Honest question: Why?
There's a free court near me, and both balls and racquets can be gotten for peanuts.
There's a free court near me, and both balls and racquets can be gotten for peanuts.
https://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/facilities/tennis-courts
My grandmother would go collect them, and we always had a basket full of balls by the door.
By the early 2000s, people stopped using the tennis court very often, and the city tore down the chain link fence around the court to use as overflow parking for the adjacent little league fields.
There are a lot of couch potatoes that don't use their time, but they have it.
Not sure how they count, but for example I have a "free" netflix subscription through a tmobile phone plan. So it's easy to pump the numbers. I only watch like one episode of something every other year on netflix, so not exactly a real user of it.
Transit is indeed slower, but there are several big assumptions in there that don’t support your conclusion. In the US, only 15% of trips are commuting to work, the majority of trips are shopping, errands, and leisure. People with cars make more trips than transit users, and go out of their way for shopping, errands, and leisure more often, because they can, because it’s “faster” than transit. Driving commuters tend to drive to lunch, while transit commuters tend to bring one or walk. Transit users can sometimes get things done that can’t be done while driving, which can in some cases more than negate the added travel time. I think that’s a minority of transit users, but I spent a couple years commuting by train and working on the train, and I saved a considerable amount of time compared to driving. Because a lot of people spend this “more time” they saved commuting doing more driving for things other than work, drivers don’t actually have more time in practice.
Yes transit uses in practice get more, but it is incidental and lower quality exercise than someone who uses their extra time on a well developed gym plan. (There are of courseetransit users with a well developed gym plan)
The average US commute is less than 30 minutes, people aren't spending all that much time. And with a 30 minute commute, they are likely doing the same thing I am, passing by stores that are reasonable for many of their needs.
How come it's the opposite in practice?
It’s not. “In practice” ≈ “your assumption”
The poor town that I spent time in has 4 tennis courts in great condition that are almost never used.
Non-athletic adult people can't step onto a tennis court and consistently get the ball back to you, even if you hit it to them.
I thought Padel was easy, but when I organized a Padel after-work I saw that that was not reality, and Padel is much easier than tennis.
Tennis you can't play truly badly since the ball is in the air, so there's a skill floor, probably not too dissimilar from the skill floor required to play baseball.
Some sports that have a lower skill floor than tennis are table tennis, pickeball, badminton, association football and ice hockey. The thing to understand is that it's not about fitness, it's the skill floor. It's that the beginner will miss the ball or not be able to control it.
I think baseball requires significantly more coordination than tennis.
Moreover, baseball (as opposed to just playing catch with a baseball) requires two whole teams, whereas tennis can be played with only two people.
> ice hockey
[John McEnroe voice] You cannot be serious
Ice skating by itself is difficult for beginners. They fall all over the place. Ice skating while trying to follow and control a moving puck is even more difficult.
> it's not about fitness
Ok, but in the current context, the ROI of exercise, it's all about fitness. What's the fitness ROI from table tennis or badminton? Even pickleball tends to be less exercise than standard singles tennis. And in baseball too, there's a lot of standing around and sitting (when your team is at bat). I would say that in terms of exercise, singles tennis has one of the best ROI. (Doubles not so much.)
In the current context fitness matters, that wasn't the context of my statement about what makes tennis hard: what makes tennis hard isn't fitness. It's that people can't control a ball with a racket that actually keeps the energy in the ball.
> you can struggle
We may have different criteria for "fine".
In any case, the debate between hockey and tennis is largely moot, because the availability of ice skating rinks is vastly more limited than tennis courts, even in Minnesota and Wisconsin, though I can't speak for Sweden.
But everyone, even the foreigners, could skate. It was normal.
Or even just one and a brick wall.
Another reason is that a tennis court takes significant space for just 2 (or 4) people. So unless it is subsidized, when land is at a premium like in a large city, it is going to be expensive.
Also one cannot tennis alone. Anything one must practise with a partner is more expensive due to scheduling requirements.
Also, the whole point of the submitted article is that the investment of time into exercise is totally worth it.
Yes, there's a learning curve to tennis, as with any sport. You could just go jogging/running by yourself, but the advantage of sports, including tennis, is that they're usually a more fun and less boring form of exercise than jogging/running by yourself. If exercise is fun, then you're more likely to stick to it rather than skipping it.
I don't think they did say that. They just said wealthy people have more freedom on schedule that non wealthy people.
I'm not sure that's true though, unless by "wealthy" you mean trust fund kids. But there are millions of tennis players of various levels of income. A lot of salaried workers in upper income brackets work more than the usual 40 hour week, have less free time.
I'm guessing these engineers weren't playing a lot of tennis: https://www.folklore.org/90_Hours_A_Week_And_Loving_It.html