A good quality volley game in padel is essential to dominate the net play, keep your attacking position and pressure your opponents. A volley is defined as a ball that you hit before it bounces on the ground, just like a volley in tennis, or even a volley-kick in soccer. A good placed volley with solid depth and slice will give your opponents trouble to defend as well as move them around the court. It can often be a winning shot, or it might set you up for an easy next ball that you can kill with a smash.

The quality of the volleys can make a huge difference in similarly skilled opponents. They can have just as good groundstrokes, lobs and overheads but if the volleys are better they will keep the net more often and create dangerous situations for their opponents.

What makes a good padel volley?

• Depth towards the feet of the opponents, forcing bad returns
• Placement that moves your opponents around the court
• Slice that makes it bounce low after the glass

Volley technique fundamentals

The forehand and backhand volleys in padel have very different technical execution, but they share some common properties;

• High racket in preparation
• Hit the ball from high to low
• Compact preparation and execution
• Use of non-dominant hand
• Weight transfer in the footwork to give the ball pace

Difference between a poor volley and a great volley

The difference between a poorly executed volley and a great volley is huge. A bad volley will make it easy for your opponents to play a high quality lob and this will cause you to lose your attacking net position. A high quality volley will force your opponents to struggle and not be able to lob you properly. A rule of thumb in padel is to only play a lob in defense on easy shots, ensuring that you can produce a high quality lob. If you keep attacking with high quality volleys your opponents will never be able to lob, or if they lob they are likely to lob poorly or even miss the shot.

The upside of the volley is that it does not take a lot of time to improve. 3-5 sessions with a good coach, focusing on your technique can make massive improvements to your volley game. You will of course need more training over time to master the volley, but just improving it will make a massive difference in your games.

See below for individual guides/articles on the backhand and forehand volley specifically. We have also hand picked some videos from our favorite padel Youtube channels covering volleys.