the full article can be found here

I really enjoy and connect with your articles and analyses. About pickleball and padel, such a well grounded set of arguments from top to bottom. I’ve shared many of the same arguments with my tennis friends.

For example, for the first time the other day, I saw padel being broadcast live on Tennis Channel. And I was excited about it, not just because it was cool to watch. But because I love tennis.

To me, and as you’re saying, the wildfire growth of pickleball and padel can’t be viewed as “taking tennis’s lunch” or similar zero sum arguments. Because it’s actually affirming an entire sport category—racquet sports—as being a thing that matters. In a way that it has never mattered before.

I understand why tennis enthusiasts worry, and I was a worrier too, but the more I think about it, tennis isn’t losing turf or people. Racquet sports are gaining people. And more importantly, the idea of racquet sports as a sport category, a specific ecosystem, family, even ladder, of related skills and competitions that have new institutional gravitas—is amazing for tennis.

I can foresee a future in which Americans, for example, loosely talk about where they are on the racquet sport spectrum, a much more inclusive world than tennis alone has been in ages.

In American culture, I see football and baseball as relatives in that they’re, in an oversimplified way, America’s “throwing and catching games”. By extension, you can also identify a category of “hitting games”, hitting a projectile with some sort of sticklike object: baseball, hockey, golf, tennis, etc. Continuing down that line of logic, racquet sports are an entire subcategory of these “hitting games”, with the particular and reasonably transferable skillsets of hitting a moving ball with a paddle-like object, at varying degrees of challenge.

Like you pointed out, I’ve seen countless tennis clubs and facilities around me being instantly energized by the pickleball fever, and that’s good news. So I’m eager to read your next installment, and I like where this trend is going.