How To Beat BANGERS In Pickleball (Hard-Hitting Players)

How often do you find yourself playing a banger or someone who hits super hard in every shot? As you probably know, these types of players can be pretty frustrating. Well, in this video, I'm gonna show you the strategy and techniques that you can use to beat these players every single time. You see, the reason that high-level players are never bangers is because if you know the information that I'm about to go through, the banger strategy simply doesn't work. And if you're new to our channel, make sure to subscribe so that you see all of our new videos. All you gotta do is hit the subscribe and the bell button and you're ready to go. So the first step to beat bangers is to know the strategy to use against them. You can't play them like you play normal players, so certain things will have to change. So when you're playing bangers, usually it looks something like this. Essentially, they try to hit every ball super hard, and usually they actually try to win from the back. Sometimes they even rush forward and try to crush balls at you from closer to the kitchen. So what's the strategy though to beat these types of players? Rule number one is that you wanna do whatever you can to keep them back. So this is what you don't want to happen. You don't wanna give them the ability to move forward. And the way that you give them that ability is by giving them those little floater shots like I just did. So they kinda sit up and they give your opponent the ability to go to the kitchen, take balls higher out of the air. The way that you do keep them back is with penetrating low volleys. So those look more like this. You don't need to hit the ball super hard, but you wanna keep it low at a good enough pace where they can't intercept the ball out of the air. Let me show you how that looks. And with these low penetrating volleys, you wanna have very defined targets. Where you wanna aim is at the depth of your opponent's feet out to their sides. So not right at their feet, but actually out to their wings more in these areas because that keeps the ball out of their strike zone and makes it more difficult for them to move forward through their shots. So as they start to move forward, you'll see the targets move with them. If I was to go deep while they're standing in the middle, like this, it's actually gonna be a very easy volley for them. So you wanna make sure that your targets move forward with your opponents. And guys, this strategy actually applies in any pick-a-ball game, but it's especially important when you're playing against bangers. All right, let's see an example. So you see there, Drew started trying to come in with his hard drive, but I was able to keep the ball nice and low right at his feet, and I went out wide a little bit, and then I took my second volley down the middle, so outside of his strike zone, which made a miss. To be able to hit these types of penetrating volleys, you need to understand the proper technique, which I'll cover. But first, I have to show you how to counter-attack. So to counter-attack means to attack off of your opponent's attack. And when you're playing bangers, this is the way that you're gonna win the point a lot of the time. So when a banger hits a really low hard drive, maybe around this height, it's actually pretty hard to be aggressive and win the point. So that's where you're gonna use those deeper volleys, where you just try to keep them back. But every once in a while, it'll actually give you a higher, easier one. Here is where you need to counter-attack. So if the banger gives you a ball that's a little higher and slower, you can actually be slightly more aggressive and try to get your opponents off balance by aiming for open sections of the court. Do you see there, the second I got the higher drive, which was on the second shot, I was able to put a little bit more pace behind the ball, which let me take control of the point. And if you're playing bangers and they make it up to the kitchen or closer to the kitchen, the counter-attack becomes especially important. Because if they're trying to be aggressive up here and I give them an easy shot, they can kill it, right? So I need to try my best to take their hard balls and be aggressive on them. So a good counter-attack at the kitchen might look something like that. The goal when you have the counter-attack is simple. You don't have that much time to think about where to aim the ball. So all you wanna think about is one, getting the ball low. If it's high, you can actually go at your opponent's feet, but the lower, the better. And two, aiming for open sections of the court, like down the middle. They leave the line open, you can go there. You can go to the right shoulder, right hip of your opponents. What you don't wanna do though is just give them an easy shot that they can kill. That's what they want. So you'll see as bangers start to move forward, you need to be really good with your counter-attacks or it's gonna be super easy for them to win by being aggressive. There's some additional strategies that you also have to know, but first I need to show you how to use the right technique so you can implement all the strategies that we just went over. You see, a lot of people feel they can't beat bangers because they don't have the reaction time to respond to their hard shots. And it's not because you don't have the reaction time, it's because you're probably not doing one of the things I'm about to show you in terms of your technique. So the first aspect to improving your technique and the number one way to improve your reaction time is focusing on having a better ready position. So ready position is how we wait for the ball. We don't wanna wait for the ball just standing like this, right? This is not the optimal position to be in to react quickly. What you wanna do is you wanna have your paddle up, okay? So you don't want your paddle to be hanging down. You want the tip of your paddle to be right below the height of your head, okay? So right about here, probably just above the height of the net, okay? A lot of people like to lean it towards the left because this gives them the ability to go to their backhand faster, which you should be using to cover your body. So you shouldn't be covering your body with the forehand, you should be covering your body with a backhand. So before every shot in pickleball, or in between every shot, you wanna have your hands like this, out in front, ready to go. Your legs are also part of your ready position. So you don't wanna be standing straight up like this. You wanna have a relatively wide base, so maybe shoulder width apart with your legs, slightly bent knees, and you wanna be on your toes. This gives you the ability to move side to side better, okay, because the banger is not always gonna hit the ball right to you. In fact, they're probably gonna try to hit the ball away from you. So a lot of the time, you need to actually explode in one direction quickly so that you can react to their shots. Let's see some examples. So I'm always waiting like this for every shot. And you'll see after each volley, I go back to my ready position. So a lot of players, what they do, is they hit one good one, and then they just go back to being like this, right? It's really important that after you hit a good volley, you go back to this ready position, because bangers are unpredictable and need to be ready for whatever they throw at you throughout the point. The second aspect of our technique that we need to focus on is how tight we're holding the paddle. So if you've watched pickleball videos on YouTube before, you might've heard that you wanna keep a loose wrist. And this is true for most of our shots, our drop, our dinks, but when your opponent is hitting hard drives at you, and you're trying to hit low penetrating volleys, a lot of the time you actually want to keep a firmer wrist. What this does is it gives your paddle stability and it lets you use their power against them. So you'll see when Drew's hitting the ball hard, it's a lot easier for me to have control when I have that firmer wrist. If I use a loose wrist here, there's a lot higher chance that I'll miss hit the ball. And I'm sure if you've played bangers, you've had that feeling before where you kind of miss the center of the paddle and the ball goes into the net or it doesn't go where you want it. So having that firm wrist actually makes that a lot less likely to happen. And when you have that firm wrist, you also want to make sure you're taking a very compact swing. So if they're hitting hard, you don't need to take a giant backswing and a big follow through to get power off their shots. The reason we actually take this big backswing is to generate our own power. So you'll see I don't really take much of a backswing or follow through at all. I'm just blocking his shot back and I still get a pretty good amount of power from that. Big backswings like that against bangers are a recipe for just mistiming the ball. Like you might get a good one every once in a while, but a lot of the time you're gonna shank it, you're gonna miss the net, you might miss long. So firm wrist, compact swing, and you're good to go. And with your feet, like I said, you want to always be waiting with that low wider base so that you can react and explode in any direction. But a really important thing to keep in mind is that when you get off balance, let's say they move you out to the right like this, it's really important that you recover fast and get back to this position. I see so many players at the 3-0 to 4-0 level that look really good before their first volley, and then they get tangled up after their next volley and they're not ready for the next shot to come from the banger. They're off balance and they miss. So you tell me which of these looks better. You'll see in the second example, when I move out to the side here, I get back quickly and I'm ready for that next shot. In the first example, I had a pretty good first volley, but I'm just not ready for that next shot. So always recover quickly, right behind the kitchen line, get back into that nice ready position. So having the right technique is a necessity to beating bangers. Now though, I wanna go over some high IQ, more advanced strategies that you can use to outsmart these types of players. After that, I'm gonna show you some examples of what this all looks like in real time. So there's five main high IQ strategies that you need to know. This section is gonna be quick, so make sure you pay close attention. At number five, bangers are streaky, so you have to play the odds. A lot of the time when you're playing against a banger, they're just gonna come up with a crazy shot or do something really awesome or win three points in a row, which is fine. But if you play the strategy that I'm going over right now, they'll still win in the long run. So don't let it discourage you when bangers string points together. At number four, you need to be a good judge of whether or not the banger shots are gonna fly long. This one is huge, because I see so many players at the 3-0 to 4-0 level messing this up. If a banger hits a really hard shot and it's above the height of your shoulder in terms of where you're gonna make contact with it, there's a 99% chance the ball is gonna go way, way out. And if you hit these shots, they're probably going really hard. So it might be challenging to hit a good ball off of them. So you need to be a good judge and recognize they're gonna go long and let them go. Just get out of the way and let the ball fly. So let's test it out. Drew's gonna go for a drive around the height of my head and we'll see where it lands. That ball went about five feet long. So I guarantee you've been in points before where you get a ball just like that and you don't even realize that it could be going long and you hit it. Maybe you hit a good shot on it. Maybe you hit a short ball and you let them win the point. The moral of the story is that a lot of the time when a banger hits a ball that's a drive that's high, you gotta let it fly. Number three is that if a banger is doing really well and you're having a hard time responding to their shots, instead of repeatedly going back to them and letting them do their thing, what you can do is actually just shift to their partner. So odds are their partner isn't gonna be playing as well as them in that moment and it'll let you get your rhythm back and let your team get the momentum back. Number two is that when you're playing a banger, you don't wanna be a banger too. So a lot of the time when I see my students playing bangers, they just start banging with them, right? And a lot of the time you need to counter attack so it makes sense to go hard, but just because you're playing a banger doesn't mean that you should leave the standard strategy of pickleball. If you don't know the standard strategy of pickleball, we just made a full video on it. And the number one thing guys is that when you're playing a banger, you need to make sure that you get in quickly off of your return. So you wanna get to the kitchen as fast as you can and get into your nice ready position. If you're playing a banger and you return and you get caught up in this area, they're just gonna hit it right at you super hard and you're out of position and it's a lot easier for them to get it at your feet. So the second you hit your return, you should get in quickly and get into this position. So you saw I jumped into that position. I jump into this position with my paddle up, ready for them to hit the ball at me. I know that was a lot of info guys, but now we're gonna go through some examples that tie everything together. So in these examples, me and my partner Aria are going to be playing against our designated bangers here, Drew and Dar. There guys, my ready position was low. I wasn't really ready for that first drive since it was our first example, but I got a little bit lucky, hit the ball late and it actually went off the court for a winner. So there's an example where a banger gets a little bit lucky and there's not really anything you can do. His ball hit the net cord and it's pretty tough to react that quickly to the change in the ball's trajectory. So that's where we just need to keep a level head and keep playing our strategy. That was a good example of me using my low volleys right at their feet, which made it hard for them to come forward. And when I got that little bit higher ball, I was aggressive and won the point. There, I got in a little bit slow on my return, which made my first volley, as you saw, tougher. Luckily though, we were good in our counterattacks and we were able to win that point. In that point guys, the point got a little hectic, but luckily I stayed in good enough balance where I could use my counterattacks to win. So that was an example, guys, of what not to do. Drew hit a good drive, I popped it up, which gave him the ability to crash. There, my first volley wasn't the greatest, but luckily on my next one, I was able to counterattack right at Drew's feet, a little bit off to his side, which got us the point. If you can do everything that we just went through, bangers are gonna have a really hard time beating you. But to beat a banger, you still need to understand the standard strategy that you can use to beat anyone. I go over that in this next video.