Also, does anyone know where all this pickleball hype is coming from? I’m sure it’s a fun sport, but with how quickly it’s taken off it feels like someone is spending some serious cash to make pickleball a big thing
It didn’t take off quickly. It started as a backyard game in the mid 60s among bored kids, and grew very slowly for decades. I was playing on a court in a friend’s back yard in the 80s. His dad was a big enough fan to lay tarmac for it. It just hit a tipping point in the last 15 years or so when it became popular enough that people could start making money off of it. So yeah, people are putting money into it because there’s a profit to be made. But mostly the game just became popular because it’s fun, cheap, and easy to pick up.