Pickleball is a phenomenon that has swept the nation; its competitive, yet leisurely nature made it a great success.
Quinnipiac University is no exception, with its intramural sports program offering a pickleball league open to students in the fall and new outdoor pickleball courts.
The pickleball craze has created some problems in the university’s community, most notably the catastrophic impact it has had on students’ nightly pickup basketball games. Many nights, basketball players gather at Burt Kahn Court in the Recreation and Wellness Center only to be turned away because pickleball players are using the courts.
The pickleball courts are now painted on top of the basketball courts, so an area that can normally be used for 10 people is now being used for one-on-one pickleball.
Students like myself go to the Recreation and Wellness Center almost every night to play basketball and owe a lot of our college experience to those green courts.
Though now with intramural pickleball, that experience is in jeopardy. A standard basketball court (like the ones in RecWell) is 94 feet by 50 feet and a pickleball court is 44 feet by 20 feet, meaning that two pickleball courts could be set up on one basketball court, instead of the current one-to-one setup.
In my opinion, this is an extreme waste of space, as there is a much larger community of pick-up basketball players than pickleball, and it takes that space away.
There needs to be a better balance between the two activities and the space they take up. Without a solution, students will continue to see up to four basketball courts used by as little as eight people, while upwards of 20 are gathered around a single one. This problem will only continue as the weather gets colder further into the semester.
It is great that university intramurals are inclusive to all sports including pickleball, but there needs to be better management of the shared space in the recreation center. Pickup basketball is extremely important to the students at Quinnipiac, and they shouldn’t suffer just because another activity needs the space.
