Fiend at Court Unplugged
The Fiend at Court “Unplugged” series continues to revisit posts made in 2020. This is possibly the longest “Year in Review” in the history of casual blogging. Today this retrospective has reached the inevitable topic of pickleball. If the Fiend at Court goes the same way as the racquet sports industry is trending, there is a dystopian future where this site issues daily content on pickleball. It is my life’s mission to prevent that from happening.
For anyone interested in glancing back at memory lane with me, the original three part series on pickleball included three posts: “Tennis, Pickleball, and Acorns: It’s Nuts,” “Learning Curves: Pickleball vs Tennis,” and “Holding Court: Pickleball vs Tennis.” Those posts explored the explosive popularity of pickleball, examined the relative learning curves of tennis versus pickleball, and detailed how court size matters.
The footnote to that series that I want to revisit is the culture of pickleball. Perhaps cult is a better word. The phrase I use to describe pickleball players is “aggressively inviting.” Pickleball players will accost random people in the public park near my house inviting them to give their sport a try. In my many years of playing tennis, I have yet to see tennis players evangelizing for the sport in a public setting in the same way. There is a distinct cultural difference in the playing community between pickleball and tennis.
I have a couple of new ideas on why that is the case. First, while pickleball was created in 1965, the explosive growth of the sport is a relatively recent phenomenon. As a result, almost all players actively engaged in pickleball today are relatively new to it. Pickleball enjoys a large and constant influx of players who are in the “puppy love” phase of the sport. Those players are naturally and automatically serving as ambassadors for the game.
A second theory on the cultural differences between pickleball and tennis has to do with the place where a significant number of players first engage with the game. I consistently run across pickleball players who were first exposed to the sport in the gym at their municipal recreation center. In essence, pickleball is attracting people who are pre-disposed to exercise in congregate settings by engaging with them in those venues.
I have been thinking about ways to draw players into tennis facilities for exposure to the sport. It suddenly occurs to me that an alternate and more effective way to engage with prospective tennis players is to bring tennis to where they are. Free tennis lessons on a recreation center gym floor is not a crazy idea. It might have to be short court, but it is doable. Maybe the pickleball players will let us borrow a net.
In the meanwhile, I want to issue this challenge to the tennis players in my orbit: Give me your ideas on how to evangelize tennis as effectively as the pickleball players. Bonus points if anyone manages to level up to “aggressively inviting.”
