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@rogs I haven't followed tennis in a while; but, Agassi (long retired) is raving about pball on youtube & various podcasts. Probably unlikely that someone would switch at this point, but over decades, pball seems to have some big advantages over tennis. Tennis is definitely the king of racquet sports but it's just so much easier to start playing pball, etc. etc. I think their equipment ramp is going nuts right now which is very bad for the sport long term.
Having some guarantee of equal equipment power w/out spending thousands on it so that there wouldn't be a cost barrier to getting serious would help a ton, both in 1st world countries but also internationally. In general like nearly everything else in the sports world, there's huge effort spent on optimizing play under today's rules, and exploiting them, and nearly no effort in iterating/adjusting/refining the rules to make the game better for what the goals actually are.
i.e. pball's goals at the highest level are NOT to "get the best and most players who play the rules as written in the rulebook now", they're to "get a game which embodies the things we all love about what we do when we play pball, including modifications to rules, field, equipment etc to preserve that". They've done a good job preventing too much focus on the serve to take over the game even at high levels, which is great. But it's going to take eternal vigilance to fend off people who push for legalizing (very expensive, slightly "better" at playing) equipment which leads to it being basically mandatory at the highest levels, requiring everyone to buy in to even get there
@Ernie I was actually just coming back to this page to post that Agassi is spending a lot of time on PB. Not sure if "full time", but it seems possible that he could qualify at some point.
https://www.tennis.com/baseline/articles/andre-agassi-to-make-pro-pickleball-debut-with-anna-leigh-waters-at-us-open-pickleball-championships