There is no evidence that pickleball is on its way to overtaking its much-older cousin tennis.
According to pickleballclick and longtime tennis coach in the area.
An usually-vacant tennis court surrounds nine pickleball courts at The Ridge Club in Acton. The sound of volleyed plastic balls is heard nearly every day, while tennis cacophony is less frequent in the evenings.
A racquet/paddle combo is what Kevin Curley is all about.
As a high-ranked junior tennis player at Hudson High School, he attended UMass-Amherst for four years. His tennis clubs are located in Westford and Lancaster, where he coaches the Acton-Boxborough boys team for over 19 years. Besides teaching tennis during the summer, Curley has directed Nike Tennis Camps for nearly twenty years.
The Ridge’s pickleball and tennis courts have been replaced by a pickleball facility he constructed at The Ridge. When it comes to individual players, he doesn’t expect pickleball to overtake tennis in popularity.
It is unlikely that a tennis player or a pickleball player would leave tennis for pickleball, he said. It will be interesting to see how the two games differ.”
Tennis remains prevalent across the nation, despite Washington state’s recent designation of pickleball as its official sport.
Pickleball was played by nearly 5 million people at least once in 2021, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. A large demand has been created for paddles, balls, nets, and complete game sets as a result of the sport’s growing popularity.
In the coming years, pickleball is expected to continue to grow in popularity both in the US and throughout the rest of the world, says Karen Thomas, director of marketing and communications at Pickleball Central, an equipment dealer website started in Kent, Washington, in 2006. “As the sport has grown, we’ve also grown.” Our inventory and shipping operations have grown, we have added more product categories (such as apparel) and have partnered with more paddle manufacturers and pickleball equipment companies. A few months ago, we moved to a larger warehouse to accommodate our growing inventory and shipping operations, and we have added more employees.
Since well before the pandemic, we’ve seen pickleball and the industry steadily grow year after year.
Nevertheless, according to Sports Marketing Surveys’ Participation report for the Physical Activity Council, tennis participation in the U.S. reached 21.64 million in 2020.
Do you know Is Pickleball an Olympic Sport? The rise of pickleball is similar to the rise of snowboarding during the 1990s, when skiers weren’t the only ones using lifts. The New York Times reports that there were twice as many skiers as snowboarders at the peak of snowboarding in 2010-11 – 8.2 million riders.
A similar ratio is revealed by the most recent data: 15 million skiers and 7.5 million snowboarders.
However, tennis courts are 78 by 36 feet, while pickleball courts are 44 feet by 20 feet.
In a tennis court of the same size as a pickleball court, four courts can be accommodated,” Curley said. It is literally possible to take a public space that typically holds two or four people for two hours and turn it into a space that holds 16 people for two hours.”
Despite pickleball’s explosive growth, thetennispredict says tennis shouldn’t be diminished in large quantities by pickleball.
“Pickleball is not as niche as racquetball used to be in the 1970s and 1980s,” he said. As there are already tennis courts in your area, my gut feeling is pickleball will overtake tennis from a volume standpoint – you’ll lose some tennis courts to pickleball by default – but there’ll be synergies between the two sports, so tennis fans will enjoy pickleball, and vice versa.”
