A dink has exactly one job: to stay low and force your opponent to hit up. When yours keeps floating up instead (sitting at chest height, begging to be smashed) the instinct is to think you aimed too high. Usually you didn't. You hit too hard. The dink popping up is almost always a fast-hands dink, and the soft game is a slow-hands game.
Slow hands, on purpose
This is the one place in racquet-and-paddle sports where slower is genuinely better, and it trips up every player who came from tennis or brought an athlete's instinct to swing. A dink is a push, not a hit. The hand travels slowly, the shoulder does the gentle lifting, and the ball dies just over the net. Add speed and physics does the rest: a faster hand puts more energy into the ball, and that energy has to go somewhere, so the ball climbs.
Fast hands also hide a second problem: they're usually wristy. A hand that whips through contact is almost always a hand being flicked by the wrist rather than pushed by the shoulder, which is why fast-hands dinks are streaky as well as high. Slow the hand down and you often fix the wrist at the same time: two mistakes, one cue.
The mental shift that helps most: stop trying to hit the dink and start trying to place it. Placement is a slow, deliberate motion. Aim it into the kitchen like you're setting a glass down on a table, not swatting a fly.
What CoachVision measures
CoachVision reads flick vs push, how much of your paddle's motion into contact came from the wrist rather than the arm and shoulder, alongside your take-back size and how far in front of your body you made contact. A dink that pops is usually a wristy dink off a long take-back, and those two reads are where it shows up.
We used to publish a hand-speed number here too. We took it out: on real footage it read 2.1 to 8.1 torso-lengths per second across four clips of genuine kitchen dinks, which is most of the range we had bands for. A number that wide isn't a measurement, so we stopped printing it.
An honest note on the reading: the app anchors "contact" on the fastest moment of your hand, the speed peak, because the true paddle-ball collision is too quick for a phone camera to catch. So the flick share and the contact point are both read at that moment, not at the real strike.
The drill: Kitchen-Line Cross-Court Dinks
Slow hands are built by playing dinks with a target and a consequence. With a partner, cross-court dinks only, every ball into the kitchen, and add the rule that any ball your partner can take above the net height is a point against you. That single rule turns "keep it low" from a wish into the way you win the game.
Play to twenty. You'll find yourself naturally taking pace off, pushing slower, placing instead of hitting, because a slow, low push is the only thing that keeps winning.
Film a few dinks from the sideline and watch your take-back compactness and lift reads settle down. In the soft game, calm hands are the whole art: slow the hand, and the pop-ups turn back into dinks.