The Erne shot in pickleball: how to hit it, set it up, and defend it

The first time I saw an Erne in person I thought the player had broken a rule. They left the ground next to the kitchen, hung in the air over the non-volley zone, and punched a ball into the open court before landing past the sideline. It looked illegal. It was not.

The Erne is one of those shots that rewards patience and pattern reading more than athleticism. You do not need to jump high. You need to know when your opponent is about to hand you the chance, and you need to be honest about your footwork.

What an Erne actually is

An Erne is a volley taken at or near the sideline, with the player either jumping over the corner of the kitchen or running around it. The ball is contacted in the air, usually pretty high, and the player finishes outside the non-volley zone on the other side of the kitchen line.

The shot is named after Erne Perry, who started using it in tournament play in the early 2000s. It used to be considered a trick shot. It is now a standard tool at every level above 4.0.

Two things make it work. The first is that you are taking a dink that was meant for cross-court and turning it into a put-away from a few feet away. The second is that you are doing it from a spot your opponent is not tracking, because most players watch the body across from them, not the sideline.

Why it is legal

The USA Pickleball rulebook is specific about the non-volley zone. You cannot touch the kitchen, including its lines, while volleying the ball or as part of the motion of the volley. Your momentum cannot carry you into the kitchen after the volley either.

What the rule does not say is that you cannot be over the kitchen in the air. As long as your feet are not in contact with the non-volley zone before, during, or after the shot, you can hang above it as long as gravity allows. The Erne lives in that gap.

The legal version of the shot looks like this. You take off from outside the kitchen, on the side closest to the sideline. You contact the ball while airborne, possibly directly above the kitchen. You land outside the kitchen on the far side of the line, still outside the sideline, or back where you started.

If your foot clips the kitchen line on takeoff, it is a fault. If you land on the line, it is a fault. If your paddle, hat, or phone falls into the kitchen during the motion, it is a fault. For a full refresher on the non-volley zone language, the 2026 rules guide walks through the current wording.

The two ways to get there

There are two ways to take the shot. Players call them the jump Erne and the run-around Erne, and they solve different problems.

The jump Erne

You stand at the kitchen line in your normal ready position. You read that a dink is coming to your sideline. You push off your outside foot, jump over the corner of the kitchen, and contact the ball in the air. You land outside the sideline.

This version is faster and more explosive. It is also harder on your knees and harder to recover from if you read the dink wrong. If you commit and the ball goes the other way, you are airborne and out of position.

The run-around Erne

Same read, different feet. Instead of jumping, you take two quick steps around the corner of the kitchen, set up outside the sideline, and volley from there with both feet on the ground.

This is the version I use. It is slower to get to but easier to recover from, and the ball contact is cleaner because you are not fighting gravity at the same time. The downside is that you need a half-second more, which means the read has to be earlier and more confident.

How to set one up

The Erne is a reaction to a pattern, not a shot you call out of nowhere. The setup is the dink rally that comes before it.

What you are looking for is a partner you have trained to dink the same place over and over. Most rec players have one favorite dink target, usually the middle or the cross-court sideline. If your opponent on the right side of their court keeps dropping cross-court dinks to your right sideline, that is a pattern you can punish.

You can also induce the pattern. A few well-placed dinks to your opponent's backhand, low and tight to their feet, will produce a defensive cross-court reply more often than not. That reply is your Erne ball. For more on building those dink patterns, the dinking strategy guide goes deeper into shape and placement.

The trigger I watch for is paddle preparation. If my opponent's paddle is below the ball and angled cross-court, the dink is going where I expect. If their paddle face is square and high, they have options, and I do not commit.

The around-the-post alternative

Sometimes the ball that would have been an Erne is actually better as an ATP, the around-the-post shot. ATP is the cousin shot. Instead of jumping over the kitchen, you let the ball travel wide enough that you can run outside the sideline and hit it back across, around the net post, with no height requirement at all.

The rule of thumb I use is that if the ball is going to land short of the kitchen line, it is an Erne ball. If it is going to drift past the sideline and behind the post, it is an ATP. The ATP is lower risk, because there is no kitchen rule to break and no jump to land. The full mechanics are in the ATP guide.

Defending against an Erne

Once you have hit a few Ernes you start to see them coming the other way, and that is when defense matters.

The simplest defense is to stop dinking the same place. If your cross-court dink is predictable, change the angle. A dink down the middle, or to the inside foot of the player you suspect, removes the Erne entirely because the geometry no longer works. The kitchen corner is no longer near the ball.

The second defense is to watch your opponent's outside foot. If they shift weight to the foot closest to the sideline before you have even hit your dink, they are loading for an Erne. That is your cue to either change your target or hit a slightly higher dink that pulls them back from the line.

The third defense is to lob. If a player is leaning hard toward the sideline expecting an Erne ball, the space behind them is wide open. A controlled lob to the backhand corner punishes the cheat. I do not lob often, but I lob against Erne hunters.

Common mistakes

The most common mistake I see is players jumping the kitchen on a ball that was never going to be an Erne ball. They commit to the read too early, the dink lands somewhere else, and they are airborne over the kitchen with no shot to play. Patience is most of this.

The second mistake is landing on the kitchen line. The line is part of the kitchen. If you are not sure your jump clears it, do the run-around version instead. The court is bigger than people think, and the court dimensions guide has the actual numbers if you want to see how much room you have.

The third mistake is hitting the Erne too hard. From two feet away, a medium-pace volley to an open foot is unreturnable. You do not need to swing. You need to direct.

Where it fits in your game

I would not build a strategy around the Erne. I would build a dinking game that produces predictable balls, and I would let the Erne show up when the pattern hands it to me.

Most of my Ernes happen four or five dinks into a rally, after I have established that I am willing to keep dinking cross-court. The opponent settles into the rhythm, and then on a slightly soft cross-court reply I take the step or the jump. The shot wins the point because of everything that came before it, not because of the jump itself.