People tend to have one of three reactions when you ask them about the sport of Pickleball. One, I love it. Two, it’s an abomination. And three, what is Pickleball? That third response, once an assumption to anyone outside of South Florida, is becoming less common, including elite athletes and sports producers who may have once seen pickleball as a near cousin to shuffleboard. Love it or hate it, and a whole lot of people seem to love it, Pickleball has legions of loyal players and fans who line up at courts across suburban America to play the game that brings paddle sports to the masses.
You can now count amongst the apostles none other than LeBron James and Tom Brady, two members of American team sports royalty, and both now partial team owners in the expanding Major League Pickleball. Other owners include NBA stars Draymond Green and Kevin Love, while former tennis stars Kim Clijsters and James Blake are also investors. The League will grow from 12 to 16 teams, which to be honest, is way more than I thought when I first started reading about this. Price tags for a new franchise has apparently cracked a million dollars, which to be fair is an absolute bargain compared to any established American professional sports league. So now is the time to get in on the ground floor of this unique investment opportunity.
About five million people play pickleball in the US. That’s a far cry from the some 20 million that play tennis, a number that exploded during the pandemic. But pickleball has eyes on its more athletic cousin, hoping to reach 40 million players by 2030. If that’s the case, expect to hear way more of that loud thumping noise you hear from the rubber ball hitting the paddle, a sound that nearly threw the leafy suburban town of Ridgewood, New Jersey into a full-on civil war. There’s a lot of reasons why pickleball has hit its stride. It’s pretty easy to learn, it’s fairly social, and, and let me be diplomatic here, you don’t have to move a lot. That stands in contrast to tennis, which can take years to master and requires a lot of running. Meaning you can play an hour of pickleball and head to brunch, which happens a lot. After tennis, you might want a shower.
Like many people, I live in a divided house. I enjoy playing tennis and have for years. My wife is in a regular pickleball league in our town. We’ve agreed to leave our differences aside, but I also have largely refused to even try out the upstart pastime. And not for nothing, we often find ourselves both trying to convince our 12-year-old – who takes tennis lessons and has become quite good, if I may say so – to join us on the court and play our respective games. It’s like we’re having a trial divorce over paddle sports. And of course, the children always suffer the most. But darn if I’m going to let our tennis loving kid fall prey to the ills of this bastardized pastime.
We’ve seen new sports launch like this before – some successfully, some less so. One of the best examples is snowboarding, which evolved from the blue blood sport of skiing only to surpass it in virtually every way in the US – something you’ve certainly noticed if you’ve ever almost been run down on a ski slope. Celebrity fame followed as well, as evidenced by the careers of Shawn White and Chloe Kim. I imagine a brash, squash buckling pickleball star is on the horizon. Other sports off-shoots have fared less well, like indoor soccer, arena football, 3 on 3 basketball, and so on. For every beach volleyball, there’s a golf long drive league that never quite made it.
So, what’s to make of all the big sports money coming into pickleball, which you can now see on places like CBS Sports and ESPN? It’s hard to say. Sports fads do come and go – remember cross fit. There’s a graveyard for sports investors who expected to take a bite out of major sports in the US. Even sure-thing Peloton has backpedaled. So who’s to say that the pickleball craze won’t go as fast as it came? I suppose for folks like Tom Brady and LeBron James, it’s worth a few hundred grand to find out. And to see if more people answer the question of pickleball with their wallet.
Keith Strudler is the director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him on twitter at @KeithStrudler
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