Solidity: The Paddle Attribute Ben Johns Rates Alongside Spin — And Why Understanding It Will Change How You Analyse Every Miss

Ben Johns — widely considered the greatest pickleball player of all time — recently described what he looks for most in a paddle. His answer wasn’t spin. It wasn’t sweet spot size. It was a concept most recreational players wouldn’t recognise if they saw it on a spec sheet.

He calls it solidity.

The concept is about what happens when you don’t hit the centre of the paddle. Specifically: how much does ball speed drop off when contact moves from the middle to the edge? The smaller that drop, the more solid the paddle. The more solid the paddle, the more consistent your shot is regardless of where on the face you actually made contact.

Johns places solidity right alongside spin as his most important paddle attribute — and above sweet spot size entirely. That ranking tells you something about how elite players think about contact that most recreational players simply don’t.

Solidity Is Not Sweet Spot. They Are Different Things.

This is the distinction that trips most players up.

Sweet spot is a zone — the area where contact produces optimal feel and power. A large sweet spot means a larger forgiving area in the middle of the paddle. Most paddle marketing leads with this.

Solidity is different. Solidity describes what happens outside that zone. A paddle with excellent solidity minimises the penalty for imperfect contact across the entire face, not just in one central area. Two paddles can have identical sweet spot size and completely different solidity ratings, depending on how sharply performance drops off toward the edges.

Johns has been clear about this: no paddle has ever delivered the same ball speed on an edge hit as on a centre hit. The goal is to get as close to that as possible — to minimise the disparity. To put rough numbers on it: a high-solidity paddle might lose 8–12% of ball speed on an edge hit compared to a centre hit. A low-solidity paddle can drop 25–35%. That gap is large enough to turn a well-struck drive into a net miss — even when the swing was identical.

Tennis players coming from the game may recognise a version of this idea. Off-centre contact costing ball speed is something any experienced tennis player has felt. But in tennis, the concept lives under different terms — sweet spot size, plow-through, off-centre stability — and no single word ties them together cleanly. Johns’ contribution is giving it a name and a precise definition: not how it feels, but the measurable disparity in outbound velocity between centre and edge contact. That specificity is what makes solidity useful as a diagnostic tool rather than just a vague sense that some paddles feel better than others.

“Nobody’s going to hit the ball in the middle of the paddle every time. That’s just not going to happen. I certainly don’t do it.” — Ben Johns

That’s not modesty. It’s an honest account of what actually happens during competitive pickleball at every level — and it reframes what paddle performance should actually be evaluated on.

The Misdiagnosis That’s Costing You Points

When a shot goes short, the instinct is immediate: I didn’t hit it hard enough. So the next swing is bigger. More aggressive. And when that also clips the net, the adjustment is more power still.

Johns addressed this directly. Going short is often not a power problem. It’s a contact location problem. Those two things look identical from the outside but require completely different corrections.

A player who swings harder to fix a contact location problem isn’t correcting anything. They’re adding force to a swing that was already mislocated. The drive that went short because it caught the lower outside edge of the paddle needed better contact, not a bigger swing. Adding pace to that pattern doesn’t fix it — it just produces the same miss faster.

Johns put it plainly: if he misses short, he wants to know whether it was a power decision or a contact location problem. A high-solidity paddle gives him that clarity. If he found the face and the ball went short, the answer is power. If the paddle has poor solidity, a short miss could mean anything — and the feedback loop breaks down entirely.

That diagnostic clarity is what he’s actually buying when he prioritises solidity.

What This Means for Your Game

Run a three-question check between points. Next time you miss short, before you change anything: Did I find the centre of the face? Did the paddle feel dead or twist on contact? Did I need more power, or did I simply miss the face? If the answer to the third question is genuinely “more power,” adjust. If you’re not sure about the first two, the answer is almost certainly not a bigger swing.

Treat contact location as a skill in its own right. Swing mechanics get enormous attention in coaching. Contact location gets almost none. But a technically sound swing that catches the edge consistently is less reliable than a simpler swing that finds the centre. Centring contact is trainable — and for most recreational players, it has more room to improve than pure swing mechanics do.

Reconsider what you’re evaluating when you choose a paddle. Spin ratings and sweet spot size dominate every paddle review. Solidity rarely comes up because it’s harder to market and there’s no standard spec printed on the box. A simple in-shop test: drop a ball from shoulder height onto the dead centre of the face, then again about an inch from the edge. Listen to the pitch change and watch the rebound height. The smaller the difference between the two, the more solid the paddle. It won’t give you a number, but it gives you a comparison — and that’s enough to separate paddles that punish edge contact from ones that don’t.

Johns summed up his preference simply: he likes his miss-hits to go over. When solidity is high, a miss that goes short tells him exactly what happened — he chose the wrong power level. That’s a correctable decision. A contact location problem misread as a power problem is a correction that never actually gets made.

The Physics Behind the Feel

Why does contact location affect ball speed so significantly? Off-centre hits cause the paddle to twist at impact, bleeding energy away from the ball rather than transferring it cleanly. The further from centre the contact point, the more rotational force works against the shot rather than driving it forward. Solidity — through core density, thickness, and edge construction — is partly about how well a paddle resists that twist and maintains clean energy transfer across the full face.

The Science of Pickleball series examines contact mechanics and ball speed physics in more depth. If you want the underlying model, it’s in there.