Bangers Aren't Ruining Pickleball. You Just Can't Handle the Pace.

There’s a certain type of player who treats “banger” like a slur. Someone hits the ball hard, beats them, and the response is a sigh about how that guy is “ruining the game” and “doesn’t even know how to dink.”

Cool. He also just beat you. Maybe sit with that one.

The dink-supremacy thing has gone too far

Somewhere along the way the soft game got moralized. Dinking became the “right” way to play and hitting hard became cheating-adjacent. And look — I love the soft game. The kitchen battle is the best part of pickleball. But the idea that pace is cheap or lazy is just cope from people who haven’t built a defense yet.

Hitting hard, on target, under control is a skill. Speeding up the right ball at the right time is a skill. Plenty of “bangers” have better hands than the dinkers complaining about them — they just also have a gear the dinkers don’t.

If a banger keeps beating you, here’s the actual problem

It’s your hands and your defense, not their manners. The good news is this is very fixable, and fixing it makes you better against everyone, not just bangers:

• Get your paddle up and out front. Most people who get torched by pace are starting with the paddle down by their hip. The ball’s gone before they move. Live in ready position at the line.
• Reset, don’t swing back. You don’t have to win the bang with a bigger bang. Soft hands, absorb it, drop it back into the kitchen. A banger with no easy put-away gets bored and starts missing.
• Back off the line a half step against a known banger. Buys you reaction time without giving up much.
• Learn to block to a target, not just block it back to their paddle.

Do that and the banger stops being scary. That’s the whole secret. You don’t beat pace by complaining about it, you beat it by not flinching.

The mental game against a banger

One thing that doesn’t get talked about enough: bangers win a lot of points before the ball is even hit. If you tighten up when someone’s smashing the ball, your dinks get tentative, your resets go long, and you start trying to match power instead of using your game. That panic is the actual weapon.

The players who handle pace best at the rec level aren’t necessarily faster — they’re calmer. They’ve accepted that they’re going to miss some blocks and that’s fine. The ones who get torched are the ones treating every hard ball like a personal affront and swinging back emotionally.

So if a banger is in your head, that’s the first thing to fix. Let go of the idea that you need to win each individual shot. Block it, absorb it, put it somewhere difficult, and grind. The banger who can’t get a short return or a put-away eventually starts making mistakes. Patience is the actual counter — not trying to out-hit them.

What bangers are actually good at (and what you can steal)

There’s something worth borrowing from the bang-it-hard approach before you go full soft-game purist: pace has legitimate value, and most rec players use it far too rarely.

If you only ever dink and reset, you’re predictable. A controlled speed-up at the right moment — when your opponent’s paddle is low, when they’ve leaned forward expecting a dink, when there’s an open hip — wins you points that a perfect dink never would. The issue with recreational bangers isn’t that they use pace. It’s that they use it indiscriminately, regardless of what the situation calls for.

The answer isn’t to be a dinker who never speeds it up. It’s to be a player who hits hard when the ball asks for it, and soft when the situation requires it. The dinker-vs-banger frame is a false choice. The best rec players live in both worlds.

Where the complaint is fair

I’ll give the dinkers one thing. There’s a specific guy — overhead-happy, slams every ball within reach including the ones six inches over the net at his 70-year-old opponent in casual open play. That’s not strategy, that’s just bad court manners, and read-the-room is a real skill too. Drilling a sitter at someone’s face in a friendly game makes you the problem.

But that’s an etiquette issue, not a “banging is bad pickleball” issue. Hard, controlled, well-chosen pace is completely legitimate. Being a jerk about it is the part to drop.

The honest version

The best players aren’t dinkers or bangers. They’re both. They’ll soft-game you to death for nine shots and then put a ball through you the instant you give them a floater. The whole “dinkers vs bangers” war is mostly intermediate players picking a team because doing both is hard.

Pick both. Be annoying to play in every way.

So no, the bangers aren’t ruining anything. They’re just exposing a hole in your game that was always there. Patch the hole and suddenly they’re not a problem — they’re free points.

Now go ahead and tell me how dinking is the real skill. I’ll be at the line with my paddle up.