Patience Is the Skill: What a 70-Year-Old Dinker Taught Me About Power

I came to pickleball from racquetball, which meant I showed up with hard hands, no fear of pace, and exactly one idea about how to win: hit it harder than the other guy. Six months in, I thought I was pretty good. Won most of my open play games. Figured the rest of the room just hadn't caught up to me yet.

Then I got put across the net from a woman who had to be 70, moved about four feet the entire game, and never once hit the ball hard.

She beat me 11-2. I don't think her heart rate changed.

The wall that made me look stupid on purpose

Every ball I drove, she blocked back softer, right at my feet. Every time I tried to speed it up, she'd already reset it into the kitchen, and now I'm the one lunging, out of position, swinging at a ball that isn't where I thought it would be. It was like playing a wall that occasionally made me look stupid on purpose. She wasn't faster than me. She wasn't stronger. She just never once did the thing I wanted her to do.

I wanted pace. Pace was my whole game. So she gave me none, and my whole game had nothing to push against.

On the way out, she said one thing: "racquetball, right?" I never told her what I used to play. She read the whole thing off how I moved — the flat swing, the itch to end every point in two shots, the way I got antsy the longer a rally went. She'd probably beaten a hundred of me.

Patience isn't the backup plan. It's the plan.

Here's what that game rewired in me. I'd always believed pace was the answer — the only answer. Power was the skill, and everything soft was what you did when you couldn't hit hard. I had it exactly backwards.

You already know the feeling if you've ever run into a good dinker. The reset, the block, the ball dropped soft into the kitchen so you've got nothing to attack — that isn't playing scared. That's playing the geometry. A banger needs the ball to sit up. A good dinker simply never lets it, and then waits for the banger to get impatient and hand over the point. Which the banger always, eventually, does. I know, because I was the banger.

That's the whole trap. Power beats power. Patience beats power and patience.

It took me a year to stop being in a hurry. Some nights I still am — the old wiring doesn't fully leave. But I finally get what that 70-year-old knew in her sleep: the player willing to hit one more soft ball almost always wins the point.

Banger or dinker?

You're one of two things before you're anything else. You're the player who wants to end the point, or you're the player who's happy to extend it until the other guy cracks. A banger, or a dinker.

I spent my first six months as a banger who didn't know there was another option.

 

The Banger is for that player. Big hands, big swing, no patience — the one trying to end every rally in two shots, for better or worse. I wore it well.

The Dinker is for who she was, and who I eventually became. The wall. The reset. The one who never gives you the ball you want.

And if you want the exact energy of the woman who taught me all this — retired, unbothered, quietly beating people half her age — there's a shirt for that too.

So who was yours?

Play long enough and you get a version of that 70-year-old. The player who beat you so cleanly it changed how you think about the whole sport. Mine moved four feet and never broke a sweat. If yours rewired your game the way mine did, you already know exactly who I mean.

The whole lineup is over in the pickleball collection. Banger, dinker, or somewhere in between — one of them wears the way you play.