USTA responds to the growing challenge of pickleball
Frank Milillo of Rockville Centre at the 2024 US. Open at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center on Thursday Aug. 29, 2024. Credit: Errol Anderson
Pickleball is everywhere.
It’s encroaching on the courts at your local park. It’s growing faster than tennis, faster than any sport period, with a participation boom of 223% over the last three years. And now pickleball is being openly discussed as a threat to his game by tennis great Novak Djokovic, who told reporters after a match at Wimbledon this year that “tennis is endangered” by the sport.
Well, the USTA is listening.
After several years of ignoring or dismissing the exploding popularity of this rival racket sport, the governing body of tennis in the United States is not only acknowledging the growth of pickleball, it has decided to meet it head-on with a group of initiatives designed to make tennis more accessible and possibly even take back some of those courts that have been taken over by pickleball players.
Days before setting a U.S. Open record with an opening day crowd of nearly 75,000, the game’s leaders in the United States announced that they had changed their mission statement to concentrate on growing the sport at the grassroots level. Part of that is an ambitious launch of more than 400 pilot programs across the country to broaden the reach of tennis by introducing an easier-to-play, small-court version of the game called “red ball tennis.”
Red ball tennis? Isn’t that tennis for little kids?
“You can begin tennis at any age, including 90,” USTA president Brian Hainline said last week in the USTA’s state of the game news conference. “We believe that when you do begin this great sport of tennis, it’s probably best to begin it on a shorter court with a larger, low-compression red ball. What’s an ideal short court? A pickleball court.”
Ah yes, a pickleball court. Game on.
On many levels, this is a very smart move. The history of American sports is littered with cautionary tales of the once popular and powerful misjudging the appeal of a new competitor. Remember when skiers looked down at snowboarders? Remember when the elite of boxing treated mixed martial arts like a passing fad? Tennis, it appears, has decided not to go that route.
Pickleball is an easy-to-play mashup of tennis, badminton and table tennis, using paddles and a lightweight plastic ball. Invented in 1965 by U.S. Congressman Joel Pritchard as a way to entertain his bored children with what equipment he had on hand, the sport grew slowly and in 2019 the Sports & Fitness Industry Association reported that it had reached 3.3 million participants in the U.S.
Enter the COVID-19 pandemic. With people looking for a socially distanced, low-impact way to get some exercise, participation exploded. According to the SFIA, there are currently 13.6 million pickleball players in the U.S., and the number who play eight or more times a year has grown to 4.8 million.
There are pickleball courts all over Long Island. The Long Island Pickleball Facebook page boasts more than 14,500 members.
Frank Milillo, a lifelong tennis player and fan from Rockville Centre, took up pickleball in 2018. He is now an ambassador for the sport, having started the pickleball recreation program at Rockville Centre and now serving as the director and pro of Pickleball XPO in Oceanside.
“Tennis is ballet. Pickleball is square dancing,” Milillo, 68, said. “Not everyone can appreciate ballet. There’s some people who don’t even know what ballet is. Everyone can try square dancing.”
Unlike tennis, pickleball puts up few barriers for entry. The equipment is relatively inexpensive, the game can be played almost anywhere, even in your driveway, it’s less physically demanding than tennis and it doesn’t take months of practice and lessons to get to the point where you can compete and have meaningful games.
The one significant drawback is the pop-pop noise when the paddle strikes the plastic ball. Compared to the quieter, almost patrician sound a tennis ball makes when it hits racket strings, this sound is so annoying that it has been the subject of multiple lawsuits across the country, including one in East Hampton that was dismissed last August after the town decided to scrap its plans to build pickleball courts.
“Quite frankly, it’s obnoxious to hear that pickleball noise,” Hainline said. “With red ball, it’s just a beautiful sound. When you look at the forehand of red ball tennis, you can do it 10 different ways. In pickleball, there’s just five strokes. Not to put it down, but compared to tennis, seriously?”
Pickleball USA CEO Mike Nealy said he understands that his game may be viewed with a bit of snobbery from the tennis faithful.
“Maybe there’s some naturalness to that. It’s ‘I’ve been playing tennis and here comes this other sport,’ ” Nealy said. “I suppose you can’t avoid the new kid on the block. It’s getting a lot of buzz, but when it comes down to it, I think [tennis] understands that there’s room for both. I’m glad to see it growing as well.”
Craig Morris, the USTA’s chief executive of community tennis, agrees that there is room for both sports. Morris is tasked with the ambitious program of introducing tennis on a smaller court in communities.
“The low-compression balls, the red, orange and gray that are used for kids, the messaging should be that those low- compression balls and smaller rackets are for everybody,” Morris said. “ . . . Short-court racket sports have been really successful, we’re saying here’s a short version of tennis as well.
“It’s not to take away from pickleball. But for adults or beginner adults who don’t want to run around on a court, here’s a version of tennis you can play . . . We want people to know they can go out and play tennis on the short courts and it’s really fun.”
Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.
