You can’t read about pickleball without running into the problem of the newly minted “Pickleball Elite”.
From the Dink:
| The “rivalry” between tennis and pickleball continues to intensify, with professionals taking shots at each other’s sport (looking at you Reilly Opelka) and court accessibility making headlines in virtually every community. |
| While the disdain continues from the tennis (and sometimes padel) world towards pickleball, the pickleball faithful should be warned of becoming what they hate. There is an increasing feeling of “elite-heat” in many pickleball communities. What was once a player-friendly alternative to tennis and a way to socialize has quickly become an intense environment of competition and exclusivity. |
| Many higher-level players are seemingly less inclined to assist in bringing in new prospective pickleball players into the mix and more frequently are spurning healthy/growing public court communities in search of less-known, hidden ones. |
| There is still a lot of good momentum in pickleball no matter how you slice it. Though now is the time to understand how the “pickle-boom” has made it this far. |
| The fear is that pickleball may build the very silos and not bridges that others in the tennis world have before – less we face a similar fate of a new flavor-of-the-month sport. |
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