WHY PICKLEBALL
SUCKS

Every sport has a sound. Tennis has the resonant, satisfying thwack of a pressurized rubber ball meeting tightly strung gut — a sound that carries across a stadium, that communicates power and precision in a single instant. Squash has the sharp, decisive crack of a rubber ball against a hard wall. Even badminton, which is not a serious sport, has the soft, papery whisper of a shuttlecock that at least has the decency to be quiet about it.

Pickleball has the pop. The hollow, percussive, plasticky pop of a Wiffle ball being struck by a solid paddle. It is the sound of a sport that has not thought carefully about its own acoustics. It is the sound of someone hitting a ball with a cutting board. It is not satisfying. It is not resonant. It is not the sound of a sport that takes itself seriously, because it is, at its core, the sound of plastic hitting plastic.

This is not a minor complaint. Sound is how a sport communicates its own legitimacy. The pop of a pickleball paddle communicates, with remarkable efficiency, that you are watching a sport invented in a backyard in 1965 using equipment that was available at a hardware store. We are not saying this is disqualifying. We are saying it is accurate. And we will not be taking questions.

Pickleball is not tennis. This statement should not require elaboration, and yet here we are, elaborating, because the pickleball community has spent the better part of a decade insisting otherwise.

The facts are as follows. A tennis court is 78 feet long and 36 feet wide for doubles. A pickleball court is 44 feet long and 20 feet wide. A tennis net is 3 feet 6 inches at the posts and 3 feet at the center. A pickleball net is 34 inches at the center. A tennis ball is pressurized rubber. A pickleball is a hollow plastic sphere with holes in it. A tennis racket has strings. A pickleball paddle does not. These are not minor variations. These are different objects, on a different surface, in a different configuration, playing a different game.

The argument that pickleball is 'basically tennis' is the argument that a bicycle is 'basically a motorcycle.' Both have two wheels. Both require balance. Both will get you somewhere. They are not the same thing, and no one who has ridden both would claim otherwise with a straight face.

Tennis players who take up pickleball are not playing a simplified version of their sport. They are playing a different sport that shares some vocabulary with their sport. This is fine. Many sports share vocabulary. It does not make them the same sport. We have made our position clear. We will continue to make it clear until the comparison stops being made, which is to say, indefinitely.

Pickleball has a rule called the Kitchen. The Kitchen is the non-volley zone — a 7-foot area on both sides of the net where you cannot volley the ball in the air. It exists because without it, the game would devolve into players standing at the net and smashing the ball repeatedly at close range, which would be both dangerous and, frankly, more interesting to watch.

The rule itself is defensible. The name is not. The Kitchen. In a sport that already has a name that sounds like a condiment, the primary strategic zone is named after the room in your house where you store condiments. This is either a remarkable coincidence or evidence of a naming philosophy that should concern us all.

For context: tennis has the service box, the baseline, the net. Squash has the tin, the out line, the service box. Badminton has the service court, the back boundary line. Pickleball has the Kitchen. We are documenting this. Future generations will want to know.

There is a phenomenon, well-documented by anyone who has attended a dinner party in the last five years, in which a person who has recently taken up pickleball becomes constitutionally incapable of discussing anything else. The sport produces converts with the fervor of a religious movement and the conversational restraint of a timeshare presentation.

This is not unique to pickleball — new cyclists, CrossFit participants, and sourdough enthusiasts have all exhibited similar behaviors — but pickleball evangelism has a particular quality that distinguishes it from other forms of recreational proselytizing. It combines the accessibility argument ('anyone can play it') with the growth argument ('it's the fastest growing sport in America') with the comparison argument ('it's basically tennis but more fun') into a single, self-reinforcing loop that is very difficult to exit politely.

The accessibility argument is true. Pickleball is accessible. You can learn the basic rules in ten minutes, which is also roughly how long it takes to explain them to someone who did not ask. The growth argument is also true, or was true, or is true depending on which year's data you are citing. The comparison argument is, as we have established, false. But the combination of two true things and one false thing, delivered with sufficient enthusiasm, is a persuasive package, and pickleball players have been delivering it, unprompted, at dinner parties, in offices, and to strangers waiting for buses, for the better part of a decade.

We are not saying pickleball players are bad people. We are saying they are very enthusiastic people, and that enthusiasm, when directed at a sport with a hollow plastic ball and a rule called the Kitchen, deserves to be examined with some rigor.

In cities across America, tennis courts are being converted to pickleball courts. This is presented by the pickleball community as evidence of the sport's growth and popularity. It is also, from the perspective of tennis players, evidence of a slow-motion infrastructure disaster.

A standard tennis court can be converted to four pickleball courts. This sounds like an efficient use of space. It is, in fact, an efficient use of space. It is also the replacement of a court that can host one sport with four courts that host a different, louder sport, and the noise generated by four simultaneous pickleball games — four sets of hollow plastic balls being struck by solid paddles, four sets of players calling scores in the specific cadence that pickleball scoring requires — is considerable.

Neighbors of converted courts have filed noise complaints in cities from New York to Los Angeles. The pop of a pickleball paddle, it turns out, carries. It carries at a frequency and a repetition rate that is, according to multiple acoustic studies, more irritating than the sound of a tennis ball, despite being quieter in absolute terms. This is because the pop is sharp and percussive where the thwack is round and resonant. The brain processes them differently. The brain finds the pop annoying. Science has confirmed this. We are not surprised.

Racketball — not to be confused with racquetball, which is a different sport, though the confusion is understandable — had 14 million players in the United States at its peak in the 1980s. Everyone was obsessed. Racketball courts were being built in every gym, every YMCA, every corporate wellness center in the country. It was the fastest growing sport in America. It was accessible. Anyone could play it. It was, people said, basically squash but more fun.

You know where racketball is now. The courts are still there, in many cases, repurposed as storage rooms or converted to fitness studios or, in a development that should give everyone pause, converted to pickleball courts. The sport did not die — it still has its devotees, its tournaments, its governing bodies — but it did not become the permanent fixture in American recreational life that its peak-era advocates predicted.

We are not predicting that pickleball will follow the same trajectory. We are observing that every sport that has been described as 'the fastest growing sport in America' has eventually stopped being the fastest growing sport in America, and that the sports which endure are generally the ones that were not primarily marketed on the basis of being accessible and easy to learn. Tennis has been around for 150 years. It is not easy. This may be related.

Pickleball was invented in 1965. It is 61 years old. It has been 'the fastest growing sport in America' for approximately eight of those years. We will check back in 2045 and report our findings.

Pickleball does not suck in the way that a bad film sucks, or a broken appliance sucks, or a sports team that loses consistently sucks. It sucks in a more specific and arguably more interesting way: it is a sport that has been aggressively marketed as something it is not, adopted by a demographic that has confused accessibility with excellence, and named after either a rowing term for a boat of leftover athletes or a dog that was, in fact, named after the sport and not the other way around.

The sport is fine. People enjoy it. People are allowed to enjoy it. The issue is not the sport itself but the apparatus that has grown up around it — the evangelism, the court conversions, the insistence that it is basically tennis, the visor-to-overconfidence correlation, the Kitchen — and the way that apparatus has colonized recreational spaces and dinner party conversations with a thoroughness that suggests something has gone wrong somewhere.

We are FckPickleball.com. We are the internet's most honest publication about pickleball. We have reviewed the evidence. We have examined the court dimensions, the net height, the ball composition, the paddle construction, the acoustic properties, the naming conventions, and the historical precedents. Our conclusion is as follows: pickleball sucks, in the specific and limited sense described above, and we will continue to document this with the rigor and deadpan authority it deserves.

We acknowledge that padel is slightly better. We said what we said.