Friends call me obsessed,” says Rebecca Bell, who discovered pickleball during the pandemic. After convincing her husband, Christian, to try it, the two began playing every day—sometimes twice a day if they could manage. It wasn’t long before they began exploring the possibility of owning a backyard court.

“We called around to find an installer,” she says. “They were so booked out, they wouldn’t even call us back.” So the Bells decided to create their own business building courts (backyardpicklecourts.com). And business is booming.

While some dream of private courts, many love the ‘speed-friending,’ aspect of play rotation—a mainstay of pickleball culture—on public courts. 

“It’s just so American,” Rebecca and Christian both agree. He adds that pickleball is communitarian, social and accessible to all types, ages and athletic abilities.

“Unlike tennis players, pickleball players have learned how to share,” Rebecca says, describing how rotation is in the DNA of the game. Players, she says, generally…generally, stick to the format of placing their paddles in a single line signifying who is next to play. When a team wins by reaching 11 points, all four players step out and replace their paddles in the lineup. “It’s so amazing. You can come with friends or come alone. So, you are constantly meeting and playing with new people.”

Asking strangers to rotate at a tennis court (even a public one): is unheard of. Rebecca says she’d consider trying tennis but it feels stale.

“If tennis borrowed from some pickleball culture, it might be revitalized,” she says, describing her new collection of pickleball friends from all over Salt Lake City. “When I stop and think about it, I realize this mix of people wouldn’t have normally found each other, but pickleball fosters connections and new, unexpected associations—that seems healthy for a community.”

That’s not to say there aren’t a few pickleball snobs out there, she concedes, especially as more folks advance in the game. While the majority of players on the public courts welcome her with open arms, she remembers a few women who refused to rotate her in.

“One of the ladies actually said, ‘I don’t want to play with her,’ because I was still learning,” says Rebecca. A few years and a handful of lessons later, she says she met that same woman face-to-face across the net at a tournament and gave her a drubbing.

“I’m not gonna lie,” she says. “It felt good.”

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At Long Le’s house, the sound of sports on TV hums in the background as consistently as the refrigerator. Basketball, football, tennis—you name it, he’s watching it. Televised pickleball, though? No thanks.

“Pickleball is so boring to watch,” he says. “The plays are all the same: they dink, they doink.” And while the Wasatch Hills tennis coach says he approves of anything that involves a racket and gets people moving, he insists not all sports are made for spectators. “The ball moves so slowly and the kitchen [the no-volley zone near the net] makes it hard for players to move too much. I don’t find that fun to watch.”

Long’s view is broadly represented in the sports marketing industry, as analysts debate the sport’s viability as a media product. While the popularity of playing pickleball isn’t in question, whether people will sit down and watch it is. Market researchers wonder if Ben Johns has the same screensaver potential as Naomi Osaka and if Catherine Parenteau’s fans will buy her Selkirk Power Air paddle the way fans of Novak Djokovic buy up his weapon of choice: the Head Speed racket.

Long has his doubts. While he enjoys a night out “dabbling” in pickleball with friends, he says it doesn’t hold the same appeal as tennis because it demands so much less physically. 

“Golf isn’t physically demanding and people still like to watch it,” he admits. “But there’s not some heightened, more athletic version of golf that people would constantly be comparing it to.” 

Whether Long can ever be convinced to watch the National Pickleball Championships or not, he says he’s unlikely to make the switch from tennis player to pickleball player any time soon. 

His love affair with tennis began 20 years ago as a sophomore on the West Jordan High School tennis team and has grown ever since. His wide-eyed enthusiasm for the game plays out every day on the court, where he instructs adults and kids and conducts competition-based workouts for players at every level. 

“You call that a volley?” he jests to a radiologist who has shanked her shot during a Monday morning tennis workout. She squawks with laughter. When another guy’s lob—with seemingly no chance of landing inside the baseline—somehow knicks the edge, Long whoops as if watching his favorite NFL team kick the winning field goal during Sunday Night Football.

Now that’s love.

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Draper resident Alena Taylor grew up without sisters—but tennis changed all that.

“When I joined a tennis team, I instantly had 12 sisters,” the 50-year-old mother of three says. “I’ve kept those relationships up and they’re some of the most important of my life.”

It started as laughter on the court, exercise, being outside—a fun new hobby. But as her game improved, Alena discovered new things about herself. “I’ve never thought of myself as competitive, or having athletic drive, but there is something about the sound of a racket hitting the ball just as it should, and I fell in love with that sound.”

She says she became obsessed with replicating that perfect point of contact. “You do five really bad shots and one really good one, and that good one makes you think: ‘I want to do that again and again.’” Advancing from a good shot to discovering the ‘winner’ shot, she says, is how true addiction begins.

Alena’s biggest problem is where to get her next fix. 

“Draper has a serious shortage of tennis courts,” she says, but no shortage of pickleball courts. “I kinda feel like tennis is being overshadowed. There are so many people who want to play tennis, but you show up to the park to play and if people are using it, you might have to wait an hour and a half.”

And finding indoor tennis courts near Alena’s house during our long winters? Forget about it. “I have to drive a ways,” she says, “but it’s worth it.”

As for whether or not tennis is for everyone (pickleballers say their sport is user-friendly), Alena admits starting tennis can be more of an investment.

“Yes, it’s harder to pick up tennis,” she says. “It takes more time, and lessons at indoor clubs are expensive, but you don’t have to go down that road. You can scrimmage with people and organize for free, you can do group lessons at a public facility, you can hit with people. When you compare that with a gym membership, I’d say it’s pretty comparable.”

Alena says she’s made tennis work on a budget. “I found a way to do it because it makes my life better. Granted, I’ll never own a fancy car,” she says,  “I choose tennis instead.”

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Laury Hammel just doesn’t get pickleball’s appeal. “If I hear ‘pickleball is the fastest growing sport’ one more time, I’m going to throw up,” he says. “And then people go around bad-mouthing tennis. Why?”

Laury essentially grew up on a tennis court,  chasing balls at the Salt Lake Health and Tennis Club where his dad was the manager. Decades later he bought the place. 

“My friends would make fun of the little white tennis shorts,” he chuckles. He didn’t care, nor was he surprised when the sport boomed during his youth in the 1960s and tennis courts (and little white shorts) started popping up everywhere. “By the time I was in high school, it was the ‘in’ sport.” 

Laury insists pickleball is a long way from eclipsing his beloved game. “It’s ridiculous to say tennis is elitist therefore I refuse to play,” he says. “I call that reverse snobbery. If you refuse to hang out with ‘tennis snobs,’ doesn’t that make you a snob?”

He points out the tireless work of the United States Tennis Association (USTA) and himself (as a club owner) to bring all income levels into the sport, and insists free courts are not hard to find. Plus, he says, more people globally play tennis, and it has the highest-paid female athletes in the world. Bottom line: tennis isn’t going anywhere.

Still, his buddies try to push pickleball on him.

“I’m confused as to why,” he says. “I want to say: you can pick it up in a day, no one’s sweating—it doesn’t seem to be a very good workout. To me, it’s a hit-and-giggle sport, and yet somehow you’re always getting injured.”

Instead, Laury politely declines and keeps his mouth shut. As a Salt Lake facility owner, he’s even caved and added a few pickleball courts. “Not near the tennis courts, though,” he quickly adds. “That ‘pop-pop-pop’ noise is enough to make you crazy.”

To Laury, tennis is akin to a martial art. “With around 60 different shots, it takes a lifetime to learn: Novak’s elegant swing, Alcaraz’s beautiful drop shot…there’s such an art to it.” He sighs as if sinking into a hammock or smelling a glass of wine. “You can’t say that about pickleball. At the end of the day, tennis is my love.”

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“Pickleball isn’t going away,” says St. George resident Wayne Bullock. “And when you’re a tennis coach and a player hands you a pickleball paddle and says, ‘You have to try this,’ you can’t ignore it.”

Wayne says he tried to ignore it at first. His hands were full teaching tennis—he didn’t have time to dabble in knock-offs. It took him a year to get around to it, but the moment he did, he saw its potential and knew he couldn’t dismiss it any longer.

“Pickleball is just so much easier to pick up than tennis,” he says, describing the latter as more technical, with rackets that can produce far more speed. “In our instant-gratification world, that makes tennis a harder sell.”

Wayne helped put Utah on the pickleball map and pickleball on Utah’s map. Working with a small community group of passionate picklers, they convinced the city of St. George to build some of the first public pickleball courts in the state. Wayne developed programs and clinics, tracking the wild uptick in participation and showing city officials that pickleball had a future. Soon, the city asked him to head up programming for both racket sports. 

“It wasn’t that long ago that we were just trying to grow and build the sport,” Wayne recalls, describing creative events and tournaments to generate interest. St. George’s well-known Fall Brawl kicked off for the first year in 2012, and a slew of others have followed. The sport’s top players have competed in St. George, including the world’s number one player, Ben Johns. 

“Now pickleball is so popular here, we don’t have enough courts for all the players,” Wayne says. “I’ve even been yelled at by some to stop teaching new people because it’s threatening their court space.”

While Wayne insists tennis isn’t dying, he admits no new public tennis courts have been built in St. George in a while and more of the city’s current revenue is drawn from pickleball than tennis. He says that’s because it’s easy to learn.

“By comparison, pickleball is very easy to teach. Within 30-40 minutes, a new player can rally and play,” he says. “Tennis is the exact opposite. On average, it takes me 3 to 4 months before I can get a brand-new player in a match, assuming they do a private lesson 3 to 4 times a week.”

Wayne says pickleball’s party culture doesn’t hurt either, nor does its inclusive ideology.

“It’s a little louder and rowdier, it’s a hangout, you camp out, and many people play all day,” he says. “The culture is more social and the smaller, tighter courts lend to that. Tennis courts are kinda spread out all over the city.”

So, Wayne. Must we choose either “Team Pickle” or “Team Tennis?”

“I see lots of people playing both, I teach both, I promote both, I love both,” Wayne says. “People will honestly corner me and ask, ‘Which one’s your favorite?’”

“Do you really wanna know?” he asks. We really wanna know.

“Tennis,” he says with a laugh, “Nothing’s more satisfying than crushing a forehand.”

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“I remember thinking pickleball was lame,” Former Southern Oregon University defensive end Hunter Aiono says with a laugh. “Now I’m the president of a college pickleball club.”

Growing up on a steady diet of football, lacrosse and wrestling, the St. George resident says he once tried pickleball during a P.E. unit in seventh grade and wasn’t all that impressed. He didn’t pick up a paddle again until he took a hiatus from college to work while his wife completed her degree, and then jumped back into the college scene. As a non-traditional student at 28 years old, now earning an I.T. degree at Utah Tech University, he says he still had that competitive itch.

“I tried Crossfit, jujitsu…those were kind of a grind and didn’t do it for me,” he says. “When a friend invited me to an open play night at the college’s pickleball club, my first thought was: ‘That junior high P.E. game? No thanks.’ But I decided to go anyway.”

What he discovered that night was more than 100 students smashing, lobbing, volleying and socializing. Some players were learning and laughing, whacking balls mid-sentence and grabbing munchies between serves. Other courts hosted laser-focused athletes, deftly maneuvering the ball with accuracy and precision, cheered by a crowd of onlookers.

“I caught the pickleball bug and it was over,” Hunter says. He immediately joined and within a few years became president of the Utah Tech Pickleball Club—one of the top three pickleball college clubs in the country. Four Utah college clubs rank in the top 10, with national championships happening each November and a few scholarships now offered to promising players. 

As for the shade being thrown at pickleball by tennis players, Hunter says it might be happening in other parts of the country or on social media, but it’s not happening in St. George. 

“Everyone loves pickleball here, no one thinks of it as a cheap imitation of tennis,” Hunter says, citing St. George as an early adopter of the sport. “And while I don’t hate tennis, I prefer the party atmosphere of pickleball. Tennis players can have their ‘gentleman’s sport.’”

Hunter describes a scene of suffocating etiquette as a spectator at the Tennis Open in Indian Wells, Calif. a few years ago.

“I was afraid to cheer at the wrong time, there’s a lot of silence, and you can’t leave or come back to your seat until the changeover,” he says. “I loved watching it, but there were so many rules for fans, I was afraid I was going to mess up.” But with collegiate pickleball tournaments, players feed off fan energy. “Crowds make the difference—they’re rowdy, they let loose and it’s a huge party,” he says. “It’s not a carbon copy of tennis. I think pickleball’s distinct differences will propel it past tennis.”

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