(Photo typti)
Many tennis players around the globe have been in recent times complaining that their courts were being taken over by the pickleball craze.
Now a brand new sport, launched last month, is looking to take over the pickleball courts.
Steve Bellamy, founder of the Tennis Channel, announced the launch of TYPTI, a new racquet sport played on a standard pickleball court, at a star-studded event in California late last month.
TYPTI is being claimed as a revolutionary new racket sport that melds the explosive action and elegance of tennis, the shotmaking of badminton and the social benefits of being atop a pickleball court
And more importantly it is a sport that makes practically no noise, an issue that has been a bane with pickleball.
TYPTI is played atop the same 20X44 court used by Pickleball and Badminton, using a standard Pickleball net.
The sport is played with a 22-inch carbon fiber racket, 3.5-inch channeled foam ball and employs a completely different scoring methodology than other racket and paddle sports called ‘Stakes Scoring.’
While the rallying aspects of the sport are similar to tennis and pickleball, the game is very different as the higher bounce and ability to produce ball spin allows for extraordinary hard and heavy ball strikes.
Players can load, explode and rip groundstrokes that go in consistently, and they can dictate shots in an artisanal manner because they have significant control of depth and trajectory of the ball through spin.
Points are often spectacular because the nature of the bounce allows players on the defense more time and ability to make Hail Mary shots. The sport employs a net rebound rule unique to racket and paddle sports that allows players another strike on a netted ball as long as they don’t use the string bed. They can use any body part or any part of the racket that doesn’t involve the string bed.
Players can also use any body part to make a ball strike at any time in the point. These rules afford some of the most artisanal and athletic points in all of racquet sports. Most of all TYPTI is super fun as you end up doing things with the ball that are much more challenging in other racquet and paddle sports.
It is hardly a month old since it was unveiled, but the first World Championships is already being planned within the next 18-months and offering a US$100,000 prize money.
Pickleball was founded in 1965 but is only seeing a boom in recent. Can TYPTI make it big in a much shorter time?
You can never discount it as it will have the backing of the Tennis Channel and more than 80 high profile investors including the likes of Tony Robbins, Chris Pine, JJ Abrams, Tiffany Haddish, Kyle MacLachlan, Nick Kyrgios and Milos Raonic.
