Opening your racket face for back corner shots

Nobody really likes playing in the back corners, especially when first learning to play squash. There’s barely space to move and you find yourself with your racket jammed in the corners and your face plastered against the back wall.

Taking the ball before the back wall

No matter how good you get, you will still struggle to do much with a shot that’s been hit well and is dying (bouncing twice) in the back corner. If you can see the ball isn’t going to come back off the back wall, you’ll need to intercept it reaches the back.

There’s not much room near the back corners so you won’t be able to use your normal swing, which means you need to get the ball out of the corner and to the back of the court using a different method. One thing to try is opening your racket face a lot more than you usually would. Of course, providing your grip is correct your racket face should already be open to some degree.

Now though have a go at rotating your forearm in an anti-clockwise direction so that more of your palm is facing the floor if you’re on the backhand side and rotate clockwise so more of the back of your hand faces the floor on the forehand side.”

This opens up your racket face further and allows you to apply more spin to the ball, which in this case is called ‘bite’. If you use more ‘bite’, you’ll find you can get very good length and often at decent power without the need for much backswing, which is particularly important when hitting a ball in the back corner.

In general, if you’re struggling to return a ball from the back, you should aim to play a straight lob shot. 

Have a go during the warm-up or if you can for a few minutes on your own just rotating that forearm and opening your grip more before playing your straight drives and see how it affects the shot. That extra ‘bite’ has quite an effect and is well worth mastering for those occasions when you’re forced deep without a lot of space.

You can also find out more about how to position yourself in the back corners in the post ‘Using the ‘wrong’ leg when the ball gets behind you’.