I have been inside the tennis industry for 25 years. And right now, I feel the need to be completely honest with you about what I am seeing.

Pickleball is growing at a rate that is impossible to ignore. We are talking 50 to 80 percent growth per year over the last several years.

Meanwhile, tennis had a nice bump during COVID when it became the unofficial sport of social distancing, and since then the numbers have quietly plateaued. If you look at a participation chart side by side and start asking is pickleball killing tennis, the answer becomes hard to ignore as pickleball is hockey sticking upward while tennis has gone flat.

That is not a comfortable thing to say as someone who has dedicated his entire career to this sport.

Part of what is driving this shift is purely economic. A single indoor tennis court takes up 7,200 square feet and at most you have four players on it at one time. In that same footprint you can build three pickleball courts and have twelve players participating, paying dues, and filling up league schedules. For a club trying to survive, the math is not complicated. In my area alone we have lost several clubs in just the last year or two because the surrounding real estate became more valuable than the business itself.

There is also the issue of age. When I started attending industry trade shows twenty years ago, the concern even back then was that the average tennis player was getting older and the sport was struggling to attract younger people. That trend has continued. Meanwhile pickleball is getting younger year over year as the sport grows. That is a serious long term problem for tennis.

I recently did an alumni call with graduates from my college tennis management program and the message I heard loud and clear was that the shift has already happened. Many of them are now asking is pickleball killing tennis because the advice from people working inside the industry right now was straightforward: if you are a teaching professional and you do not know how to coach pickleball, your hours and your courts are at risk.

So here is my honest recommendation.

If you are a coach, you have two paths in front of you. The first is to generalize. Become competent and confident across multiple racket sports so that you can serve your membership no matter what they are playing. That kind of flexibility will make you far more valuable than being strictly a tennis coach. The second path is to go deep. Specialize in a specific age group, a specific level, or a specific style of player. That is the path I have taken over the last 13 years and I believe it is what will allow me to continue doing meaningful work in this sport even if the overall numbers shrink.

If you are a player who loves tennis, my message is simple. Support your local courts. Support your local coaches. In many areas right now the availability of courts, clubs, and qualified coaches is going down, not up. The game needs your involvement and your investment to stay viable.

I am not going anywhere. I still love this sport deeply and I believe in its future. But pretending that nothing is changing would be doing you a disservice.

The picture is shifting and the best thing we can do is face it honestly and adapt.

Your Coach,

Ian