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 faults, 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 how fast your hand is moving through contact and reports it as hand speed, in torso-lengths per second. For dinks and drops, a lower read is usually the better one — that's the honest tell of a push. A high read on a dink is a hit wearing a dink's clothes, and it's the number most likely to explain a ball that keeps sitting up.
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 this metric is literally measuring the peak, and for a dink you want that peak modest. (Serves are the exception — there, some upward pace is fine.)
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 hand-speed read settle down. In the soft game, calm hands are the whole art — slow the hand, and the pop-ups turn back into dinks.