By Steve Bellamy
To all my tennis loving pals moaning about pickleball taking on tennis courts… I’m a tennis man to the core. I’ve put rackets in 1000’s of arms. I’ve fed balls till my arm felt prefer it was going to fall off.
To today I nonetheless assist folks in tennis. I’ve carried out most of what you are able to do within the sport. I additionally sat in tons of of hours of conferences with the alphabet communities of volunteers and overpaid executives not doing something to develop the game they had been exploiting.
In my thoughts, the truth is that tennis wanted pickleball. And sooner or later in time, tennis must cease bitching and begin advertising and marketing all of the great points of the sport.
And the truth is that pickleball goes to avoid wasting tennis courts. Living proof, if in case you have a 6-court facility in a serious DMA that’s barely squeaking alongside, however once they convert 3 of the tennis courts to pickleball courts and the place quadruples in income, pickleball simply saved 3 tennis courts by preserving the condos or the strip mall off of that land. Be at liberty to cut wooden within the feedback.
It is a video taken this Saturday at a 3-court membership on the Santa Monica Promenade known as Picklepop. It’s at 4:30PM. The promenade is deader than a doornail and there are a whopping 70 folks at a 3-court facility at a time interval when most tennis golf equipment are empty after the 8 AM to Midday morning rush.
Tennis ought to be embracing pickleball, studying from pickleball and ought to be making each effort to create some worth out of all the buzz that pickleball has created. PS. Does anybody know what the very first broadcast rights settlement that The Tennis Channel signed was? #pickleball@thekitchenpickleball
Editor’s Be aware: Thanks, Steve Bellamy, for sharing your ideas and experiences and sensible options to issues, which we don’t all the time see in our sport. Steve Bellamy is the visionary founding father of Tennis Channel, who has devoted a lot of his life to our sport. The purpose Steve is making is it’s higher to have tennis courts shared with pickleball. As an alternative of ripping the tennis courts out for condos which was occurring right here the final 20 years.
