Pickleball England has gone public over its attempts to resist the Lawn Tennis Association’s rival bid to become pickleball’s official UK governing body.
Although Pickleball England has effectively run pickleball activity – including competitions, coaching and governance – since its inception in 2019, it is yet to be officially recognised as a sport by Sport England.
Pickleball England submitted its full application to Sport England to become the official UK governing body in April last year. Pickleball England say Sport England asked them to meet with the LTA, which happened on two occasions in June and October.
At the second meeting the LTA made three proposals about future governance. All options resulted in pickleball being under the LTA and proposed pickleball to be part of its ‘Tennis Opened Up’ initiative, aimed at the inclusion of younger and older players. Pickleball England rejected this plan, stating that pickleball was a sport for all ages and, in any case, did not want to be a subcategory of tennis.
The LTA instead submitted their own separate bid to become pickleball’s governing body – and both bids are set to be reviewed by Sport England’s Board in late March.
These undertakings have so far occurred behind closed doors – until Monday February 26 when James Chaudry (pictured below), English singles champion and Pickleball England’s Strategy and Development Advisor, gave an interview to the Daily Telegraph to bring the battle to wider public attention.
Pickleball is set to pick the brains of leading figures in British padel – a sport which was annexed by the LTA in 2019. Padel has exploded in popularity since, but the LTA’s role in that growth is much debated, with nearly all of padel’s infrastructure being driven by huge private investment into clubs.
The LTA’s development of key elements such as padel coaching qualifications and junior programmes has been criticised, although those inside the organisation charged with driving padel’s growth site the difficulties of developing a sport’s infrastructure pretty much from scratch.
As reported by Pickleball 52 last week, Pickleball England expects the number of players in this country to rise to around 25,000 by the end of this year. It has run three years’ worth of hugely successful English Open and English Nationals events and is launching its own certified coaching qualifications very soon.
Pickleball England Chair Karen Mitchell told us: “I am hopeful that Sport England understands the importance of allowing a nascent sport to be developed by a dedicated body that has demonstrated that it can drive growth of the sport. Forcing a sport under a governing body that has multiple sports already, means that it will be competing internally for resources and exposure.”
In response, an LTA spokesperson issued a statement to Pickleball52. It said: “Pickleball is an exciting sport with a large potential cross-over audience amongst tennis players.
“We believe that the LTA’s relationship with over 15,000 registered venues, 1.5m tennis fans on our database and an existing infrastructure around coaching, safeguarding, facility investment and workforce could be hugely beneficial to pickleball and help it to grow and flourish.
“We were open to collaborating with Pickleball England on any application to Sport England for NGB status and approached them to explore this, but ultimately they chose to put in a separate application.”
We are still open to collaborating with the LTA in the future. To be clear, we had already submitted our application to Sport England in April 2023 and our first meeting with the LTA was June 2023. We have always wanted our application to be reviewed on its own merit.