Stop Faking Your Shots. Start Hiding Them.

We once wrote a post about how your opponent is telegraphing every shot they hit and you’re just not reading the memo. Several of you emailed to say it changed your game. Great. Congratulations.

Now turn the camera around.

You are also broadcasting. You have been broadcasting for two years. Every third shot you hit comes with a courtesy announcement roughly four-tenths of a second before contact, and the reason it hasn’t cost you much yet is that most of the people you play against aren’t looking. The moment you move up a level — a tournament bracket, a better open-play rotation, that one 4.5 who moved into the neighborhood — the people across the net start looking. And then all your best shots stop working, and you conclude that you need a new shot.

You don’t need a new shot. You need the same shot with the volume turned down.

Disguise Isn’t Acting. It’s Withholding.

Here’s where almost every rec player goes wrong: they think disguise means deception. Big theatrical wind-up like you’re going to crush it, then a delicate little drop. A dramatic shoulder turn for the crosscourt dink, then a flick down the line at the last second. Pump-fake, freeze them, win the point.

That almost never works, and the reason is timing. Your opponent isn’t watching your wind-up. They’re a split-step machine reading the last twelve to eighteen inches before contact, because that’s the only window that reliably predicts where a ball goes. A fake that happens a full second before contact gets overwritten by real information before it ever matters. You did an entire one-act play and they read the last line of the script.

Real disguise is the opposite of acting. It’s withholding — making the frames before contact look identical across every shot you might hit from that position, so the only useful information arrives at contact, when it’s too late to be useful.

Boring. Mechanical. Extremely effective.

The Three Platforms You Need

You don’t need to disguise every shot in the sport. You need three “platforms” — body positions from which multiple shots can emerge looking the same until the final instant.

Platform 1: The third shot. Drop, drive, and lob all have to come off the same setup. Here’s what most people actually do: for the drop, they sink their knees, shorten the take-back, and open the paddle face early. For the drive, they stand tall, take the paddle back a foot further, and close the face. These two setups look like different sports. A returner at the kitchen line reads it before you’ve even started forward.

Platform 2: The kitchen dink. Crosscourt dink, down-the-line dink, and the speed-up all have to share a base. Rec players give this one away with grip pressure and shoulder line — they square up early to the target and re-grip visibly when a flick is coming. If your opponent can see you change your hand, you’ve bought them 200 milliseconds, which at the kitchen line is an eternity.

Platform 3: The return. Deep drive, slice, and short return. Not the most valuable of the three, but the cheapest to fix, because you’re the only person on the court with unlimited time to set up.

Everything else — overheads, resets, ATPs — is either obvious by nature or hit under so much duress that disguise is a fantasy. Don’t spend attention there.

Your Five Broadcast Antennas

Self-audit time. These are the five signals that leak, roughly in order of how loudly they leak.

1. Take-back length. The single biggest tell in the sport. Long take-back means drive, short means drop, and everyone knows it. The fix is asymmetric: you don’t lengthen your drop take-back, you shorten your drive. Compact swings are better for you anyway — more repeatable, less late, and they hide the drop for free.

2. Body height at setup. Sinking into your legs early is the universal signal for “something soft is coming.” Get into your athletic base before you know what you’re hitting, and stay there for both. Bonus: your legs were supposed to be bent anyway.

3. Shoulder and hip line. If your chest is pointed crosscourt, you’re hitting crosscourt. Elite dinkers keep their shoulder line neutral and steer with the wrist and forearm in the last few inches. You don’t have to be elite to stop rotating your entire torso a full beat before you hit a dink.

4. Visible grip changes. If you switch to a firmer grip or roll to a slightly different bevel when you’re planning a speed-up, and you do it while the ball is still on their side, you have announced it. Learn to make the change during your forward move, or don’t make it at all.

5. Where you’re looking. Staring at the open court before you hit it. Yes, really. You do this. Everybody does this.

The Drill That Actually Fixes It: Late Calls

Here’s the one thing in this post to take to the courts this week, and it costs nothing.

Stand at the baseline. Partner feeds you returns from the kitchen. Normally you’d decide “drop” or “drive” as you’re moving to the ball — which is exactly why your body starts prepping the specific shot early. Instead: your partner calls it out loud as the ball crosses the net.

You physically cannot pre-commit, because you don’t know either. Your body is forced to build one neutral platform that can produce either outcome, and the only thing that changes is paddle speed and face angle in the last stretch of the swing. Do twenty of these and you will feel your setup collapse into a single shape. That shape is the whole skill.

Kitchen version: dink rallies where your partner calls “dink” or “speed up” a beat before your contact. Return version: partner calls “deep” or “short” as the serve leaves the server’s paddle.

Two things happen. First, your disguise improves without you thinking about disguise once. Second — and this is the actual gift — your shot tolerance improves, because you’ve stopped having a dedicated pre-built swing for every situation and started having one adaptable one. That’s a big chunk of what people mean when they say a player “has soft hands.”

The 90-Second Video Test

Prop a phone at the net post, sideways, and record a couple of games. Then scrub through your third shots and pause the frame where the ball is about three feet from your paddle. Show that frame to your partner and ask them to guess drop or drive.

If they’re right 8 out of 10 times, you’re broadcasting. If they’re at 6 out of 10, congratulations, you’re roughly a coin flip and you have functionally solved the problem — you do not need to get to zero. You need to get to uncertain. An opponent who is 60% confident cannot commit their body weight, and an opponent who cannot commit their body weight is late on everything.

That’s the whole prize. Not fooling anybody. Just denying them the head start.

The Honest Caveat

At 3.0 and low 3.5, disguise is close to worthless. The person across the net is not reading your shoulder line; they are trying to remember whose serve it is. Spend that practice hour on depth, on getting to the kitchen, on not popping up the fourth ball. Depth beats deception at every level below about 4.0, and it isn’t close.

Disguise starts paying rent right where your opponents start anticipating instead of reacting — around solid 4.0 — and it compounds from there. It’s also the rare skill that ages beautifully. You can lose a step every year for a decade and still be maddening to play against if nobody can tell what you’re about to do.

And there’s a version of this that goes too far. Players who obsess over hiding everything develop a stiff, over-managed swing that produces mediocre versions of both shots. The goal was never a perfect disguise. It was a common setup that lets you hit your normal, committed, aggressive shots without an announcement.

Shorten the backswing. Get low before you decide. Keep your chest quiet. Stop staring at the corner you’re about to hit.

Go dark.