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Q . I ’ ve heard a lot about new paddle standards , including a new way to measure paddle power . What is the new standard and why was it adopted ?
A USA Pickleball has technical standards meant to limit both the power of a paddle and its ability to add spin to a ball . These limits were included in the Official Rulebook until a few years ago , when it was decided that they required their own publication and revision methods . The details are available on the USA Pickleball website at usapickleball . org / docs / eec / Equipment-Standards-Manual . pdf .
Paddle technology , of course , has evolved . Wooden paddles , which are still used in many schools because of durability , gave way to lightweight sturdy plastic honeycomb or foam core structures with smooth faces . Paddle designs also included variations on surface roughness and shape , including “ yoke ” handles and paddles with textured surfaces .
As these advancements developed , USA Pickleball added specifications on characteristics like surface roughness to limit spin , and on “ deflection ,” a term used to quantify the amount a paddle is permitted to flex when a weight is placed on its surface . This limitation on flex was , and remains , one method of limiting the power of a paddle but designers were hard at work continuing to innovate .
Carbon fiber face paddles arrived on the scene and the woven fiber faces were shown to add some ball “ control ,” but these new paddle surfaces could sometimes be “ damaged ” by heavy use . One form of the damage was “ delamination ,” where the face of the paddle was no longer attached to the core material . A delaminated face was found , in some cases , to store more energy when struck since the face material could move like a “ trampoline ,” increasing the speed of a ball leaving the paddle face . USA Pickleball developed test methods to by BOB UNETICH
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detect delamination , and many pro tournaments adopted on-site paddle testing procedures .
Another concern was the risk of paddles becoming even more powerful , so an effort began to quantify the power a paddle could deliver to a ball by measuring the speed of a ball after contact with the paddle face . Other sports have had very similar investigations over the years and the results are ball speed limits developed specifically for those sports , like baseball .
The speed an object acquires when struck by another object is a classic physics problem and in fact its solution was called “ restitution theory ” by Sir Isaac Newton in 1687 , a term he used to “ describe the relationship between the velocities of two objects before and after a collision .” In essence , this theory says that some of the initial energy involved in a collision is “ restored ” to an object after the collision .
Today this is known as the “ coefficient of restitution ,” or COR , and in pickleball it is called PBCOR . Pickleball paddles , in fact , have a rather low COR compared to other sports like racquetball , which is , in many opinions , one of the factors that makes pickleball so playable . In this sport , it means that the ball does not come off the paddle any faster than about 40 percent the speed that it was moving relative to the paddle — a remarkably low ratio compared , for instance , to racquetball .
Other test procedures are also evolving , like the measurement of the spin a ball achieves when it strikes a paddle at various angles . We should expect to see the rules and test procedures for equipment , including balls , continue to change . The Rulebook clearly states this objective of the rules : “ To preserve the traditional nature and character of the sport and the skills traditionally required to play the sport .” •
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