For every headline about pickleball’s miraculous growth you can also find stories about conflicts and infighting among various leagues and governing bodies, as well as between pickleballers and tennis players.
Most newer sports are hybrids of older ones, and pickleball is no exception. The progeny of tennis, badminton and pingpong, pickleball is played by singles or doubles teams who hit a ball back and forth over a 3-foot-high net until one opponent commits a fault.
Still, the young sport is not immune to growing pains. As I argue in my book “Emerging Sports as Social Movements,” the popularity of some fledgling sports may seem self-evident in splashy headlines. But their less visible social undercurrents ultimately shape whether they’ll continue to attract new players and fans.
The sport has three professional leagues battling for control of the pickleball kingdom. It has two international governing bodies: the International Federation of Pickleball and the World Pickleball Federation. The lesser lords of pickleball also feud with tennis players over dual-use courts and plans for expansion in public parks, with reports of “turf wars” and “a tug-of-war” between the two racket sports.Internal squabbles are common in emerging sports movements.
Pickleball insiders like to talk about the sport’s relatively balanced gender ratio, which stands at roughly 60% to 70% men and 30% to 40% women. The newest professional league, Major League Pickleball, is promoting the sport through mixed-gender competitions, with teams comprising two men and two women – a unique format in the male-dominated world of pro sports.But grassroots sports sprout from the ground up, and long-term growth depends partly on the demographic diversity of core players.
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