Pickleball on the Eclipse info

[wtang]

We just disembarked from a 7 day Bermuda cruise on the Eclipse today. A few folks have asked about pickleball on Celebrity ships so I thought I'd share some info about the Eclipse. First let me say I've never played pickleball before but my daughter and I were curious to try it. I've played a lot of tennis and ping pong so I'm not unfamiliar with racket sports. Anyway, the Eclipse doesn't have a dedicated pickleball court. What they did was paint pickleball court lines on the basketball court and set up a portable net. They had  "pickleball open play" sessions listed in the dailies a few times during the week. If you don't have your own equipment, like us, you can borrow the paddles and balls from the Excursion Desk on deck 3 and head up to the sports court on deck 15, all the way forward. Now here's the problem. If the ship is at sea (moving) it's extremely windy on the sports court. It's almost impossible to control the lightweight pickleball on the windy court. The second issue is the floor of the sports court is sort of soft and padded. That's probably good when young children from the kids camp play there, but the pickleball barely bounces at all. Is that normal for a pickleball court? I always imagined pickleball courts being a hard surface which lends a decent bounce, but I may be wrong. We did manage to play for a bit on one of the port days, with zero wind, and it was fun. Due to the no bounce surface, we mainly just volleyed the ball back and forth, keeping it in the air.

[NutsAboutGolf]

Pickleball balls should ideally bounce; the sport was born on a badminton court but is often played on converted tennis courts.  How many hours was it open?  There are reports of lots of noise and therefore they limit the hours

[wtang]

Each open play pickleball session was either 11am-4pm or 11am-2:15pm followed by a pickleball tournament at 2:15pm. Looking over the dailies I brought home, it looks like pickleball was scheduled every day. Here's a photo of the court.

[zitsky]

On 7/14/2024 at 2:19 PM, wtang said:

We just disembarked from a 7 day Bermuda cruise on the Eclipse today. A few folks have asked about pickleball on Celebrity ships so I thought I'd share some info about the Eclipse. First let me say I've never played pickleball before but my daughter and I were curious to try it. I've played a lot of tennis and ping pong so I'm not unfamiliar with racket sports. Anyway, the Eclipse doesn't have a dedicated pickleball court. What they did was paint pickleball court lines on the basketball court and set up a portable net. They had  "pickleball open play" sessions listed in the dailies a few times during the week. If you don't have your own equipment, like us, you can borrow the paddles and balls from the Excursion Desk on deck 3 and head up to the sports court on deck 15, all the way forward. Now here's the problem. If the ship is at sea (moving) it's extremely windy on the sports court. It's almost impossible to control the lightweight pickleball on the windy court. The second issue is the floor of the sports court is sort of soft and padded. That's probably good when young children from the kids camp play there, but the pickleball barely bounces at all. Is that normal for a pickleball court? I always imagined pickleball courts being a hard surface which lends a decent bounce, but I may be wrong. We did manage to play for a bit on one of the port days, with zero wind, and it was fun. Due to the no bounce surface, we mainly just volleyed the ball back and forth, keeping it in the air.

That sounds like a dedicated court to me.  Did you stop when folks wanted to play basketball?  

Edited July 15 by zitsky