Pickleball Is What Diversity Workshops Wish They Were

I hate Sundays. I always have.

I know Buddhists tell me to live in the present, but I live perpetually in tomorrow's shadow. Sunday is the day before dreaded Monday; and come Sunday afternoon, I'll start feeling blue, wanting nothing more than to watch bad made-for-TV movies on my living room couch.

I hate Sundays.

I'm writing this essay early August. And August, at least for us lucky academics, is the Sunday of the year. Sure, I've got a month before syllabi and office hours reclaim my soul, but September looms like Walter's rage when someone steps over the line. This August hits different though: it’s my sabbatical's death rattle. Go ahead, play your tiny violin. I'm a privileged professor lamenting the end of his year-long vacation (ha!). But don’t us ivory-tower types also bleed when pricked (couldn't resist)?

Instead of wallowing, I've decided to look back at this year and reflect. I set two goals for myself for my sabbatical. In addition to my usual research, I took on two extra challenges. You're reading the first: write a weekly Substack. As I approach a year of Substacking, I will soon share reflections on my weekly sideline, where I will also announce some changes coming to this space.

My second goal was pickleball.

You can stop laughing now. Actually, don't. Laughter might be pickleball's best export. While pickleball is now a serious sport, the dominant emotion I have seen on the courts is mirth. The sport is simultaneously North America's fastest-growing sport and its most reliable punchline. I mean, it’s called pickleball for crying out loud, after one of its creators’ dog, or so the story goes.

Pickleball is the lovechild of tennis and ping pong. It's played on a court about half the size of a regulation tennis court, it has a weird area by the net called the kitchen, it uses a variant of the whiffle ball, and it’s played with paddles, not rackets. It is mostly a doubles sport. You can tell if pickleball is being played around you if you hear the characteristic pop or clack sound, which occasionally generates noise complaints.

Some snobs look down at pickleball with the kind of disdain usually reserved for pineapple on pizza. Case in point: a certain irascible podcaster who declared that ChatGPT and pickleball are spiritual cousins. Lest you think this was a compliment, this podcaster inhabits the humanities, where enthusiasm for AI rivals that of The Dude for the Eagles. The man is no doubt a tennis player, complete with the country club airs.

Tennis players look down on pickleball as a low-skill alternative to the royal game. Pickleball also started out being popular among the retiree set, with many younger people seeing it as something their grandparents play at the rec centre. I've also heard online people say that pickleball is for white people, like craft beer and pumpkin spice lattes.

Some of the above is true. Pickleball demands less skill than tennis, and as such attracts less athletic players and older players. Pickleball also started out as a suburban pursuit, meaning that its roots are pretty white.

But here's where my sabbatical got interesting, man: the very features that make pickleball mockable might be exactly what we need right now.

The low skill barrier that makes tennis players sneer? It means I spent this winter playing regularly with Greg, an 84-year-old widower and retired civil engineer from the prairies^[1]. Despite not being as mobile as people half his age, Greg is still a good player who can hold his own. I have also played with sixteen-year-olds who push me to my limit.

This intergenerational contact is perhaps what is most beautiful about the game. I mean, other than my own family, I hardly ever interact with people in their 70s or 80s, or kids in their teens. Compare this to my past experience playing rec league basketball, where I was more than 20 years older than the next oldest person on my team. It struck me that, as religious attendance has dwindled in the west, there are few places where different generations can actually speak and interact as equals.

This intergenerational, cross-cultural mixing shouldn't be remarkable, but when was the last time you spent two hours with someone 30 years older or younger than you who wasn't family? We've built a society of demographic silos. Churches and synagogues empty, bowling leagues extinct, third spaces gentrified into condo towers. We've optimized away every opportunity for actual community in favor of curated digital connections.

This intergenerational mixing matters. Sure, it's good for older folks like Greg, who might otherwise spend Tuesday evenings alone with their memories. But it's equally valuable for younger players who get to peek inside minds shaped by different decades and different assumptions about how the world works.

When you're young, you fall too easily into the trap of assuming that everyone processes reality the same way you do, that your cultural moment is the only cultural moment that matters. But when you meet people who came of age when handshakes meant something or when you had to show up places on time because there was no way to text that you were running late, your worldview expands.

I guess I’m lauding diversity here, but not the one so favoured by HR professionals, where everyone looks different but thinks the same. This is the messier, more valuable kind: diversity of experience, diversity of perspective, and diversity of the mental models we use to navigate life.

The increased accessibility also means that men and women are more or less on an even playing field, at least at my intermediate skill level. Some of the fiercest players I have played with and against are women. There's Ngoc, the 58-year-old Vietnamese Canadian with a backhand slice that I can never return. Then there's 41-year-old Lucy, whose small frame I misjudged as being fragile, but who beats me every single time because she thinks about the game better than anyone else.

In Toronto, the players I meet in the various parks I frequent come from all walks of life: all races, ethnicities, and economic backgrounds. Far from being a bunch of white Lululemon Karens and Kens, I have met and played with players from China, Vietnam, Ghana, Russia, India, Afghanistan, Iran, Italy, Ukraine, the Philippines, and Jamaica. While we mostly talk about the games we're playing and watching, I have also learned about these new people's lives. Last week, I learned that one of my new pickleball friends, Roxanne, is a 32-year-old recovering alcoholic; she introduced me to a few of her friends, also players, whom she met at AA.

More importantly: nobody talks politics. In our hyperpolarized moment when even our lawns are political statements, pickleball courts remain blessed neutral zones. I have no idea how Greg voted, what Ngoc thinks about Palestine, or whether Lucy believes Sydney Sweeny’s boobs ended wokeness. They're just people I enjoy spending Tuesday evenings with, united only by our willingness to look silly chasing a plastic ball.

The magic happens because of pickleball's accessibility. When skill matters less, other things matter more: strategy, patience, reading your partner, staying calm when Mustafa lobs over your head for the fifth straight point. Derek Thompson just wrote about pickleball and described it as 80% checkers, 20% chess, meaning it’s easy enough to start a game and be decent, but extremely hard to master and endless ways of excelling.

How Pickleball Explains American Culture

Pickleball is competitive enough to care about, casual enough to laugh about. Nobody's going pro, so nobody's an asshole about it. It’s also the norm to compliment players, even when they whiff on a shot.

So, really, what I like most about pickleball are the friendships I have deepened (I have a regular game with my friends and colleagues Paul Bloom and Yoel Inbar) and the new friendships I have made. I went into this year looking for a new hobby, and what I found was not only that, but a new community, too.

The self-satisfied tennis snobs can stick to their elite country clubs and pressed whites. Instead, I'll stick to the parks and enjoy the sport that people mock. Sometimes the most rebellious thing to do is to refuse to care what others think. So what I’m saying is that playing pickleball is punk-rock. Nothing sticks it to the man quite like a sport that sounds like a sandwich topping.

If you need me this fall, I'll be on the courts, getting humbled by retirees and twenty-year-olds alike, finding community in the most unlikely place: a sport named after a dead dog, played with equipment from a toy store, bringing people together in laughter who have nothing in common but the knowledge that we look ridiculous.

The joke, it turns out, is the point.

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[1] I have changed people’s names to maintain confidentiality