Pickleball in a pickle: Even Boomers don’t want to watch it on TV
By Ashwin Rodrigues
More than 36 million Americans reportedly played pickleball between August 2021 and 2022, amounting to 9 million simultaneous doubles matches. Despite cries of noise pollution and pushback from freshly-courtless tennis players, the sport is thriving.
A recent report by Morning Consult further reaffirms everything you’ve heard from your uncle: People are loving it. Fifteen percent of adults in the U.S. have given the game at least one go, and a surprising 25% of tennis fans have also played. The sport is extremely popular with older demographics: A separate 2022 study showed that more than 50% of “core players”—playing more than eight times a year—are 55 and older. (The Morning Consult, however, showed that just 7% of baby boomers polled have played the sport.)
An entire commercial ecosystem has arisen to cater to this eager cohort, including pickleball dresses, pickleball sneakers, and hybrid businesses like Chicken N Pickle, a recreational restaurant chain that has locations in four states with more coming soon.
But there’s one place the sport still needs to prove itself: television.
Multiple professional pickleball leagues—the Association of Pickleball Professionals, Major League Pickleball, and the Professional Pickleball Association—have formed in the past couple of years, hoping to capitalize on the sport’s popularity. And part of the legitimizing, and monetizing, any sport is selling broadcasting rights. The leagues are moving quickly to make deals.
The APP, for example, inked an agreement earlier this year to air its tour—which is currently underway—on CBS Sports Network and ESPN2. The Tennis Channel, which (to the chagrin of some tennis fans) aired its first PPA match in 2021, has said that its pickleball coverage would “escalate significantly” in 2023, with its and CEO noting to NBC that the sport was “hot as hell.” Steve Kuhn, the founder of Major League Pickleball, predicted during a podcast last month that he sport would be in the top five most-viewed sports, eventually competing with MLB, MLS, and NHL. (To compete with the NHL, they might have to loosen rules around fighting.)
Yet according that same Morning Consult survey released March 9, 78% of baby boomers are either “not too interested” or “not interested at all” in pickleball as a televised spectacle, with similar stats for Gen Xers. (Millennials were the most keen to watch it on TV, with 33% responding they were either “interested” or “somewhat interested.”)
Stu Upson, the departing CEO of USA Pickleball—the sport’s governing body—told Morning Consult that having multiple major leagues for one sport just doesn’t work. He also pointed out that the sport does not yet have “star power,” and that pickleball is not appealing to people who don’t play it.
To borrow a favorite term of the crypto community: It’s still early days. The report notes a lack of historical data, which makes it difficult to predict trends.
The new game also doesn’t yet resonate with self-identified sports fans or tennis players, according to the Morning Consult poll. Sixty-one percent of those polled who identify themselves as sports fans, along with nearly half of professed tennis fans, were “not too interested” or “not interested at all” in watching America’s fastest growing sport on TV.
Broadcast pickleball’s true believers will surely keep keep trying to make the sport more than just a viable option for background noise while cooking. At the very least, the Morning Consult report says, pickleball has the potential to become the next cornhole.
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