I was introduced to pickleball six years ago this month and wrote a story about how great it was.
It seemed like the most positive, innocent thing imaginable. Almost anyone of any age can play, and you don’t need any athletic ability to get started and have a good time.
Is it a sport, an activity, a game, or all or none of the above ?
Who cares ? This combination of several sports that looks like table tennis with the players standing on the table is fun, and seemingly harmless.
It definitely falls into the category of recreation, and with popularity on the rise, the Honolulu Parks and Recreation department acted accordingly, responding to demand by setting up more places where people could play pickleball—and the small size of the court made that easier than it might have been otherwise.
Of course, that was all too good to be true—or remain true for long.
I had one prevalent nagging doubt six years ago. What about the tennis community ? Wouldn’t the rise of pickleball infringe on public tennis courts, of which it seems there have never been quite enough at areas where tennis is popular in Hawaii, anyway ?
I was told back then that everything was cool, the score was love-love. But I wasn’t the only skeptic. Anyone could see that pickleball and tennis were on a collision course. Pickleball was coming on strong, and tennis would hold its ground.
There wasn’t an outrageous number of complaints when Parks and Rec started converting tennis courts to pickleball in areas where they weren’t being used much anyway.
But grumbling commenced after the pandemic when more people came back out to play both. Although pickleball looks like miniature tennis, there’s a lot more to the differences than the E-Trade commercial where one of the toddlers calls pickleball “basically tennis for babies but for adults.”
Some pickleball players are very seriously competitive, and some tennis players are casual about their sport. But in general, it’s the other way around, and even though there are plenty of cross-over players, the cultures conflict.
Tennis players tend to be more into the competition, while pickleball is more like a social gathering—a noisy one. The sound generated by a pickleball paddle hitting the plastic ball is disconcerting to some tennis players.
Coexistence is continually more challenging, and chalk-drawn pickleball lines on tennis courts are now potential battle lines.
Things came to a head recently at the heavily used Ala Moana tennis courts, where pickleball players formally requested that some of the courts there be converted for their exclusive use. Tennis players have made a stand with a petition of their own.
Pickleballers flexed their people power in another situation recently, to try to get working lights at the Keehi Lagoon courts. They like the facility, but they get left in the dark when the sun goes down.
There’s pickleball today at, of all places, Aloha Stadium, as it celebrates its 45th anniversary. Actually, it’s in the parking lot, where the state makes money with the swap meet, concerts and other events while the old stadium itself can’t host football or anything else.
The blueprints for the New Aloha Stadium Entertainment District should include a facility called Pickleball in Paradise … court time for nominal fees, merchandise, all things pickleball. It must be indoors, though. Tennis players aren’t the only folks bothered by the twack-twack of the paddle on the ball. Some Manoa residents who live near courts there say the noise is intrusive and inescapable.
I thought I might be too biased to write a fair column about tennis vs. pickleball because I’ve been watching the Netflix series about the Menendez brothers, and that family’s sport was tennis. But then I read that Ryan Routh was an avid pickleball player here. Routh is the former Hawaii resident who is alleged to have tried to kill former president Donald Trump two weeks ago.
I don’t personally know any bad people who play tennis or pickleball. Only good ones. Both groups deserve enough of their own courts so they don’t have to fight over the few that exist.
“This is not about the tennis and pickleball players as much as it is about local government not responding to the taxpayers, ” said Darren Dong, a retiree who plays tennis on public courts here regularly. “If they did, it wouldn’t be a pr0blem.”
He’s correct. We all knew this was coming, right ?
