Like a lot of upper-middle-class families where I grew up, my parents had enough money and flexibility in their work schedules to make my extracurricular activities explorative and numerous. I did karate, soccer, baseball, Shakespeare club, even one archery lesson and much more. My parents held the “educating the whole person” philosophy long before my time at Seattle U. But as I grew older, and the social pressure to “specialize” in something grew, the sport that stuck with me was tennis.

Solving problems is a part of how we make sense of the world, how the brain feeds the soul, and a process needed for growth. This problem-solving ethic is easily applied to sports—refining a technique, countering an opponent’s strategy. For me, one of those formative moments came during my first lesson at the South Austin Tennis Center. Having limited success keeping the ball in, my coach told me to try brushing up on the ball using a grip that was rotated further western than my previous continental, “to get topspin, and hit the ball harder without it going out.” 

By the end of the lesson, I could noticeably see the ball spinning head-over-heels as it left my racquet. I had felt myself improve, and it was addictive. That feeling lasted me the rest of my childhood as I continued to play high school tennis for four years. But I was no D-I (or probably even D-III) athlete, and after losing the structure and opportunity provided to me by public-school tennis, I stopped playing.

Three years later, I encountered pickleball on the tail-end of the “COVID niche sports boom.”

I thought the game was a joke. It was clearly tennis for an inferior athlete. Everything looked the same, except in this “sport,” the athletic ability needed to produce mutually rewarding gameplay was lower. My tennis elitism worked, successfully at first, to blind me from seeing pickleball’s athletic legitimacy. 

For a sport to be successful, its athletic essence must be easily understandable, emotionally resonant and easily transferable among and between players and spectators. This essence, often encapsulated by the phrase ‘the beauty of the game,’ is the quality that gets players hooked. A sport’s ability to spread like a disease to those who come into contact with it is the start of its ascension towards a community’s common cultural curriculum (think UCOR!), integrated at every level of society. 

Immediately, I could see how pickleball possessed some of these viral characteristics that were allowing it to grow at such a rapid rate. You could play with anyone and have a good time (try saying that about tennis), and more importantly, I realized games were happening everywhere. Every public outdoor court I looked into—Miller, Greenlake, Rainier Beach, Mount Baker, Beacon Hill— are now dominated by a vibrant, and almost omnipresent, pickleball community. Go to Greenlake on any sunny day and you’ll find 50-100 pickleball players participating in open play. The same courts, if occupied by tennis players, would typically provide eight players with athletic enrichment. 

But plenty has been written about the democratic egalitarianism of pickleball. It’s how most laymen know it, that game that’s easy to play and super casual! Part of me is grateful that pickleball can draw such a wide range of engagement, keeping the sport growing while creating amazingly diverse outdoor communities. Another part feels resentful. Resent because pickleball’s accessibility means it draws a lot of hate when it tries to assert itself as a paddle sport with an identity and athletic legitimacy that exists separately from tennis. Pickleball media is plagued with comments that contain these general sentiments: “go play a real sport,” “just play tennis,” “nobody cares you fucking losers.” And while people in the real world aren’t unnecessarily hateful, their attitudes towards pickleball are similar—that it’s a dulled-down version of tennis made to accommodate old people and the unathletic. I resent and pity this attitude—it was once mine. 

When I first started playing, I thought I was better than everyone else just by virtue of a tennis background. I quickly found out I was horrible, and that if I wanted to get better against high-level players, I needed to learn this game, not just play tennis. The longer I watched, played and competed in this sport, the stronger my convictions grew that there is art in this game, there is a soul with beauty and potential equal to any other competitive athletic endeavor humans have created. 

In these next paragraphs, I will attempt to explain why. Why pickleball should be a premier global paddle sport, and why it deserves its own source of athletic legitimacy derived independently from the giant that is tennis (all discussion of gameplay is doubles).

Game Analysis: It’s Not Tennis (Disclaimer* technical pickletalk ahead!)

The “no volley zone” in pickleball, known as the kitchen, is the foundation on which the sport’s independence from others in the racquet family rests. Pickleball’s small court size and slower-moving ball mean that being closer to the net is advantageous for both players. There is little court space for passing shots, and if you try to continually drive from the baseline, villains will easily counter your drives—it is very difficult to drive balls that are low with topspin and keep them in-play. To get around the limitations of driving, you’ll often see players “dropping” the ball into the kitchen, where villains have no choice but to wait for the ball to bounce as the primary way to get themselves up to the net. 

Thus, the game design eliminates the classic tennis doubles format of one up-one back; getting to the kitchen line at every opportunity is crucial. When both teams are at the kitchen line, “dinking” often ensues. This is an element of the game that commonly gets criticized; people see it as boring and unathletic. I think dinking is as suspenseful as a tie game in the fourth quarter. The kitchen only extends seven feet from the net, meaning any ball even slightly popped up can be aggressively taken out of the air. Being able to hit high-pace dinks that get your opponents out of position while simultaneously leaning in on the kitchen line to speed up balls out of the air, or off the bounce, requires high-level shot recognition, deception, consistency and movement. Any moment can be the one for attack—high-speed “firefights” or “hands battles” that require quick “counter shot” volleys don’t exist in sports elsewhere, and produce some of the best athletic content in the paddle sport world.

From dinking we also get my three favorite shots in pickleball, the shots I believe truly separate the sport and give both players and spectators a reason to uniquely engage with pickleball instead of other paddle sports. The first is the one-handed backhand flick or roll. The roll and flick differ slightly in their respective techniques, but both are attacking volley shots that involve a unique wrist pronation similar to a golf swing or frisbee throw. This is the difference maker in high-level pickleball. Assuming the player is right-handed (most are), the “left side” of the court tends to be the dominant one as the left side player can cover the middle with their forehand. This results in the majority of dink patterns being cross-court between the two left-side players (there is more space between you and the player diagonal to you than the player directly across the net). Thus, when balls are popped up enough to be taken out of the air, they usually come to the left side of players’ backhand—initiating the opportunity for the roll/flick speed up (you use these shots respectively depending on the height of the ball and how aggressive you want to be). Being able to roll the ball out of the air catches opponents by surprise, setting you up to put the next shot away and allowing you to dictate the point. This shot is highly technical, and one that I had no prior skill development for from tennis—over a year into playing and I am just now starting to figure it out. 

The next two are the “around the post” shot (the ATP) and the ernie. During cross-court dinking, the ball can be pushed far enough out-wide to be outside the confines of the court—allowing a player to circumvent the net completely and hit ‘around the post.’ This shot has been done before in tennis, but in pickleball, it happens almost every game. The shot requires putting a sort of bending-spin on the ball reminiscent of a table tennis shot, and it’s exhilarating to hit and watch. The ernie is even more unique. Because the pickleball court is much smaller, and dinking is played at a slower pace up-close, on certain shots traveling near the edge of the court, the kitchen can be circumvented by jumping diagonally over to the far side of the net. Here, while you’re mid-jump, you can extend your reach a few feet into the court, beyond what you would otherwise be able to from the kitchen line. This shot is extremely dangerous as it cuts the distance between you and the villains in half, making it a very hard shot to counter, and a very fun shot to watch as it is often unexpected (you have to wait to make the kitchen jump until the last second so the villain can’t recognize it and change directions.) These shots—the flick/roll, the ATP and the ernie—are just some of the evidence as to why pickleball deserves its own athletic identity and prestige, because while it’s a game that anyone can play, it’s not a game that anyone can play well.

My analysis of the game could go on eternally—and there are certainly countless shots, point dynamics, strategies and techniques that I haven’t touched on at all. This game is truly a puzzle; there are countless pieces.

The final point I’ll make is this: Even though I think pickleball is an incredibly amazing game, it isn’t “better” than tennis. More importantly, pro pickleball players are not better athletes—it’s the opposite. Athletes at the top of global sports like table tennis or tennis are undoubtedly more elite because they have a larger social network to pull from. But as pickleball continues to grow and develop its institutions, this might shift. The pool will grow larger, and the future Carlos Alcaraz of pickleball might decide at the age of seven, on an almost unconscious level, to play pickleball instead of tennis—it’s what all the cool kids are doing (is what I hope the sentiment will be in fifteen years). 

If you’ve made it here, go play some serious pickleball! It’s a real sport, and it’s here to stay.