My private club in Charlotte won’t make room for pickleball. Seriously? | Opinion
The name is silly, the sound of the whiffle ball grates on the nerves of nearby homeowners, and the growing demand fills tennis facilities with a new kind of enthusiastic, and borderline addicted, player. Go on Instagram or YouTube and you will find funny reels that tell how pickleball takes over a person in multiple stages: starting with the judgment phase and ending with utter absorption.
This summer, I witnessed the attempt to introduce pickleball, America’s fastest growing, and most contentious, sport at one of the oldest members-only swim and racquet clubs in Charlotte. While private clubs around us adopted it years ago, our club has held out, despite members asking for it and the board toying with the idea summer after summer.
Our tennis community has been well established for decades, and we offer excellent youth tennis programming and summer camps. My daughter took private lessons, attended our summer camps for years and played on the youth team briefly. Her sport obsession turned to travel, year-round volleyball, but the tennis education she received at our club is why she’s so good at pickleball now.
I respect the tennis instruction and community my club offers, but we are not a tennis academy. We pride ourselves on being a family-friendly, recreational club.
What do my daughter and her teenage friends ask to play together after a sleepover, as they did recently after her 14th birthday? Pickleball! Why? Because it’s inclusive, relatable, fun and full of rallies. Plus, the fashion slays! It’s available for every level of fitness, but make no mistake: pickleball makes you sweat.
Over the course of this summer’s pickleball experiment at my club, enthusiasm for it grew in a grassroots way. We offered only one beginner’s clinic through Pickleball Charlotte, and from there, people kept coming. Grandparents with grandkids, college students, high schoolers, parents with little kids, and every combination in between. And what could you hear coming from the pickleball courts? Laughter. Every time.
For this experiment to take place, we added temporary lines using Green Frog tape to our only single, fully enclosed tennis court, which we use for clinics and lessons for beginner tennis players. Those lessons still take place with pickleball lines on the court. But try to re-tape four temporary pickleball courts all summer long in Charlotte’s heat — the job becomes unsustainable fast.
Some tennis players in our community and nationwide play pickleball too, like Charlotte tennis star Jack Sock. Some have no interest in playing, and some have been outspoken in their desire to never have pickleball installed permanently at our club. I understand the latter. What if pickleball is a trend? One that will fade soon? What if we build permanent pickleball courts only to dismantle them later?
For now, pickleball continues to grow rapidly, and the USTA Southern Section does not allow match play to take place with pickleball lines on the court. We have permanent junior tennis lines installed, but those are allowed. If pickleball isn’t a passing fad, then the USTA will increasingly face pressure to revise their policies. If they do, they would solve some problems for racquet clubs like mine, where space to build is limited and tensions are high about trying to find viable compromises for pickleball on the existing infrastructure.
Sadly, I’ve had to witness behavior from a small group of club members that I wish I could forget — actions taken, words spoken. A distaste for pickleball and protection of tennis can lead some to act in ways they would consider bad manners if the situation were reversed.
I will try to forget it all once the pickleball experiment is finished at our club where each member pays the same initiation fees and the same dues. The experiment might fail. Right now, the impasse with the tennis community feels insurmountable. Who wants to play pickleball in that kind of environment?
People play pickleball for community, joy and exercise too. There’s risk of injury, but that’s true of other sports. (Player be warned.) Most of all, it’s a social sport that’s growing and wants to be included. Only time will tell if our club can make room.
Sarah Creech lives in Charlotte and teaches English and creative writing at Queens University of Charlotte.
