A look at racquet sports in the US

RacquetX and marketing agency LaneTerralever (LT) published a report titled Who’s on the Court: A Profile of Today’s Racquet Sports Player, available online, to lay out the results of a survey they conducted in February of this year.

The sample was 506 people in the US who have played “at least one racquet sport in the past year” and, the authors say, “represents a solid cross-section of U.S. consumers of all ages, geographies, income levels, and ethnicities.” However, it “slightly” oversamples households with annual incomes above $100,000 “because that population tends to have the most time and disposable funds for sports activities.”

Here are the key findings:

• “Tennis is here to stay, with 53% of people reporting it was their primary racquet sport played.”
• “Many pickleball players (39%) also play tennis.”
• “Public courts are the most popular places to play.”
• “Badminton is popular among younger consumers.”
• “Racquet sports have appeal across all generations and different demographics.”
• “Most people (76%) play at least weekly.”
• “17% of people play daily or multiple times a day.”
• “Non-sport-specific workout clothes are the most popular player attire.”
• “Health trackers are the most valued technology, but scheduling and social apps are also popular.”

The top four racquet sports overall are tennis (80%), table tennis (51%), pickleball (47%) and badminton (39%). Almost all of the respondents (99%) plan to keep doing what they’re doing, and more than half (56%) plan to play more, with almost half (43%) planning to add a racquet sport. Women, it turns out, are more interested in adding a racquet sport than men (48% vs 36%).

It turns out, in addition, that most of the respondents already play more than one racquet sport and that tennis players are the most likely to play other sports regularly (four or more times a year). Those sports are table tennis (50%), pickleball (39%), badminton (32%), racquetball (23%), pádel (16%) and squash (8%).

For pickleball players, the sports are tennis (67%); table tennis (44%), badminton (19%), racquetball (18%), pádel (8%) and squash (7%).

US amateurs are unofficial

“A mere 13% of respondents report being a member of a professional association or other membership group.” This looks low from a European perspective but is likely due to a transatlantic difference in the administration of sports.

Joining a sport’s national federation is, for European players, usually a prerequisite to joining a club. This is not often the case in the US. A lot of American youth competitive play is organized through school districts, many of which operate at the county level. Private local leagues tend to operate on their own, negotiating with one another for cross-league play. And club enrollment for youths and adults alike is generally limited to the club in question.

However, there are indeed governing bodies in the US. USA Baseball, for example, has “nearly every major national amateur baseball organization in America” as a member. But the membership, you’ll notice, is made up of organizations, not players.

The governing body for tennis, the US Tennis Association (USTA), has a membership of both organizations and players – 7,000 and 680,000 respectively. Player-wise this is about 3 to 6 percent of the American total. According to USTA’s own Participation Report for 2024, the US boasts about 23.8 million at-least-casual players (aged 6 or more and having played at least once in 2023) and 11.8 million “core” players (having played at least ten times in 2023).

Moreover, as the next statistics suggest, there is a transatlantic difference in infrastructure. Many public parks in the US offer racquet courts of some kind, with no checkpoint and thus no flashing of membership cards or ID. You walk in, close the gate behind you and play. You needn’t join anything. You just buy your gear before you go.

Most American racquet sports players (60%) play at these “public/community courts,” as the report calls them. The next most popular spot is gyms (14%). Only after this do we get to racquet clubs (11%) and private country clubs (10%). A minority (5%) have courts at home. From this, the report infers that “a huge opportunity exists for the private sector to invest in public spaces to make racquet sports accessible to all.”

The report also observes that pickleball courts are proliferating in such public spaces, “as well as in office buildings and shopping malls.” It stands to reason that such investments would only drive down federation memberships – as would the next suggestion: that “communities should consider repurposing some of their recreation spaces to incorporate” pádel, whose courts, like those of pickleball, take up relatively little space.

It stands to reason, too, that statistics would be harder to come by in the US because, for most sports play, nothing is set up to generate them. Hence, there is a need for surveys.

Racquets and generations

The report breaks down racquet sports by player age as well. If the sample is, in fact, representative of the US population, then at least four things stand out:

• Tennis is king among Americans, no matter how old they are (although there is an exception, detailed below)
• Pickleball has achieved near-universal popularity, with close to 50 percent of all American racquet-wielders taking part
• American generational differences show up best in the mid-market sports: table tennis, badminton, pickleball and racquetball
• Pádel appears to be a sport of the future in the US (the younger Americans, the more likely they are to play it)

A sport fades

Racquetball, incidentally, appears to be on the wane. Three years ago, Racket Rampage posted an analysis of the phenomenon and advanced seven reasons. The most compelling to us, which we have somewhat restated, are:

• Low profit per unit of space
• Unattractiveness on television (no visual variety because the court is small, is always viewed from the back, etc.)
• Low purses for professionals – in part, we imagine, because there’s so little coverage on TV or elsewhere (the result: few people dream of racquetball stardom)

The first of these reasons, Racket Rampage argues, stems in part from the rise of fitness.

Well, Joe Sobek, the “father of racquetball,” made “paddle racquets with strings” (paddle, not pádel!) during the Korean War and began making his frames of an aluminum alloy in 1971, according to USA Racquetball’s history of the sport. Only six years later, a documentary called Pumping Iron was bringing the muscleheads of Venice Beach and Gold’s Gym to public notice, and the rivalry at its center soon yielded the first live-action portrayal of the Incredible Hulk, with Lou Ferrigno and a genuine movie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Buff bodies got a lot of exposure, and the next two decades saw the heyday of the exercise tape. It’s no wonder that many in the general public began to train body parts directly rather than play a sport (have fun) and reap the ancillary benefits.

There was, in fact, another guy who was preaching the gospel of fitness in the US before all this and was a household name in the country for decades. This was Jack Lalanne (1914–2011), who seems to have some claim on the invention of the leg-extension machine, swam cuffed and shackled from Alcatraz to shore, and hosted a nationally syndicated TV show on exercise, The Jack Lalanne Show, for 34 years (1951–85).

Anyway, according to Racket Rampage, the rise of fitness “meant that racquetball courts were taken down or changed into fitness centers.” This could be, but it would be difficult to confirm.

Another piece of evidence in the analysis is a chart of Google searches for “racquetball” from 2004 to 2021. It shows an overall decline. The internet multiplied in size over that period, but should the increasing mass of data generate more or fewer searches, all other things being equal? After all, there are now more sports and more websites looking at things from more angles than ever before, and the internet’s growth far outstrips that of the world’s population.

Being in doubt, we’ve redone the analysis for racquetball, which shows flattish interest but also a drop in March 2020, just before the lockdowns hit for real. The sport has yet to recover.

Racquetball:

We’ve also extended the analysis. Google Trends permits comparisons of no more than five search queries, so we’ve generated two charts: for the top five and the bottom five racquet sports as listed in the generational chart, above. Our time window covers the past five years.

Top five:

Bottom five:

Racquets and money

Who’s on the Court divided respondents into two income categories: below and above $100,000 per year.

The report points out two things: that pickleball is popular among the rich, and that badminton is popular among the young, “who are just realizing their earning potential.” We’d like to add another: rich people, it seems, don’t play tennis.

This seems to fly in the face of tennis’s reputation as the most expensive of the racquet sports. If we assume that gear costs the same regardless of sport, the cost of court time alone ought to put tennis over the top. After all, it has the biggest court, and the bigger the court, the fewer the matches that can be played per unit area over time.

We speculate, though, that the highest earners among racquet sports players tend also to be the oldest, and tennis, whatever it costs, is the likely most strenuous of the racquet sports. Along with the speed and bounce of the ball, the size of the court probably determines the strain of playing the sport. Pickleball has the smallest court, followed by pádel. This and history – pádel hasn’t yet become big in the US – probably accounts for the popularity of pickleball among both the oldest and the richest of the survey’s respondents.

Racquets and tech

Finally, the report supplies us with a ranking of “sports-related technology” – apps, really – in racquet sports.

Unfortunately, the report mentions but does not explore on-court tech, in contradistinction to the tech players might have on their smartphone