Pickleball is a game and games are meant to be fun. But some of us who play pickleball have blind spots about the realities of the sport — either that or we are fully in denial.
While it may be uncomfortable, we think it is important to address some of the harder truths about the game.
We love seeing people keen to work on their game. Whether it is in our clinics, camps, private lessons, or just grinding away on the practice court, it’s great to see people who are serious about improving. But at some point we will all hit a wall. We will come to the moment where the work we put in will be less about getting better and will be more about slowing our inevitable decline. That doesn’t mean we should stop playing or having fun, of course, but inevitably our bodies will let us down. It hurts (sometimes literally), but it is true.
We hear a lot of people complaining about how fast the game is getting. Banger is used as a disparaging term, suggesting that people don’t understand strategy or have sufficient patience. In our experience, the people bemoaning things getting quicker are usually those who have trouble keeping up. If you don’t like when people hit hard, the best thing to do is to punish them for it. And if you’re not able to do that (yet) maybe it’s time to hit the practice court and improve your defensive skills.
While we continue to see pickleball explode across North America and around the world, it is rare to see the people who play pickleball accurately reflect the demographics of a region. People of colour are still greatly under-represented in the pickleball world. You can see this at most pickleball tournaments and likely at your own rec play. We can and should do better to make the sport more inclusive, accessible, and welcoming for people from all communities.
As more money comes into the sport, we often hear people worried that pickleball is losing its way; that the grassroots origins of the game is being threatened by big, bad corporate interests and those looking to profit from this emerging industry. There are certainly situations where the dynamics of pickleball are changing as a result of financial incentives — questionable behaviour in pro level matches, for example — but we believe that overall, access to grassroots, non-commercial pickleball opportunities is growing, not diminishing.
The growth of pickleball has been meteoric and this has caused some to opine that it will soon fizzle out. We believe that the sport offers so much in terms of fun, exercise and (perhaps most importantly) community building, that we expect pickleball to be here for the long run. But if you're reading this you probably know exactly what we are talking about!