28 July 2023

Racket $port$...WHY A$K Has Pickleball $old Out??

Today, paddles can cost as much as $450. Adidas promises its “Adipower” multi-weight paddle allows players to “benefit from power in offence with extra control in defense”.

“There are lots of people trying to figure out how to make money in the sport that maybe don’t have a love and passion for the sport, but they have a love and passion for money,”

$450 paddles and millions in prize money: has pickleball sold out?

As a family sport becomes more elite and more commercial, its founder’s son mourns the loss of a game once ‘played for fun’

In Frank Pritchard’s telling, it was only meant to be a bit of fun. Or rather, a lot of fun.
Pritchard was there in the summer of 1965 when his father, the congressman Joel Pritchard, and two friends devised the game of pickleball at the house they rented for the summer on Bainbridge Island in Washington state.

They “invented” it using what they found lying to hand – a plastic, perforated whiffle ball, paddles shaped from plywood, and a net usually used for badminton.

The primary intention, says Pritchard, was to entertain a group of bored children and adults during the kind of long, hot school summer holiday that manages to lodge itself in many of our memories.

Almost 60 years later, pickleball has become the fastest-growing sport in the US with around 8.9 million participants. For a while there were several, rival professional leagues, which sought to emulate the NFL or NBA, with a pro circuit not dissimilar to tennis’s ATP.

> Last year, the Professional Pickleball Association (PPA), supported by the sports entrepreneur Tom Dundon, agreed to merge with the Steve Kuhn-backed Major League Pickleball (MLP).

> The creation of another league, Vibe Pickleball, in which Mark Cuban had a stake, was floated but later included in that merger.
There are international world rankings – and people can bet on pickleball as with any other sport.

This year, players competed for $5.5m in prize money across 25 events, an increase of 83% on the winnings of 2022.
The league claims its pro players earn an average of $96,000.

Meanwhile, its celebrity investors and A-list aficionados – Serena Williams, the Clooneys and Emma Watson, among others – have ensured media exposure. . .

Frank Pritchard, 71, says he dislikes the way the game has become too much about making money. He thinks his father would feel the same.

“He would be disappointed to think it had become this huge commercial venture right, with ‘killer instinct’,” Pritchard says from the city of Yakima, the heart of Washington’s agricultural industry. . .

He rues how pickleball has already turned into an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars with investors such as Kuhn, of Austin, Texas, who would love to turn those millions into billions. . .

David Benezra, 55, an engineer with Amazon Web Services, questions why there is a need to turn a profit. “Why does everything have to make money? Can’t we enjoy it for the sport?” _____________________________