Steve Tignor: With its deep-pocketed backers, pickleball made itself the talk of the sports world, for better or worse, in 2022. This was considered bad news for tennis; in the fight for court space, pickleball was on the offensive, and tennis in retreat.
The first thing to do in 2023 is admit that pickleball is here to stay, stop seeing it as a threat, and learn to live with our new sidekick sport, the way skiing learned to live with snowboarding. Some tennis-club owners will tell you that converting a court or two to pickleball has helped them stay in business. More important, as pickleball gets younger, there will be more opportunities for tennis to position itself as the next step up on the racquet-sport evolutionary tree.