Depending on how you look at it, this is either my last article of the year (I am writing it in 2024) or the first article of 2025. In any event, since my initial annual salvo, which ran last January, I have penned thirty-five pickle articles. There seems to be an insatiable demand for news of Landings Club picklers as well as the current status of the country’s fastest growing sport.
The last Club-sponsored pickleball event of the year was the Holiday Round Robin. Forty-eight players, most dressed in holiday red and green, assembled on six courts to strut their pickle talents. Players ran the gamut, from a handful of elite players to those relatively new to the game. The purpose of a round robin is to have fun. After two hours of play, there are no soul crushing defeats, nor are any medals awarded. Newer players mingle with, and sometimes play against, established picklers as a warmup to a post-event adjournment to The Deck for a late dinner and several well-earned Landings pours.
2024 was notable for the growth of DUPR at The Landings Club. The introduction of DUPR rating system and The Landings Pickleball Association (LPA) in 2022 ushered in a new era for Landings pickleball. The ratings system tickled the competitive fancies of many of our players who began to study the intricacies of the sport in order to take their own games to ever higher levels. We now have several players with ratings over 4.0 and a handful at 5.0. Not only should credit be given to Chris Kader and Charlie Bradford for embracing DUPR and creating the LPA, Alex Fox and Bradley Morse have been instrumental in teaching the skills that have helped many of our picklers soar to heights never before associated with Landings players.
There are a couple of interesting pieces of global news which will be worth watching in the new year. First, word is the gentlemanly Jack Sock will team with tennis terror Nick Kyrgios on the pickleball circuit. According to online magazine The Dink, the duo is talking about teaming up for the PPA Australia Open in late January. True fans will watch, if only to see if Kyrgios will bring his uniquely bad attitude to the game or adapt to the socially genteel ways of pickleball. Granted, professional pickleball is intense, but one hopes Kyrgios will leave his tennis tirades on the tennis court.
Second is a statistic that might well be a harbinger for the future of tennis and pickleball. According to Sports Business Journal, “The battle for court space between tennis and pickleball has arrived -- and tennis is “losing ground fast,” as the USTA says that at least 10% of tennis courts in the U.S. have “been taken over and repurposed for pickleball.” Joshua Robinson of the Wall Street Journal notes, “the same court that accommodates up to four paying customers for a doubles tennis match can be “carved up into at least two separate pickleball courts,” meaning that clubs can “charge up to eight players to rent the same real estate.” Stay tuned.
HAPPY NEW PICKLEBALL YEAR TO ALL!