Foe, Friend, or Both? Pickleball and Padel in 2023 and Beyond
competency and flow—partisans and purists—middleweight tennis—recreational and professional products
“You’ve got to be able to hit the ball hard. Nobody plays golf to putt.”
— Joel Pritchard, inventor of pickleball
With the help of several high-profile and well-heeled backers, pickleball has been making waves in North America since it first caught on during the pandemic. “Fastest growing sport in the US” has been the usual lede to the point of sloganization. Naturally, this has led some within tennis circles to question if pickleball’s explosive growth is a threat to tennis.
I don’t think that is the case (even in the US), but the rise of pickleball and padel does fill a void that tennis has been slowly losing ever since the sport embraced technological innovation (with the advent of wide-body racquets and polyester strings in the 80s and 90s) combined with the trend of taller and faster athletes. More on that later.
I was first introduced to the notion of pickleball when I was in Los Angeles around 15 years ago. I say notion, because nestled alongside Venice Beach’s famously bohemian strip was a cluster of paddle tennis courts.1 To avoid confusion I’ll just clarify from the outset that there are three main versions playing out right now, but I will mainly focus on the latter two:
Paddle tennis, also known as pop tennis or deck tennis, is apparently 100 years old, with the first tournament occurring in 1922.
Padel tennis is thought to have been invented in Mexico around 1969. It is a blend of squash and tennis and is only played as doubles inside four glass walls.
Pickleball was invented around 1965 and can be played as singles or doubles. It has many similarities with paddle tennis, but important differences that you can read here, such as the use of a perforated and hollow plastic ball.
Paddle tennis in Venice Beach was wildly popular on the weekends and it wasn’t uncommon to see top-flight tennis players out there. Here’s a look at some of the best paddle tennis duos:
Most of these players are former standout tennis players. I can’t speak for them, but the appeal for me (coming from tennis) was always in the ability to bring rallies online with minimal worry of technique and fitness as well as an enhanced focus on net play courtesy of a smaller court, lower net, and shorter racquet. Additionally, the learning curve—whether you had played tennis or not—was much kinder. This is an important factor when it comes to participation rates in sports because one of the main reasons people drop out of physical activities is due to a perceived lack of competency or improvement. This is true of children and adults.23
Competency has been a term I have written about on numerous occasions, especially when it has seemed convenient to attribute subpar performances by a player to mental weaknesses or a lack of confidence. An excerpt from the competency-linked piece quoting Australian sports psychologist Jonah Oliver (emphasis added):
“It’s the most common thing I get asked to help with: “Jonah can you help me with my confidence”, “I’m struggling with no confidence”, or a coach will say, “Jonah, these guys aren’t confident enough” and it’s like this obsession with confidence, because the belief is, if I feel confident, I will play well. Whereas, what they're really saying is they want competence. Now, what’s the difference? Confidence is an emotion. I’m feeling a certain way, whereas competence is a behavior…In life and sport we’ve got to focus in bringing people’s competencies out, not searching for this idea that we have to be confident before that can happen. You know, confidence actually follows competence. Do you want a competent team or a confident team?”
—Jonah Oliver, Dyl & Friends podcast
While Oliver’s above quote was in relation to working with elite athletes in professional sports, the sentiment of these athletes is essentially the same as your average John Citizen: they want to feel better about themselves. Everyone pursues this feeling through various activities like painting, music, writing, and sports. But the feeling is related to an outcome. It follows action, specifically, a sense of mastery. An excerpt from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s seminal book Flow4 (emphasis added):
“Getting control of life is never easy, and sometimes it can be definitely painful. But in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery—or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life—that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine.”
Csikszentmihalyi is famous for coining the term “flow” or “flow state” to describe these experiences:
“the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.”
Sports are a prime venue for enabling flow states. They require players to perfect skills to be able to satisfy the arbitrary rules and demarcations of the game. Upon executing a skill, feedback is immediate, allowing the participant to adjust and improve. As Csikszentmihalyi summarizes, “They [sports] make control possible.”
Control is something else I’ve written about when discussing the Big 3’s sustained success against younger fields, but it is interesting that it is also a core feature of enjoyable experiences.
What these smaller tennis variants—paddle, padel, and pickleball (PPP)—offer participants is an almost immediate sense of control and competency.
Andy and Jamie Murray are fans of padel tennis and highlight similar reasons5
A key excerpt:
“Like I say to people, I could go play padel with my dad. I couldn’t really go play tennis with him, but you know, we can pick up a padel bat and go play and have a good game.”
— Jamie Murray
This is one area where other sports have an edge over tennis at the recreational level. The ultimate example would be golf, where the skill level of who you play with doesn’t matter: it’s you versus the course. But racquet sports like PPP widen the scope of possible player pairings by being more user-friendly for beginners. I can’t tell you how many tennis lessons I’ve done where rallies have been impossible for the student until weeks or months into the course. The player experience is virtually all feed-based drills that attempt to mold a technique that can stand up to the rigors of full-court tennis, and certain elements of tennis, like learning to both impart and handle topspin, or adapting to continental grips for serves and volleys, just aren’t intuitive. They require a huge time and money investment that most people can’t make. Even those players who do invest continually run into additional developmental roadblocks, such as the racquet preparation and movement required to handle balls of greater heights and speeds, as well as being able to predict the bounce of various spins based on the opposing player’s strokes, all while covering the large area of a tennis court. All these facets of the game mean a long and painful learning curve is necessary (along with decent athleticism and fitness) before you can experience cathartic baseline rallies of considerable length, speed, and variation.
For many, the game just makes you feel uncoordinated. Golf is similar in this regard. But if golf is ‘a good walk spoiled’, then tennis is something sweatier and without the joys of cart beers and the accompanying nature. There’s also that pesky relational aspect to it, where you’re relying on a partner to help deliver that flow experience. It’s not unlike a conversation in that respect. Anyway, to drive home the difficulty of tennis, here’s 13-time NBA All-Star Dwane Wade practicing backhands. Even this guy shanks hand-fed balls:
As a result, everyone who plays tennis understands the pains of finding a willing partner who is of an appropriate skill level. Play Your Court is an entire business dedicated to this problem. This is because even small skill gaps make for lopsided experiences: the better player gets bored from a lack of pace or consistency, or from having to “puddle” the ball straight to their partner, while the inferior player gets discouraged or anxious as their errors pile up (this is also a major headache for coaches who run squads: everyone wants to hit with someone as good or slightly better than themselves, with the players often not recognizing the conundrum of such a desire).
At the junior level tennis has introduced its own version of PPP— larger and depressurized foam/red/orange/green ball stages—in part to aid development, but also in a bid to bolster junior participation rates. This excerpt, from Merchant of Tennis, was used in a piece I wrote on desirable difficulties (emphasis added):
“…the types of tennis balls your child uses can aid in their tennis skills development. As your child grows taller, stronger, with more fully developed strokes and hand-eye coordination, they will gradually be able to handle a tennis ball that more closely mimics an adult ball. Junior tennis balls fall into four classes: foam, red, orange and green dot. Each progressively firmer than the previous one. Subsequently, as the ball gets firmer, the height of its bounce and distance it travels down the court increases. Matching the correct progressive tennis ball to your child’s needs will promote longer rallies, greater consistency and a more positive experience on the court.”
Red ball tennis may give 6-year-olds a sense of mastery, but it’s less appealing to adults who take up the sport; suggesting they start on some infantile color-coded ball isn’t exactly the ego boost they’re looking for. Heck, even some of the children have an implicit understanding that what they are playing isn’t “real tennis”. Many yearn for the yellow ball.
But PPP makes an amateur’s slapshot technique workable. In fact, padel tennis rewards slice rather than topspin (a far more intuitive way to swing at a ball for beginners) as it then bounces lower off the glass wall. By lowering the bar on rally formation, these smaller tennis variants give players that sense of control, allowing them to jump to the more interesting challenge of learning rally tactics. The appeal is obvious, especially at the recreational adult level (where sports like pickleball are exploding in the US, especially in the 18-34 year age bracket, but are still largely made up of older adults). There are numerous analogs to this in other sports: go-karting to F1, TopGolf to golf, touch football to NFL/rugby, ten-pin bowling with guardrails, etc. Guardrails is a good term for it: self-correcting mechanisms that are there to keep the user engaged and feeling good.
As pickleball has grown in popularity in North America there has been a growing discontent among tennis players. A Guardian article from last year highlighted several public court incidents between the two racquet factions (pickleball players often use tennis court facilities to play, as there aren’t enough dedicated pickleball courts, and even in parks with dedicated pickleball courts neighbors have complained of the noise), but the piece also served as an advertisement for pickleball as a sport well-suited to the elderly. An excerpt:
“I mean racquetball is 10 times faster than this. Playing this is like The Matrix, it’s so slow. So any grandmas, if they can stand up, lift their arm, they could do some damage,” Tubo says.
“And it’s like, ‘Holy shit. I’m competitive.’ Even non-talented people can be superstars, you know, that never played a sport.”
Pickleball has removed power from the game by using a perforated plastic ball, as well as drawing a line near the net that players can’t cross—a ‘no volley zone’—which has forced ideal tactics to trend toward touch, with a soft ‘dink’ over the net proving an effective antidote, even at the professional level. It’s unclear if such dynamics will remain watchable for spectators once the hype and novelty are gone. See below and judge for yourself:
Huge sums of money have poured into pickleball since the pandemic as investors look to get various pro leagues (like the PPA tour) off the ground, hoping the widespread adoption of the masses can translate into television success. However, many people are skeptical if the sport can capture attention on the screen. An excerpt from an article by Benjamin Hart for Intelligencer, Pickleball Looks Really Dumb on TV (emphasis added):
“The main problem is pickleball’s inherent casualness. The sport’s accessibility — the playing space is a fraction of the size of a tennis court — is perhaps its central selling point. The barrier to entry, and even to a credible level of play, is very low, which is one reason it has become so popular with older Americans in particular. From a televisual perspective, though, this is an Achilles’ heel. The best players in the world are undeniably talented, but the sport’s basic setup makes it impossible for anyone playing it to look all that impressive. Naturally, there are all kinds of advanced strategies that go into becoming a world-class pickleball player. Yet the physical manifestation of those strategies doesn’t translate into exciting viewing because the players aren’t moving all that much. It’s all too slow to be very dynamic.”
This hasn’t stopped Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks (and owner of a Vibe pickleball league team), betting on participation rates to translate into onscreen demand, as per the New York Times:
“If you play actively, you watch, so the player growth will certainly translate to more viewers,” Cuban said.
There’s probably some correlation for Cuban’s assumption, but even those invested in pickleball are realistic of the uphill battle facing their product. Connor Pardoe, chief executive of the PPA tour, hasn’t been afraid to share a similar sentiment to Hart. From the New York Times again:
“…trying to show that it’s not just a silly game that you play in the backyard but is a real professional thing,” Pardoe said. “That’s our challenge.”
So where does tennis fit into pickleball’s (seemingly) inevitable growth? I think Steve Tignor’s take was on the money:
“The first thing to do in 2023 is admit that pickleball is here to stay, stop seeing it as a threat, and learn to live with our new sidekick sport, the way skiing learned to live with snowboarding. Some tennis club owners will tell you that converting a court or two to pickleball has helped them stay in business. More importantly, as pickleball gets younger, there will be more opportunities for tennis to position itself as the next step up on the racquet-sport evolutionary tree.”
To be frank, tennis is not an ideal product for producing flow states in beginners. Learning the sport is largely an exercise in delayed gratification that requires a metric shit-tonne of discipline and effort. Flow states aside, the economics are also overwhelmingly in pickleball’s favor when you consider that you could fit four pickleball courts in the same space it takes to use one tennis court. For these reasons, pickleball will always be a recreational “threat” (or an opportunity, for the more savvy club owner) to tennis.
But tennis as a professional product is great. It is, in Tignor’s language, at the top of the racquet-sport evolutionary tree; its recreational weakness is its professional strength.
Despite a recent survey finding that 71% of Americans believe they can win a game against a professional tennis player (a take that was, quite correctly, labeled as “delusional” by Eugenie Bouchard) it’s hard to reconcile how you play tennis with how the pros play tennis. The gap in athleticism and skill makes for a humbling experience that is at once both awe-inspiring and demoralizing. Casual players can only dream of executing full-court butterfly-patterned points that have any semblance to what they see on TV because the level of fitness and skill required to get that dream off the ground is so damn high.
It reminds me of an entertaining clip from Top Gear when Richard Hammond—no stranger to fast cars—tried to drive an F1 car:
“I’m going as fast as I feel I can, and it’s not fast enough to keep heating the tyres which means I’ve got no grip, let alone no down force. If I go a bit faster than that, that means there’ll still be no heat in the tyres and no downforce and I’m going even faster and I will crash. The only way from where I am now is a lot faster. Then I’ll have heat in the tyres and grip and I won’t crash.”
An analog to tennis would be the amount of racquet speed needed with closed strings to get Rublev-esque topspin forehands.
It just ain’t happening for mere mortals.
But I would argue that is exactly why we watch professional sports.
Partisans and Purists
Stephen Mumford, a British philosopher known to dabble in sports, outlined two main ways people watch sports in his essay, Ways of Watching Sport.6
Partisans watch sports (and usually that of a team) to see a victory; it doesn't matter how. They want the win and contend that sport is about victory.
“Beauty may be a by-product of victory, and of playing for victory, but it never should be the primary aim” (p. 4).
From this perspective, if an athlete starts trying to entertain, rather than simply win in the most effective manner (I’m looking at Kyrgios, Monfils, perhaps even Alcaraz), and the spectator enjoys that, then Mumford suggests “they [ the spectator] may have ceased being a sports fan and instead they have become an art-appreciator, perhaps” (p. 7).
Certain conditions can sway how one perceives a sporting contest, and thus, how partisan they are. If one has ever bet on the outcome of an event, for example, they probably didn’t care as much for the spectacle as they did for the victory.
But a purist watches sports for entirely different reasons. They don't care who wins as long as the spectacle is great and the game is played well. To attack this viewpoint is to assume beauty and competition are incompatible, an assumption that Mumford challenges (emphasis added):
“Imagine that we were admirers of the human physical form and the extent of human capabilities generally…”
“A fully extended limb, for example, may be more appealing than one that hangs loose…”
“In other cases, the aesthetic categories that interest us might be strength, stamina, dexterity, flexibility, power, height, length, extension, smoothness, grace, fluidity, and so on. And we might note that the more we get under these categories, the better….”
“The purist can be defended, therefore, on the grounds that far from not getting the idea of sport as being essentially about victory, such a quest for victory within the sport is precisely the thing that secures the aesthetic features that we admire. Sport makes us run faster, jump higher, exhibit the maximum strength. It is an entirely artificial contest, insofar as its prelusory goals tend to be worthless or worth little. But what is important about them is that their pursuit creates the athletic beauty we seek: fully-exerted human bodies, graceful style, intricate tactics and real drama” (p. 9).
There is, of course, no ‘right’ way to watch sports and I’d wager tennis has its fair share of both spectators.
In recent times we’ve had an endless GOAT debate around the Big-3 as they all vied for the most slams, with Big-3 fan bases likely watching as partisans. Additionally, tennis is one of the most popular sports globally for gamblers (which creates a host of issues for poorer and lower-ranked players) and surely kills one’s appreciation for beautiful shots and graceful style in favor of “winning ugly” victories.
Yet, on the other hand, the sport has continually recognized that the product itself needs to be entertaining and has made changes to the balls, courts, serve clock, and scoring system over the last 20-odd years in a bid to increase rally length and reduce downtime between points. While some tennis purists still long for the serve-and-volley styles of the Sampras era and earlier, the contemporary tennis product has produced countless epic rallies that have been more palatable to casual viewers. Longer rallies combined with freakish end-range athleticism have been the hallmark of the Big-3 era, and while certain elements of tennis—slices, volleys, angles, ‘finesse’—have been relegated in terms of use, it’s hard to argue that it hasn’t delivered on many of the aesthetic elements Mumford pointed out, as well as attract new fans to the game.
In fact, according to the ATP’s “One Vision” plan, a strategy designed to align competing organizations within the sport, professional tennis is the fourth most watched sport globally, with more than 1 billion fans (and an equal share of male and female viewers). Every sport ahead of tennis is a team sport with an established league, which perhaps reflects the notion that tapping into a large partisan viewer base requires a team aspect that tennis is in need of clarifying (unless you freakishly do have three GOATs all playing at the same time). The current team tennis landscape is a mess with the Davis Cup, United Cup, Hopman Cup, Ultimate Tennis Showdown, and Laver Cup all lacking clarity and/or genuine appeal. What will survive of this, and in what format, is unclear.
That tennis is in this position despite lacking a modernized funnel to attract new fans is a testament to the product. One only has to watch the recent Shanghai highlights between Grigor Dimitrov and Carlos Alcaraz to see how much this sport demands. For an even shorter advertisement, here’s the point of the year between Sinner and Alcaraz.
But as I hinted in the opening lines, tennis isn’t actually full of the forecourt net exploits and variation that someone like Alcaraz, Dimitrov, and Evans might bring. These players and matches are outliers in that regard. Your standard-issue ATP pro today is a double-handed topspin baseliner. What tennis gained in rally length and physicality in recent decades, it lost in its own ‘pickleball dink’: the deft touch, angles, and time-stealing elements that defined McEnroe in the 80s and much of tennis’ history. The modern trend is clear at the top of the game: players are getting taller, one-handers are dying out, baseline play is the norm, and the fringe elements—slices, approach shots, volleys, and drop shots—are just that: fringe elements that certainly help, but aren’t necessary for year-round success (although the drop shot is having a moment, which is great). One only has to watch one Medvedev vs. Zverev match to have seen them all.7
I’ve tweeted multiple times (here, here) in the past months that there is a good argument that “middleweight tennis”—involving players who aren’t big enough to servebot and who use their footspeed and racquet work to win points— is the sweet spot for tennis in 2023.
Dan Evans is the perfect canvas: his old-school game creates great contrast against multiple playstyles.8 Watch this 3-minute highlight reel of Evans v Alcaraz from the US Open this year:
This isn’t to say that the baseline-heavy Nadal/Djokovic rivalry isn’t one of the most watchable ever (bloody oath it is), but simply to point out that the rules and regulations of any game influence what eventually become the optimal tactics, body shapes, and styles, which in turn have downstream consequences on how entertaining the overall product is. While Sinner, Alcaraz, and Rune are three young top-10 players willing to play with power and aggression, it’s clear that the big-serving counterpuncher (Zverev, Hurkacz, Medvedev, at times Djokovic) is often an optimal strategy to win tennis matches, but maybe not the hearts of fans. I’d wager that Djokovic’s (relatively) safer and ‘bland’ style has played a role in his inability to win fans (again, relative to Fedal) precisely because so many people watch sports through a purist lens. Given tennis’ worldwide popularity and 100-year head start on these other variants, it still is in a good position to grow as long as it takes care to continually refine the product.
So far I’ve tried to walk out a couple of ideas that aren’t all that controversial: tennis is harder to learn but better to watch; pickleball is easier to learn but worse to watch. As a result, tennis loses casual users but gains casual viewers, and vice versa for pickleball (or so I’m betting).
Assuming this framework, there must be a racquet game with an ideal ‘sweet spot’, where the sport is relatively easy to pick up for amateurs, but difficult enough in terms of athleticism, skills, and tactics that it can be aesthetic and watchable at the professional level. I’m not saying padel tennis hits that sweet spot right in the middle, but after playing for a summer and watching some highlights, it comes pretty close.
Long-term I don’t think professional tennis will have a pickleball problem, but it might have a Padel problem.
Whereas pickleball sapped power by nerfing the ball and marking out a ‘no volley zone’, padel does something more interesting by wrapping the players inside a box and using something closer to a tennis ball. The glass walls make power shots a risk. They act as a faithful ‘third-player’, the ultimate counterpuncher, quickly turning your opponents’ smash into your smash if executed poorly. Additionally, like squash, players can use the walls to hit against, creating a myriad of new shot possibilities — both offensive and defensive — that aren’t possible in tennis or pickleball. Furthermore (and unlike squash) players can leave the glass box to retrieve shots, adding yet another layer of complexity and dynamism. Padel is also played on a court that is ~10 feet wider and 20 feet longer than a pickleball court, providing professional players more room to display their athleticism. Taken together, this setup creates a game that is far richer in terms of shot possibility, athleticism, and strategy compared to pickleball but is still easy to learn for beginners.
I liked the analogy from a recent Medium article:
“It’s hard, but also easy. Hear me out. Have you ever played Scrabble? Simple game, fun and easy to pick up. But the English language is an enormous and complex maze. It can be daunting and daunting can be a good thing. Padel is like scrabble, ish. Very easy to pickup, but you soon start to get excited as you realise it’s a complex sport and you’ll continue to learn, appreciate and discover.”
To run with this analogy, pickleball is also like playing Scrabble, but you’re limited to making three-letter words; lacing together cat, tap, and pat might make you feel good, but you’re not impressing any bystanders.
Based on what I’ve laid out so far, the pros and cons of tennis, padel, and pickleball, look something like this:
This isn’t an exhaustive list of factors. For instance, an additional tailwind for pickleball is the relative ease of installation; you can slap down a few lines on already-built tennis courts (or any hard surface for that matter), prop up a mini-net, and you’re off to the races. Padel, with its glass walls and astroturf, requires single-purpose courts to be built; a significant investment and barrier to entry when it comes to getting that crucial first taste.
On the other hand, Padel is nearly always played as doubles and has a ubiquitous ‘19th hole’ aspect to it. Whether in the UK, Spain, Italy, or Argentina there is a strong social strand to this game (this also mirrors my experiences so far in Montreal). This is another core reason people play sports.
Manu Martin for Esquire:
“In one tennis court, you can install three padel courts. In tennis, people play one versus one, so if you’re a manager of a club, you’ll be earning money from two people. But if you have three padel courts, you have 12 people playing, paying and drinking beer in the cafeteria after the match. This is very common, at least in Spain and the Mediterranean: after padel, you drink beer. So as a business, it’s more interesting than tennis.”
I’m not the only one in North America with this bullish view of Europe’s fastest-growing sport. Investors are betting big on Padel’s growth in the US market despite the current obsession with pickleball, and the United States Padel Association (USPA) (optimistically) forecasts there will be ~25 000 Padel tennis courts by 2030; a meteoric rise from the couple of hundred currently smattered around the Southern states.
Predicting how this all plays out is always difficult, but I don’t think it’s an either/or scenario. These games can coexist in some way. For the moment, some centers in the US are removing the guesswork altogether and giving people the choice. From the New York Times:
“The Barnes Center, with its menu of racket-sport offerings, looks like a template for the future as private clubs and public facilities strive to be more things to more people, protecting themselves economically from shifting tastes while trying to defuse some of the rising tension between the grand old game of tennis and fast-growing newcomers like pickleball.”
Andy Murray echoes this sentiment across the pond. From Esquire:
“I think the two sports can sit side by side. Padel is a great way for people to start racquet sports because it’s so easy to learn, but the beauty of tennis is the technicality of the game. There will always be a place for that.”
At the recreational level, there is a bullish case for all these variants—for now. However, my view is that by the end of this decade, pickleball will be relegated to the role of ‘retirement home game’; it’s fun for beginners and easy for older folks, but once the novelty and hype wears off, pickleball will struggle to reach its lofty goals. Young Americans may be flocking to it with their elders for the moment, but once they get a taste for padel, pickelball will become a gateway sport to the “more high-octane, cooler, sexier” Padel.
Padel as a product is just so much easier to sell, recreationally and professionally.
As tennis is my jam, I guess the question is: what does tennis need to tweak to ensure the game remains attractive into the future?
I’ll leave that for Part II.
See you in the comments! HC.
There are seemingly many other variants I haven’t mentioned in this article: touch tennis, platform tennis, beach tennis, etc.
Papaioannou, A., Bebetsos, E., Theodorakis, Y., Christodoulidis, T., & Kouli, O. (2006). Causal relationships of sport and exercise involvement with goal orientations, perceived competence and intrinsic motivation in physical education: A longitudinal study. Journal of sports sciences, 24(4), 367-382.
Overdorf, V., Coker, C., & Kollia, B. (2016). Perceived competence and physical activity in older adults. Activities, Adaptation & Aging, 40(4), 285-295.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2008). Flow : the psychology of optimal experience. Harper Perennial.
Andy Murray is an investor in Game4Padel, a UK-based Padel court operator.
Mumford, S. (2013). Ways of watching sport. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 73, 3-15.
Alcaraz is the exception to the rule, but I do think he has inspired the tour to a degree regarding drop shots and coming forward.
Evans v De Minaur 2020 ATP Cup — Evans v Alcaraz 2023 US Open — Evans v Dimitrov Washington DC
I loved this article! What do you think of badminton as the sweet spot between playability and watchability?
What does tennis need to tweak to ensure the game remains attractive into the future?
It seems like a lot of traditional sports are asking themselves this at the moment, about how to attract younger audiences and grow their sport. There's always a lot of strong statements made about what the younger audiences want to see, but I've never been presented with any research/facts backing it up. Then the current generation who manage these sports end up doing slightly cringey things that they think younger audiences want (excessively loud dance music, lights, gimmicky scoreboards etc., how do you do fellow kids stuff).
But I think the answer isn't that complicated, just maybe it seems hard to execute.
- Get stuff on TV/stream at a sensible price/free when it can
- Get good quality highlights online
- Governing bodies to be the correct mix of people who care about the sport driving the direction and good managers doing the boring bits making it happen
- Look after the players, they are the product, don't make them play 100 matches a year to make living, sounds like something needs to be done with the ATP balls, WTA cancun was a bit of mess. I'd also look if pay structure is distributing money well enough down the pyramid
I think the current game of selling out stuff to the middle east (ATP next gen etc.) is not a long term strategy for the sustainable growth of the sport - just a quick buck for current shareholders - could be wrong and it ends up driving good growth in a whole new market which would be great - but there's a lot of competition with golf, football, F1 etc. all being bought by that market.