offhand observation: I prefer both playing and, if i'm gonna, watching "bad" pickel ball. once the game gets optimized it turns into lots of dinks in the kitchen until someone makes a mistake, rather than longer, more interesting shots.
pickle ball is one of the sports in the United States where chesterton's quote still applies:
> "It is a good sign in a nation when such things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is a bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on. "
"Pro" pickleball is quite possibly the most boring sport I've ever seen. Hope to (deity of your choice) that this is a fad that dies out.
The game has already been optimized. It's tap-tap-tap and winner. There's very little room for tactical adjustments, no room whatsoever for different styles of play (unlike tennis). The ball doesn't move that quickly and apparently one isn't allowed to even hit sidespin on their serve.
The sport is quite literally jumbo ping pong for seniors who can't move without the speed or spin of ping pong. Somehow it's caught on to the masses. I don't get it. It's as if someone intentionally took the worst elements of every major racquet sport and turned it into a game.
I believe the core reason for popularity of it is that literally anyone can play it. this is also why - as you stated - “pro” makes no sense and it is boring as shit.
Funny, as a casual player starting out, dinking was a skill I really wanted to gain proficiency in. But now most of my opponents just drive or overhead as hard as they can, which I think is very un-fun to play against. The points are short and there's a lot of randomness. And the best counterplay is to just do what they're doing.
1) It's loud, a lot louder than tennis. Tennis balls have felt, and tennis racquet strings have some flexibility, whereas pickleball uses a hard paddle and an unpadded ball. People who live near courts complain about the noise from pickleball.
2) Pickleball is coming to monopolize the local courts, making them inaccessible by tennis players.
3) Pickleball involves less running and physical fitness than tennis.
Point 1 is absolutely a downside, at least for people near the court. The city decided that putting a pickleball court across the street from my building would be a great idea, and now my summers are filled with the pock-pock-pock of pickleball. From 9am to 8pm nearly every day that is nice. Also, since we cannot have nice things / people are assholes, they had to come back and put up an 8 foot tall fence because people were simply stepping over the shorter fence and playing until after midnight.
> Point 2 is neither here nor there. If all those people were playing tennis instead, the courts would be equally inaccessible.
The problem is that the courts were built only for tennis, often many decades ago. Now pickleball has adopted the same courts rather than using different courts of its own, so there are two sports competing for the same existing volume of courts. And since the tennis courts already exist, there's a lot less incentive and motivation for communities to spend money and other resources, such as land, building brand new courts to handle the new pickleball players.
Imagine if tennis and basketball used the same courts; that would be a major problem.
> Point 3 could be a positive!
Not in one of the most obese countries in the world.
Actually I think it’s an upside even then. It’s a lot easier for someone who’s out of shape to start trying pickleball compared to a lot of sports since you don’t need to run as long. Once someone starts to get in shape, they can still get plenty of exercise playing pickleball (I’ve even seen several people at my local court using weighted vests to make the game more of a workout).
> Not in one of the most obese countries in the world.
Obesity is primarily resolved through diet, not through exercise. It is exceedingly difficult to lose weight through cardio. Not only do calories take a drastically greater amount of effort to burn than to consume, but exercise directly increases hunger.
> Imagine if tennis and basketball used the same courts; that would be a major problem.
It would only be a problem if you closed half the courts. Otherwise it would better spread the load over the existing courts.
And if twice as many people started wanting to play tennis it would be the same problem as if they want to play Pickleball on tennis courts. It's just gatekeeping tennis courts.
>2) Pickleball is coming to monopolize the local courts, making them inaccessible by tennis players.
I'm not a player of either, but from walking around the courts at our city park, I'd say (in our area at least) it is the opposite: Tennis is making pickleball courts inaccessible to pickleball players. It is NOT uncommon to see the 4 pickleball courts packed, and 1 or both of the tennis courts empty. Our neighborhood tennis courts are basically never used, they are tennis only.
It's nice (admittedly, not living directly adjacent to courts) to see them used by pickleball rather than just sitting there idle.
Point 1 above does seem to be a real problem. I gather there are ball/racket combinations that can help, and also curtain solutions that can help?
The same way that pickleball is making the tennis courts inaccessible (the statement I was replying to). Specifically in the case I'm talking about, the park used to have 4 tennis courts, 2 of them were converted into 4 pickleball courts. There's a serious case to be made, from casual observation, that the city should have converted 3 or even 4 of the tennis courts into 6 or 8 pickleball courts, given that there is almost always 100% pickleball court penetration when we're out walking. Not saying we should do away with the tennis courts, I'm just saying there's a case for it.
Also tennis has some of the best aesthetics of any amateur sport where pickleball is somehow more sexless than ping pong. It's fun tho. Truly a game for our time.
Indeed, and a lot of the time the more casual players often bring stereos or speakers to the courts and blast music.
It's incredibly annoying. A park near me tore up one tennis court and erected 2 pickle courts, and the people that play on those pickle courts are loud and obnoxious and blast music all the time.
Note: I am a lifelong tennis player. I detest pickleball. Is it great to see new people playing a sport and getting active? Yes. Does it have to come at the expense of proper etiquette of sports that have been around much longer? No, but it currently is.
Pickleball makes way more sense than tennis as a tax-funded public good. It's a much more accessible game, and you can fit 16 players in a space that would most often be consumed by 2 playing tennis.
And pickleball is popular enough in my city that you'll fill those courts.
> Pickleball makes way more sense than tennis as a tax-funded public good.
To some who live nearby, it's a public nuisance rather than a public good, but in any case nobody is saying build more tennis courts. They already exist from past investment. The problem is when the existing tennis courts are cannibalized. If pickleball is worth public investment, they can build new courts. We shouldn't have to sacrifice one for the other.
Loud grunting is not pervasive in tennis, especially not in amateur tennis. You may hear it more in professional tennis, because it's a specific offensive technique that seemed to have originated from famous trainer Nick Bolletteri, a number of whose students such as Monica Seles and Maria Sharapova were among the loudest grunters on the pro tours. Many consider the exaggerated grunting to be a form of cheating and wish that the existing tennis "hindrance" rule were called against it much more often in professional matches.
One reason pickleball is interesting is because it factors out physical advantages more than most other sports. You can get wrecked by a 9yo and a 70yo in consecutive games.
I met Joel Prichard several times as a kid… grew up in a poor neighborhood in the 1980s where we played Pickleball on the playground and in PE class… when I first started hearing about this new craze (from friends in the Midwest!), I absolutely lost my mind - you mean that game we played in the ghetto when we weren’t playing tackle football in the streets? I’d love to know the story of how it got from Bainbridge Island to my poor neighborhood, and at the time Joel was just the Lt. Governor, I never made the connection to Pickleball until adulthood.
My pet theory is that the "improved" technology of tennis rackets paved the way for pickleball.
"New" (to me, I'm 48 and played varsity in high-school) tennis rackets are actually now TOO light and the strings are too grippy, allowing for just stupid levels of spin and baseline control usually reserved for the pros. This severely reduces net play and increases a whole lot of court running.
I don't understand anything about this sport except for that it's "controlled" by that a Texas billionaire and now I finally comprehend how sports are businesses.
Ice hockey players famously play a lot of golf in the summer, so much so that when a team gets knocked out of the playoffs people accuse them of throwing the game so they can get back to their golf.
Never heard of "pickleball" until recently. Lots of article about this. Seems like a PR campaign of some sort. Is someone paying Graf to promote this game?
Oh the peak was like 2022, I think. My city even banned it from public tennis courts, because of number of people getting into it and hogging the courts. Then unbanned. I actually see it less now when I’m on the courts.
I think it's just becoming very popular. I can tell you at least "looking for a pickleball partner" is a very common line in dating apps at the moment.
Padel is great, and I do wish it would make it over to the northeast US somewhat. Paddle tennis has some presence, but Padel is basically nonexistent still
That was my assumption too. I first heard about pickleball a couple years ago where some billionaire sports team owner was on Bloomberg hyping up his investment.
pickle ball is one of the sports in the United States where chesterton's quote still applies:
> "It is a good sign in a nation when such things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is a bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on. "
i hope that doesn't change.