The Ultimate Convergence- Men & Women Aren't So Different After All!

As a kid, boys were terrifying, foreign creatures. They were gross, with boogers in spades, and had the incurable and serious affliction of being infested with “cooties”. Today, I won’t pretend to understand men (especially men my age… but I shouldn’t get into that, this is a pickleball newsletter after all🤪), but I have undoubtedly realized that we are more similar than we are different. And interestingly enough, we are becoming increasingly similar at the highest level on the pickleball court!

Pickleball is constantly evolving, and there are, of course, ebbs and flows to the “meta” with time. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the invention of the right-side alpha, and today I bring you the next piece in my series on macro-shifts in our beloved game: the convergence of the men and women’s games.

I can’t pretend to have been around when pickleball first began, and even though I do get occasionally gawked at when I say I’ve been playing for 4 years, I do not consider myself a veteran of the sport. I suppose at this point I’ve been around longer than most, but I was not around when professional pickleball first started up, when the PPA ran its first events, or when Anna Leigh and Leigh Waters fundamentally altered what women’s doubles looked like.

While I wasn’t around for those things, I’ve talked a lot to the people who were, and I’ve watched my fair share of vintage pickle. When I first started playing pickleball in 2021, the men’s and women’s games were largely viewed as being fundamentally different. Some skills were “male” (backhand flick), and others “female” (2-handed backhands). But, was it always this way? Is this shift towards “convergence” new, or have the prevailing styles always been different? Pickleball has a long history, after all.

Long story short, here I will argue that NO, there have not always been huge differences. When pickleball began, the men’s and women’s games were actually not that dissimilar. There’s a reason why the Waters were told their hyper-aggressive style wouldn’t work. It was viewed as being incorrect, even for women. They were too aggressive, too reckless, too spastic to win at the highest level. So what was working at the highest level?

This match is from Game 3 of a women’s doubles final in 2015 and features the first two GOATS of the women’s game, Sarah Ansboury and Simone Jardim. If you watch a bit of it, you’ll see a lot of dropping, slicing, volley dinking, holding the line, and aerial pulls. Things that we once thought were characteristic of men’s doubles! Also, both Sarah and Simone were not getting too many touches, and Simone was even hitting a lot of shots with topspin. She was definitely at the forefront of the revolution of women’s game and more than deserves her flowers.

So, if at one point the prevailing game styles were not too dissimilar, what caused women’s to diverge so significantly? How did the #1 men’s team in the world, Ben and Collin Johns, embody “steady, measured, cerebral” play for so long, while the #1 women’s team, Anna Leigh and Leigh Waters, embodied chaos, power, topspin, and a determination to hit their way out of trouble? Why did men only start figuring out these things could work, situationally, in the last few years? The short answer is that women are smarter. KIDDING (mostly). Sorry, couldn’t resist🤪.

While improvements in paddle technology have definitely had an impact on our game’s development, I feel the wood paddle tournament from a few weeks ago demonstrated quite irrefutably that most of the game’s progress is simply due to players having gotten better. The wood paddles were more outdated than what was being used in 2015, and the level of play was still absurdly high and the game didn’t look much different in Sacramento. 

I think the main reasons the Waters (and other aggressive women) found so much success with their new, aggressive style of play is two-fold: 

Being a better athlete is not an insult to the people who started our game. It’s just a fact. Pickleball has only gotten younger, and athletes better than me will come along (and in all honesty, I’ve never been that amazing an athlete anyway, as we all know from my many failed attempts to dabble in other sports), and the ceiling of the sport will continue to rise. Being athletic helped Simone, the Waters, and other female revolutionaries because it allowed them to

These things changed what had formerly been thought possible, and when your opponents are holding the kitchen line religiously, picking spots is very easy. Women come off the line more than men because we are smaller and not as strong. If I had to hold the kitchen line always, I think my DUPR would drop by 0.5. I would just not be able to defend my body effectively or generate much of any power at extension as I wouldn’t have much time to do the backswing I need to get any oomph on the ball. 

I wrote extensively last week on the rise of the right side alpha, and I highly recommend you read that if you want more context on how the men’s game has changed and become more chaotic in the last few years. The rise of players like Gabe Tardio, Christian Alshon, and Hayden Patriquin who brought a level of creativity, variety, and dynamicity altered men’s doubles fundamentally. Players like Matt Wright and Dylan Frazier began this change, but in my view, a large, aggressive, chaotic, and relatively spastic men’s doubles style (on the right) wasn’t proven as consistently viable until the first three players I mentioned started consistently winning titles on the right in 2024. To put it succinctly… Gabe Tardio, the most dynamic, long, elastic, and wristy player in the male game is Ben Johns’ partner, while Collin (perhaps the polar opposite player of Gabe), is not.

So the men’s game is more chaotic… that must mean that the women’s game is… less? If that’s the entire point I am making? And, it is. At the highest level, I believe that women’s doubles is becoming grindier. Of course, if you look at early rounds and blowout score lines, it is not. But as the level of athleticism and power improves, it stands to reason that the careless pulls that worked once will not work as often anymore.

A team like Tyra Black and Jorja Johnson, when hot, will punish careless attacks. Their hands are unreal, their power elite, they are both good at their body, and they are both lethal out of the air on their respective sides. And don’t even get me started on the defense. They actually play a very masculine style. And while Anna Leigh and I most definitely do not💅🏼, we are both working hard on getting better out of the air, and I in particular, am working on earning the right ball to attack. Careless aggression against the best women just doesn’t work anymore. I feel this also rings true in how mixed doubles has developed, but I don’t have the time or energy to get into that right now.

Of course, when relentless banging works, that is what I will always prefer. It’s simply more efficient, more fun, and more flashy. But I recognize that disciplined play is now necessary to beat top teams as the counters improve, players hit the ball harder, and as players get better at mixing up their court positioning (being on/off the line). 

I would be remiss to not shout out Chris Haworth and Lea Jansen for winning the Life Time Open yesterday and each taking home a 50K (!!!) check for their efforts. Lea had one of the more iconic starts to her final against Parris I’ve seen and demonstrated that any Sliders loyalty was going to be on hold in that match: 

Chris’ match was also epic, in which he came back from being down 2 games to 1 to beat Federico Staksrud handily in the fourth and fifth games. This year, we have seen something we have never really seen before in men’s singles, something once thought to be… feminine. Many men are now opting to stay back on the return of serve! There were even multiple rallies in this match that extended for 5+ shots in which Federico Staksrud chose to try to rally with Chris rather than come in and risk getting passed. It was once thought that men should always come in and that cat and mouse was the predominant style of play, but again, the meta is shifting. It was once thought women were too small to recklessly come to the net, but now… as passing shots have improved… perhaps the men are on occasion too small too? 

So while yes, of course, there will always be differences between the men’s and women’s games, I’d argue that as pickleball continues to become more “solved” and as both the level and the caliber of athlete playing rises, the games will continue to move in a similar direction. No longer are “flicks” reserved only for men, or “2-handed backhand dinks/drops/counters” only for women. Men like Christian and Ben have even developed them from nothing, signifying just how important it is to have every shot. Stay tuned for my next piece on meta shifts, in which I will cover this in more depth😊. Thank you so much for reading, and please share with a friend if you enjoyed! See everyone on Thursday from Las Vegas!