink, 13 August 2026; shuffle drop, The Dink newsletter, 2 December 2024. Third shot drop vs drive decision framework, The Dink, 28 April 2026. Nicholas Wade, drive-drop combination, The Dink, 10 June 2026. Richard Livornese Jr., four key strategies for 2026, The Dink, 27 January 2026. Roscoe Bellamy, six shot upgrades for 2026, The Dink, 13 January 2026. Jack Sock, three drop techniques, The Dink, 2 August 2026, and forehand drive guide, The Dink, 10 August 2026. Drop-versus-drive counts, Bite Size Pickleball, 6 November 2024. Pickleball Insiders is not affiliated with any player or outlet named here.