A UBC Professor and local Boeing engineer are working with their local pickleball school on a scientific approach to the third shot drop.
The “third shot drop” has taken on an almost mythological status in pickleball. There are companies named after the shot. YouTube is rammed with contradictory information about THE PERFECT THIRD SHOT. What’s the apex? How much pace? How to adjust for distance, angle, wind? What kind of spin? For new players, it can feel like voodoo.
And so Dr. Douw Steyn, a professor of Atmospheric Sciences at UBC didn’t just set out to learn and perfect his own drop, he sought to understand what actually makes an optimal third shot drop.
He pored through research papers about the aerodynamics of soccer balls, golf balls, tennis balls, baseballs—there were models for almost every sport. Except pickleball.
At the Jericho Hill Pickleball School, Steyn met Boeing engineer Troy Mithrush and economist Andre Plourde. Mithrush and Plourde had been doing research in the JHPS statistics department. They helped Steyn hone his model.
They’d sneak in for the last few minutes of the Sunday Pickleball Accelerator clinic at Wesbrook Community Centre. (Steyn’s initial idea was to put a spinning pickleball in a wind tunnel.) Players in the clinic would hit different “shapes” of balls. Mithrush used a Canon r6, shooting at 120 fps to record the ball flight, then used particle-image velocimetry (PIV) to extract speed, angle and time of the trajectory data from the frames. Steyn’s model evolved over the winter and spring.
We’re pleased to publish the final draft of their paper here.
