Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
I've played all of the racquet sports you mentioned casually (including pickleball) except one, two of which competitively as well in a more formal capacity when I was younger.
I agree, as a sport pickleball is the worst of many worlds. It reminds me of the Robert California quote on the Black Eyed Peas: Pickleball is like tennis for people who don't like tennis, badminton for people who don't like badminton, racquetball for people who don't like racquetball. Yet, it has a relatively high floor and low ceiling, which is a feature and not a bug for people who like it for its Inclusivity and lack of athletic Ableism, especially to serve as a social event.
Pickleball is a recurring source of displeasure in online tennis spaces, including /r/tennis and /r/10s, sometimes with even a "total pickleball-player death when?" vibe. However, mainly for a different reason: the tennis players in such spaces feel there’s a concerted movement to non-consensually Replace them with pickleball players, a movement they’re largely powerless to stop.
They see their local tennis courts getting converted into pickleball courts, when tennis court availability can already be sparse depending on time and geography. Sometimes the tennis nets are removed and pickleball nets installed, the lines repainted from tennis to pickleball court. Sometimes pickleball nets are installed on each half of the tennis courts and the tennis lines are painted over with pickleball lines. Sometimes pickleball players just bring their own portable nets to takeover tennis courts. They report that pickleball players are more wont than tennis players to bring non-playing friends and family, so even when playing tennis on an adjacent court there are more hazards and obstacles in the forms of kids running around and bodies and chairs eating up space in the “out of bounds” regions between courts.
They also resent the unspoken and sometimes spoken message that pickleball is the future and they as tennis players should just bend the knee and yield their courts to pickleball players, for they are on the wrong side of history. Naturally, tennis Redditors refuse or neglect to Notice any parallels there may be between their predicament and other ongoings in the world.
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