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.

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.