Widening the Nets Won't Fix Pickleball — and Neither Will Most of the Other 'Fixes'

Andre Agassi went on the Pickleballers Podcast, got asked what he’d change about pickleball, and floated an idea that’s been bouncing around the sport ever since: widen the net posts. The logic is actually clever. Make the net wider and you can rip a sharper cross-court dink without handing your opponent an around-the-post winner. That forces the player hogging the middle to respect the sideline, which means they can’t camp the center and eat 70% of the court anymore.

It’s the kind of idea that sounds great for about ten seconds. Then you actually think it through and realize the cure is worse than the disease — and that, like almost every pickleball rule-change proposal, it’s solving a problem that doesn’t exist for 99% of the people who play.

Let me make the unpopular case: the game is fine. Stop trying to re-weld it.

First, give Agassi his due

The thing he’s pointing at is real. At a high level, one player — usually the stronger one, usually the man in mixed — plants himself in the middle and takes everything he can reach. The other three players spend the rally trying to avoid him. Critics call it poaching; it narrows the court and the fear of the ATP keeps everyone hitting safe, straight-ahead dinks instead of opening up angles.

So yes, “one player dominates the geometry and the other becomes a spectator” is a genuine dynamic. Agassi isn’t hallucinating. He’s just wrong about the fix.

Why wider nets backfire

Here’s the part the idea skips. Take the dynamic to its logical end in pro mixed. The whole reason the stronger player clogs the middle is that it’s the only way they stay in the rally — take that away and they vanish from the point entirely. Make the middle uncoverable and you don’t get a more balanced, dynamic game. You get 95% of points being two players dinking cross-court at each other while their partners watch. That’s not more exciting. That’s less.

And it cascades from there:

• Longer dink rallies, not more athleticism. Widen the angles and you don’t open the court up, you just extend the patty-cake. The pro men’s game becomes a battle of attrition — who can dink cross-court the longest without blinking.
• You make it easier to hunt the weak link. More angle means it’s easier to isolate and pick on the weakest player on the court. Now the game is dominated by whoever’s worst, which is a miserable thing to watch or play.
• It kills the ATP, which is the fun part. The around-the-post is one of the genuinely thrilling shots in pickleball, and defending it has gotten good — that’s a dynamic, highlight-reel exchange. “Let’s eliminate the exciting shot to slightly reduce poaching” is a strange trade.
• It quietly kills the Erne too. Players routinely cross past the post when they Erne; a wider net means more bodies running into more net. There goes another creative shot.

Change one part of the game and you change the entire game — usually in ways you didn’t intend.

The “70% of the court” thing isn’t a bug

Here’s the bigger philosophical problem. The complaint underneath all of this is that the best player takes the most court. But… that’s how every sport works.

The best hitters get the most at-bats. The best scorers take the most shots. Star receivers get thrown to the most. Nobody watches the NBA and demands a rule that makes the best player touch the ball less so the role players can get more shine. We want to see the best players doing the most. In pickleball, “doing the most” partly means owning real estate. Taking the middle is a skill, not a loophole.

The honest version of the complaint isn’t “the game is broken.” It’s “I keep getting stuck with the young buck who takes all my middle balls.” That’s not a rules problem. That’s a partner conversation.

And then there’s reality

Even if you wanted to do it, you can’t. There are millions of courts and nets in the world. Widening the posts means physically re-building every single one — new posts, new nets, often fewer courts per facility because the footprint grows. The gym that barely fits three courts now fits two. The logistical cost runs to the absurd. At most this is a pro-tour experiment with a three-inch fin strapped on the posts, and even the pros have little appetite for a separate rulebook fans have to relearn.

So we’re debating a change that makes the pro product worse and can essentially never ship. Cool.

Pickleball has a rule-change addiction

The wider-net thing is just this week’s version. The sport is awash in proposed fixes: slow the ball down, lengthen the kitchen, shrink the baseline, switch to badminton- or MLP-style scoring, mandate quieter paddles, add a two-touch volleyball rule. Every few weeks someone — often someone fairly new to the sport, often a crossover star with a tennis-shaped view of the world — decides the game needs an overhaul.

Most of it is tinkering for tinkering’s sake. And there’s a tell: the people most eager to redesign pickleball are frequently the ones who’ve played it the least. The sport is young enough that it feels editable, like a video game waiting for a patch. But the games that last become institutions precisely because they change at a glacial pace. Stability is a feature.

What’s actually worth experimenting with

I’m not a total purist. A couple of these deserve real testing — just not by decree:

1. Noise. A quieter ball or paddle standard is the one change with a genuine constituency (every neighbor of every court). That’s worth serious work.
2. Scoring format. Rally scoring is already used in places and doesn’t require rebuilding the physical world — easy to trial, easy to reverse.
3. Ball and paddle spec. If you want a slightly slower, longer game, the ball and the paddle are the cheap dials to turn — not the net posts.

The common thread: test the things you can actually undo, at lower-stakes events, and watch what happens — the way other sports trial rules in the minors before touching the show. Experiment freely at the top. Just don’t mandate that the entire planet re-net its courts because the pro meta got a little stale.

And none of this is your problem anyway

Here’s the part that gets lost every single time one of these debates flares up: none of it touches your game.

You are not playing pro mixed. The “poaching problem” at your level isn’t a structural flaw in the sport — it’s Johnny parking himself in the middle to show off, and the fix costs nothing. Talk to your partner. Learn where you’re actually supposed to stand. Get your third-shot drop consistent so you earn the net in the first place. Those three things will transform your results more than any net-post relocation ever could.

The best “rule change” available to a rec player is getting better at the rules we already have. Everything else is podcast content.

So no, I wouldn’t widen the nets. I’d leave them exactly where they are, let the pros experiment with the dials that don’t require a forklift, and spend the energy we’re pouring into redesigning the sport on, you know, playing it.

The game isn’t broken. We just got good enough to start nitpicking it.

Disagree? Tell me which rule you’d change — and then go count how many courts you’d have to rebuild to do it.