Which Sports Suck

Actually it's just one but by God it must die

Ever since I mentioned I might write this post I’ve gotten some eager inquiries about when/what it might entail. There are several sports whose very existence I side-eye. Skiing, for example. Seems like way too much of a production. Too much schlep, too much gear, a lot of potential danger. You wipe out and you’re not only injured but COLD and WET? No. No thank you. This is somewhat of a liability now that I live in Vermont, one I usually side-step with polite indifference and half-hearted mentions of how snowshoeing is fun! And hey, I like the apres-ski aesthetic as much as any hygge-pilled elder millenieuse. So skiing is safe for now (and besides, The New Yorker came out with the ultimate roast of skiing just yesterday, spotted in time for this newsletter thanks to Friend of The Schill Joanna.)

Golf? A total ecological disgrace, a magnet academy for douchebags.¹ But I kinda get it on some level. It’s a vibe, it’s an aesthetic. The carts, the snack shacks, the outfits. If it wasn’t so expensive I could see myself learning golf one day, and even if I don’t, the golf memberships are so astronomically expensive that they subsidize the “social” memberships at the country club I may join soon (we’ll talk about that another time.) So, golf and I are good. For now.

What I’m not good with, and never will be, is fucking PICKLEBALL. If pickleball has no haters, then I am dead. And if the above apologia for golf and skiing weren’t clear enough, this is in no way a woke take. This is pure intra-class war, but that shit can get vicious.²

I want to be clear, if you are a friend and you like pickleball, this is not personal and we can avoid the topic entirely in-person. I am not without empathy — games are fun, the hours are long in retirement. I wish you as injury-free a life as this activity permits.

In fact, was going to wait on the Pickleball Takedown. It didn’t seem especially urgent, until last week. But then I saw proof of pickleball’s normalization as a respectable sport, and it chilled me to the bone.³

what is THIS don’t piss me off

Martin Niemoller wrote a whole poem about this. This is my “first they came for” moment, and I say that with full knowledge that slightly more Nazi-adjacent things are happening in the world at this moment.

PICKLEBALL IS PRIVATE EQUITY ASTROTURF

I’ll start with the case furthest from my personal vendetta: pickleball’s suspicious catapult to popularity, fueled by venture capital and private equity. We must reckon with the true darkness lurking within this frivolous pastime.

Technically, pickleball has existed since 1965. But it surged in popularity around 2020, under the cover story that it was an outdoor, distanced activity accessible to people of all ages. According to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, the number of regular pickleball players grew nearly 40 percent between 2019 and 2021, making it America’s fastest-growing sport. There’s a lot more proof points in this white paper, but since I’m not employed by any VC’s, I’m not going to summarize them.

If you take one thing away from this screed (other than the fact that my thirst for vengeance is boundless once provoked), it should be that PICKLEBALL IS A REAL ESTATE PLOY. A facility needs 20K-40K square feet. That’s a huge amount to devote to a single-use activity. Literally billions of dollars are going into franchise development, at rapid rates. One company, all-too-aptly named PickleRage⁴, aims to have 500 clubs open in five years, across five states, which even the owner admits “sounds very aggressive.” No activity has the kind of expansion — in popularity, equipment sales, new facility construction — without some major investment turbocharging the market. Investing in pickleball clubs, equipment, apparel, et al is now such a favored play, even for family offices, that one publication called the last several years “the great pickleball gold rush.”

Go ahead and ask: aren’t these investors just responding to market demand?

NAH, Bruh. It may be that pickleball had some organic growth. But this rate of growth is wildly inflated.

Here’s my big problem: one sport, that happens to require specialized equipment, facilities, instruction, etc. just surged in popularity out of nowhere, and now it’s normalized without any question. Let me adjust my tinfoil hat while I say this: feels like a psy-op. “Turns out you guys just LOVE broccoli in your brownies,” says the broccoli lobby.

PICKLEBALL IS BAD BODY MECHANICS

I’ve been working on my tennis game for the last few months. My teacher is really into body mechanics and I’ve learned why it’s important to, for example, rotate from a starting point in your hips and extend your arm fully — it allows you to connect with the ball in this way that is about your body’s whole position in space relative to the ball. It’s not a unilateral place-the-paddle-in-front-of-the-ball thing. If I’m swinging correctly, my body whips my racket fast enough that it makes contact with the ball and then sweeps over my shoulder, without me having to think through every micro-second of that movement. This makes for a more elegant, full-body motion, one that uses all its strengths in concert. In fact, the thing my instructor pushes me on all the time is slowing my swing midstroke in order to (seemingly) optimize contact with the ball. Just swing! Swing fast! She’s teaching me to trust that the mechanics will get the ball where it needs to go, instead of micro-managing how and when the racket comes into contact with the ball.

Now, there are a lot of reasons for the well-documented high rate of injuries in pickleball that predate the actual sport. And of course tennis poses a risk of injury — I sprained my ankle not long ago on the court. But the design of the game, both gameplay and the court, along with it being deceptively “easy” to pick up, do lend pickleball to more injuries than average. It’s not even that beneficial to fitness: A Canadian study found that an hour of pickleball gets you only half as many steps as just walking the hour.⁵

I think a big part of this is that, at least to my knowledge, the body mechanics are more truncated than in tennis. Watch players sometime; the swings are all bent-elbow arms and the torso never gets involved. A lot of stopping short, a lot of quick explosive reactions, a lot of fast turns and reactions. It doesn’t use the body optimally, at least based on my (still limited) sports education. In all that stopping short, tapping, jumping, etc., you get a game that leads to a lot of falls because there’s nowhere for your momentum to go.

I love ping-pong. My husband used to have a whole ping-pong room, which was where we spent a lot of our third date (I still laugh when I remember frantically lunging for a ball and him calmly chuckling, “she’s moving around the court.”) But I think trying to scale up the tight, hunched, frantic motions of ping-pong onto a full size court has a lot of athletic liabilities. Even though tennis is higher impact and requires a lot of cardiovascular exertion, I still think it better supports mobility in bodies of all ages. This is among the many reasons I think tennis is so vastly superior, which leads me to my real gripe:

PICKLEBALL IS TAKING OVER *MY* TENNIS COURTS

As I grieve a huge, tragic loss, I am channeling my existential anxieties into lower-stakes problems. At the top of that list is the difficulty of getting a regular tennis court and instruction in New York, where I hope to spend more of my time. The arcane, obscenely expensive, process of getting a court is, at this point, a major psychological obstacle. You gotta get a permit, you have to sign up for a public court at the crack of yesterday’s dawn (in person! with a pen on a clipboard!), and/or you have to travel to, like Hell’s Kitchen or Randall’s Island for an indoor court.

Brandon Taylor, who now writes a Substack that now focuses exclusively on tennis, summarized it beautifully:

Playing tennis in New York requires either animal cunning or a kind of feudal privilege—it’s one of the few areas in the city where you can’t actually buy your way into knowledge…tennis is so gatekept in this city that money itself is not sufficient to gain access to the knowledge you need in order to play…if it were about the money, the process would be far more efficient than it is. For example, to sign up for a weekly clinic at Sutton East, you cannot actually do it over the phone or even at the front desk. You have to take the email of the guy who does all the arranging and then email him, at which time, you get an automatic response with a long list of options and explanations that you must enter into a Google Form, and then enter your payment information. Then, you wait and wait and wait, and one day, an email shows up and it says, okay, you got a spot in the clinics, we will charge you now, here are the dates and times, etc.

And here’s the thing that kills me: pickleball enthusiasts are all too delighted to share that they’ve “repurposed” tennis courts! They were just THERE for the picking, I guess! I know this is cherry-picked but stg in one forum asking “why is pickleball so popular all of a sudden” the FIRST TWO RESPONSES are

Ah yes! How convenient! All those existing facilities no one else was using! (In which case why are you building so many goddam new courts, BRYAN? ANSWER ME, WHICH IS IT.)

thank you my Wook Prince

Back to the whole, uh, Nazi reference. The expansion of pickleball courts is fitness Lebensraum, full stop. I’m watching the construction of these centers and it’s giving Anschluss.

Do you KNOW what I would do with an abundance of tennis courts like what pickleball has going on now? The power that that would have? The clearance that that would have?

Somehow there is another white girl named Amy, who is potentially an even bigger pickleball hater than me, and I must give her credit where it’s due for naming the true problem:

[Newport, RI] converted one of the public tennis courts to three pickleball courts and then painted distracting pickleball lines on five other tennis courts…That meant an immediate reduction of access to tennis. You can play pickleball on a tennis court, but not vice versa.

[Taking] over public tennis courts for pickleball points to a larger problem: older, white people feel entitled to space not meant for them. And they take it.⁶

This sport, which is allegedly so “easy,” so “accessible,” is a joke game taking over the courts that tennis players — yes, like me — need. You’re being bamboozled that it’s a good athletic conditioning activity, it is an injury machine and a fad, and it has brought white-on-white colonialism into MY life.

Soon as I get Serena’s number from Drake, it’s on sight for this whole cursed complex.

1. There’s also the possibility that any antipathy I have towards golf is just unresolved envy that my dad and grandfathers taught my brother, but not me, and they had their cute boys’ days taking leisurely rambles around the course while I was stuck sifting through fluorescent-lit flea markets as the girl-coded activity (love you grandma!)

2. If you’re watching this season of The White Lotus, hearken back to the exchange between Parker Posey and Leslie Bibb. IYKYK. That is the level of ruthlessness here.

3. Friend of The Schill Marisa notes that they did say “recreational” and that is a helpful caveat but its inclusion in a list of any “sport” is troubling nonetheless.

4. Been there, girl. Probably not how you meant it but hey.

5. No I will not be paying a 50% tariff for that citation, thank you very much.

6. I don’t have enough evidence to claim white flight specifically, but it is SUSS to me that pickleball got so popular after decades of tennis becoming Blacker — we now have generations of champions, from the Williams sisters down to Ben Shelton, Coco Gauff, and more coming. Is it another form of white flight? TBD, but I AM WATCHING.