Why do tennis players hate pickleball? Plus MLP Draft 2024 | This Pickleball Life (Ep. 38)

5 Comments

1. 

   @thirtydayjeff 1 year ago

   was that JDub that commented on my vibe Pickleball shirt at the Delray tournament?

2. 

   @WisGuy4 1 year ago

   The three main reasons tennis players dislike pickleball are:

   a) Tennis players snobbishly think that pickleball is only for people who are too old and/or injured and/or not athletic enough to play tennis, not appreciating that it’s simply fun in its own right;

   b) Tennis players do not understand how much strategy is involved in the game plus they misunderstand the purpose of drop shots and dinking. Most tennis players somehow think that a dink rally is one of the goals and pleasures of playing pickle ball and cannot understand why people would slow down the sport so much – to them it’s like preferring a heavily censored, watered-down, rated-G version of a movie that originally was released as a rated-R film. These tennis players do not understand that drop shots and dinking are to avoid hitting a shot that the other side can attack and to set up a shot several hits into the future in which a player can force the opponent to make a mistake, attack the opponent’s shot, and then win the point.

   c) Some tennis players are simply jealous and resentful that pickleball has become so popular that it’s resulted in municipalities and clubs converting tennis courts into dual use courts for both sports, or outright permanently converting them into pickleball-only courts. A lot of tennis players are proud of the many years of devotion they have given to mastering various shots in tennis, often when it was not as popular of a sport, only to have an easier, less challenging sport overtake it in popularity.

   I’ll now watch the video and see what your answers were to that question.

3. 

   @davidj7516 1 year ago

   Thank you for your time and posting. I saw that tournament on YT with the bussed young people. I don't think the players appreciated it, especially when they were grabbed by the patrons. Do you really think ALW's paddle will fail at any time? We can thank the Waters for starting the Third Shot Drive. It is interesting, two years ago, nobody was using a two-handed backhand. 🙂 I like Dallas or Texas to win. NY would have been there, but, IMHO, Lea is a weak link (okay… chokes). It's interesting, Seattle is all 'old school' players. Thanks again. I'm going to Selkirk, St. George, UT. Should be fun.

4. 

   @WisGuy4 1 year ago

   Sad to say, the predominant reason that the Iowa – Connecticut women’s championship game attracted the level of attention that it did is because of one person only, Kaitlyn Clark. Whether because of the novelty of a star in the sport being both attractive and white, and the fact that she stood to break records in the playoffs, fans tuned in to see Kaitlyn Clark.

   Some of the increase in fans for the championship game are the same sort of guys who typically did not watch women’s tennis, but started watching matches featuring Anna Kournikova, Maria, Sharapova,and Genie Bouchard. Some of the rest of the new fans were probably women who finally decided that maybe they ought to pay attention to women’s sports.

   The very biggest reason that women’s sports has lower popularity and viewership than it deserves is not male chauvinism, it is female apathy.

   If it’s not the Super Bowl, or Olympic skating, swimming or gymnastics, most women don’t really give two hoots about sports, male or female. Kristin, as a professional golfer, surely you’ve attended some LPGA events. I took my daughter to an LPGA major some years back, and there were easily twice as many males in attendance than there were females in the crowd. You have seen the same thing at other women’s golf tournaments, correct? I’ve seen the same male-female disproportion in the crowds of our local Div. 1 university’s women’s hockey, volleyball, and basketball games, and in recent years the women’s teams have been better than the comparable men’s teams at the school.

   When I hear a female bring up the topic of gender inequality in sports, I ask her to name the last several women’s sporting events she’s attended in person and the last several ones she’s watched on TV that weren’t figure skating or gymnastics. An amazing thing often happens: the voice of protest stutters a bit and then changes the topic. Women are their own worst enemies when it comes to women’s sports because the average woman does not support women’s sports. Note, I’m not making a sweeping generalization about all women, just the majority of them. And I’m not blaming for the sake of pointing fingers but to identify a factor I’d like to see change for the better.

   Kristin, changing topics slightly, to your sport, the one statistic in golf where strength plays no role is putting. Men and women should theoretically be exactly equal in putting since it is purely a matter of practice and skill. Yet PGA Tour pros have always had significantly better putting statistics on average than LPGA pros. Why do you suppose that is? In 2024, only five LPGA pros have putts-per-round stats that are below the average on the PGA Tour. This isn’t a snidely or rhetorical question – I’ve thought about it and I’m genuinely curious why there is such a difference when there is no obvious explanation.

5. 

   @user-cp5yx6om1h 1 year ago

   In reply to your comment about snowboarding inventing parabolic designs:

   Skis themselves are the subjects of huge amounts of engineering these days. But contemporary skis were pioneered by Elan, which invented the "deep sidecut" ski (aka parabolic skis) and patented several designs in the late 1980s.

   Sidecut – the subtle hourglass shape of the ski – goes back to skiing's prehistory. It was invented by now-forgotten artisans sometime before 1808 and was adopted universally after being popularized by Sondre Norheim and his friends in Telemark, Norway, around 1856. Early skiers, who carved their own skis, found that pinching in the waist of the ski made it easier to turn.

   I had a parabolic waterski in the 90’s too.