Tennis, you only have yourself to blame.
I constantly hear tennis coaches and teaching pros complaining that padel and pickleball are stealing their real estate — both literally with courts being converted, and figuratively with players switching sports.
But when you look at the image below, can you really blame people for thinking tennis is more complicated than P&P?
This is exactly how tennis often looks to a beginner: coaches, sticks, positions, angles, corrections, anguished and contorted faces.
Meanwhile, P&P have garnered the reputation of having people playing within minutes, laughing within ten, and booking their next session before the hour is over.
This reality is uncomfortable, but simple: too many tennis coaches make the game inaccessible.
Coaches, if you are not:
– getting your beginner to rally in their very first lesson (even inside the service boxes)
– asking your student EVERY lesson what THEY want to do — not what you want to teach
– rallying with your student instead of feeding balls all the time
– showing them how to serve, volley, and actually play points early
– make every lesson fun, social, instructive and physical
– run group lessons where players play each other instead of waiting in lines
– introduce new players to others and setting up games
– understand why your student plays tennis in the first place and what drives them to come back
…then you are part of the problem.
The thing is, tennis is not inherently harder than padel or pickleball:
– The target is easier to hit — a tennis court is almost twice the playing area of a pickleball court.
– The racket is bigger — tennis rackets have hitting surfaces several times larger than paddles
– Tennis has over 100 million players worldwide and the deepest coaching knowledge base in racket sports, yet coaches still struggle to get their students to rally in their first lesson.
Tennis should be the easiest racket sport to teach well. Too often, we make it the hardest.
So, it’s not a sports problem, it’s a coaching problem.
But until coaches accept that they are in the service industry first and the serve industry second, until we stop making tennis lessons about technical perfection instead of player experience, until beginners feel like players instead of students…
….people will keep walking off the tennis court and onto the padel or pickleball court…. not because those sports are better but because they FEEL and LOOK easier.
(Originally published on LinkedIn)
