Pickleball, the new fashionable sport in the US

At the foot of the famous Brooklyn Bridge, Amy Zhao hits the ball with determination, before bursting out laughing. Tennis? Badminton? Ping Pong? No, it is pickleball that is conquering New York, as in the rest of the United States, where it is becoming more professional and attracting investment.

On any given night of the week, dozens of men and women of all ages line up to occupy one of the four new pitches that have replaced the petanque fields in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

The teams form spontaneously and wait their turn chatting in front of the impressive view of the illuminated skyscrapers of Manhattan, before playing a game, in 11 points. “It’s so much fun. I always play with different people,” says Amy Zhao, a 52-year-old New Yorker.

David Masters, a 31-year-old computer engineer, was seduced, discouraged by tennis in New York: “100 dollars (the annual price to access public courts) and you had to get up at 6 in the morning” to get a clue, he explains.

With the fluorescent yellow perforated plastic ball that floats a little in the air, rackets reminiscent of paddle tennis, the mandatory spoon service and a small court, detractors say that pickleball is a “mini tennis” or even a “sub tennis”.

But what he likes the most is precisely that mixture of badminton and table tennis or ping-pong that provokes very fast exchanges. In addition to reflexes, positioning on the ground is essential: you have to play high on the court, but it is forbidden to get close to the net to hit the ball on the volley.

The game, invented in 1965 in the State of Washington by three fathers, including Republican Congressman Joel Pritchard and businessman Bill Bell, is rapidly gaining traction in the United States: in February, the Sports Industry Association and the Fitness (SFIA) called it a “fast growing” sport, with 4.8 million regular or occasional players in 2021, an increase of 39% compared to 2019.

An increase that is noticeable in New York, where private teachers who charge up to 75 dollars an hour have appeared, and where pigs appear everywhere, sometimes in an artisanal way in public parks, delimited with scotch tape and removable nets.

The covid-19 pandemic gave the final boost to this sport. Pickleball “allows you to be outdoors and doesn’t require much physical exercise, unless you want to play at a high level,” explains Karim Kerawala, a 33-year-old client manager and one of Brooklyn’s busiest players.

In the application where his group organizes the dates, the number of members has gone from about 200 to about 2,000 in a year, he explains, after acknowledging that it has become a “new obsession” for him.

Several “professional” circuits compete on the American landscape, including the APP Tour, founded in 2019, and whose first tournament was organized at the end of May in Flushing Meadows, on US Open land.

Its competitor, the PPA Tour, founded in 2018 and acquired by businessman Tom Dundon, owner of the Carolina Hurricanes ice hockey team, signed exclusive contracts with the 24 best players in the discipline, men and women. The circuit distributed 3 million dollars in prizes in 2022, a sum that should double in 2023, explains Hannah Johns, director of content for the organization.

“We have achieved great sponsors and we are now working with the networks of the most important (television) networks that helped us discover this sport to the general public,” he explains, citing NBC, ABC, or Fox. CBS broadcast this summer a tournament.

In this boiling sector, the Major League Pickleball, which wants to reach 40 million players by 2030, announced on Wednesday that the American basketball star, LeBron James, partnered with fellow players Draymond Green and Keven Love to buy a team .

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