There is a form of panic that sets in the first time you set foot on a court as an adult. You are holding a paddle you borrowed from a friend, wearing a skirt you bought for the occasion, and staring across a net at people who seem to know exactly what they are doing. The voice in your head is loud: I am too old to be a beginner. Everyone is looking at me. I should have just gone on a run.
But then, someone serves the ball.
You swing, you miss, you laugh, and suddenly, you are playing.
We are living in a golden age of adult beginners. For decades, the cultural narrative insisted that if you had not mastered a sport by high school, your athletic window had closed. Sports were for the people who had private coaches since they were seven or those with unhindered natural ability. The rest of us were relegated to the gym or the spectator stands. The craze exploded around Oura Rings and apps like Strava that — while highly useful — have optimized fitness in a way that makes it it just another task for you to complete.
That narrative is officially dead. We are officially calling it.
We’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because something shifted in the last couple years and it feels like we’re finally coming out the other side. It hasn’t disappeared entirely, but it’s loosening its grip. What’s replacing it is people are just playing again. Like, recreationally. For fun. The way we did when we were eleven and you lost track of time until the street lights came on.
The numbers back this up at record highs. The USTA reported that 25.7 million Americans played tennis last year, which is roughly one in twelve people and marks five straight years of growth. Pickleball hit nearly 20 million players with 311% growth since 2021, and padel went from fewer than 20 courts in the US in 2019 to over 650 across 31 states. But honestly, what’s more interesting is who is showing up.
It’s not athletes, per se. It’s women. In their late twenties-thirties. She maybe moved to a new city and needed to meet people who aren’t her coworkers. It’s moms who have exactly one hour a week that has nothing to do with their children or their spouses. Or the friend group that is moving away from Thursday happy hour and now does doubles instead… though they still do happy hour, obviously.
The Challengers Effect Is Real
The cultural permission to pick up a racket and just try reached a tipping point in the spring of 2024, and Luca Guadagnino’s film Challengers had a lot to do with it. The film, starring Zendaya, Josh O'Connor, and Mike Faist in a tennis love triangle that is more about desire and competition than actual tennis, did something unusual: it made the sport feel electric. The soundtrack itself both charted on Billboard’s Top 100 and won a Golden Globe. Google searches for "adult tennis lessons" spiked 245% after the film dropped.
Behind the scenes on the Challengers (2024) court — Luca Guadagnino directing the tennis scenes. Image: The New York Times
Watching Zendaya's Tashi Duncan command a court made tennis feel like something worth wanting. Her press tour, styled by Law Roach, leaned fully into the aesthetic with custom Loewe, Jacquemus, Thom Browne, all with a tennis-inflected sensibility. And the message landed: this sport has a world you can belong to.
It’s the exact same with padel, which is currently spreading through Miami and New York at record rates. By way of Europe, padel is tennis’s cooler, more social younger sibling. The court is smaller and you play in a glass box. The learning curve is forgiving enough that you can rally on your first day. It’s perfect for beginners. Condé Nast named padel the “New It-Girl Amenity at Luxury Hotels”. Rafael Nadal is building padel courts at his academy, and there are clubs opening in the Hamptons with cocktail bars attached. There are currently [over 30 million players worldwide](https://www.bbc.com/sport/articles/crrlnlj8lrxo#:~:text=With over 30 million padel,has never been more popular.), including our aforementioned friend Zendaya and her beau-to-be Tom Holland, who were just spotted in Sherman Oaks at a padel tournament.
Sunset Padel Miami — the new standard in luxury padel. Image: Resident Magazine
The Point Is to Be in the Room
Underneath all the participation stats and celebrity sightings, we think people just got tired of working out alone. The Peloton era was fun but fun isn't the same as fulfilling. It is lonely to “optimize your body” in a room by yourself, and a court sport fixes that immediately because you need at least one other person, usually four. You have to coordinate schedules, which means you have to text people, which means you have a built-in reason to reach out on a Tuesday afternoon. It’s low-stakes social infrastructure.
And the beginner thing—the being-bad-at-it thing—is normal, and okay. It is okay to not know what you’re doing. We spend so much of our adult lives performing competence: at work, at parenting, at keeping friendships alive. The bar for "good enough" keeps rising. Showing up to a pickleball court and whiffing the ball entirely is a relief because nobody is grading you. Nobody is keeping score. Well, someone is keeping score, but you know what I mean.
Last year Dirk Nowitzki—seven feet tall, NBA champion, one of the greatest basketball players ever—headlined a celebrity pickleball tournament in Dallas. He was not good at pickleball. He was having the time of his life.
This is not some radical act. It’s just playing a sport. But there is something worth noticing about the fact that millions of adults are choosing to be beginners right now, at a time when the culture rewards expertise above almost everything else.
You don’t need to post about it, though you probably will, because the outfits are good and the light at golden hour on a court is genuinely beautiful. The best reason to start something new is not to get good at it. It is to find the people who show up for the same reason you do: not to win, but to play.
