Are we looking at more service rule changes in the near future?
A quick history on the service rules:
- Major League Pickleball has adopted a more lenient service rule compared to USA Pickleball – essentially, the player just has to have the paddle moving in an "upward" trajectory. MLP doesn’t care where – compared to your body position – the ball is hit from.
- On the PPA Tour, the rule in 2024 has been that the ball also needs to be hit below the hip and dropped from below the hip.
- Last week, Zane Navratil tweeted this. Essentially, the PPA eliminated the drop-from-below-the-hip rule.
If you want to go back and re-watch some very high serves from this last week, you can watch the singles gold medal match between Tyson McGuffin and Connor Garnett. Skip ahead to the second game, as Tyson didn’t get to serve in game one 🤣.
Herein lies the problem: It seems the referees know the rule is for the ball to be hit below the hip, but it is VERY subjective where exactly the hip is, and referees are hesitant to call a high serve.
In order to fix the problem, the players council is trying out ideas. I assume no one wanted this experiment to be leaked, but here we are. It would be like asking a marketing team to brainstorm ideas and the public gets to look at every idea – good or bad.
Initial reaction
This would make pickleball look even closer to tennis, and I don’t think that is good for the game. In addition, if we want to take subjectivity out of the game, this would be yet another line that players would have to call in or out – which we have witnessed doesn’t work well.
Players reacted quickly to the leaked footage from Goldin’s post:
We will see if this becomes a real thing. I doubt it does. If the players council believes the current serves are bad for the game, they will continue to problem solve ways to fix it.
This just seems like another bad idea in a big brainstorming session. Let’s not get too upset about it.
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