Genie Bouchard needed her partner to pull his weight.
About two months before her Pickleball Slam 3 doubles match against Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf for a $1 million cash purse, Bouchard approached Andy Roddick’s wife, Brooklyn Decker, at a charity tennis event in the Bahamas.
“I was like, Brooklyn, you gotta make him practice,” Bouchard recalls. “She’s like, I’m trying. And Andy’s like, I am not practicing. And I was like, Dude, come on. I can’t carry the team here.” (The event takes place Sunday in Las Vegas and will air on ESPN.)
As Bouchard has learned, the journey from the baseline to the kitchen line is harder than it appears. Bouchard, who rose to prominence in 2014 when she became the first Canadian-born player to reach a Grand Slam singles final at Wimbledon and peaked as No. 5 in the world later that year, joined the PPA Tour last season. She embraced that circuit as her new competitive home, even if that meant starting from scratch.
Which, at first, meant adjusting to a smaller racket and unlearning her tennis habits. Bouchard, 31, finding herself mid-rally, has instinctively hit a tennis shot, only to lose the point. In tennis, she had been taught for 25 years that playing a soft, short ball would get her in trouble; in pickleball, though, it’s the opposite. A dink—a controlled shot designed to land in the kitchen—is weaponized as a strategic shot to create a difficult return.
“It’s a totally different skill set,” Bouchard says. “I went 0–9 in my first nine matches and I felt like the expectations from the outside were different than that. It’s like living in a whole new world.”
She’s beginning to find her place. In October, she reached a women’s singles semifinal for the first time, at the Las Vegas Open. Weeks later during a match, she executed an around the post, a shot hit from outside the sideline, around the net post and legally into play, and landed on the SportsCenter Top 10. She closed 2024 by going 15–8 after her winless start and reached No. 19 on the PPA Tour.
For Bouchard, though, the benefits of her career swap aren’t as directly tied to wins, losses and rankings. She only entered one WTA Tour event in 2024—a decision made more difficult by the fact that she considers tennis her first true love—but pickleball is easier on her body, and she enjoyed its lighter travel schedule. She’s had time to challenge herself and take on endeavors that make her feel more well-rounded, like her stint calling matches for the Tennis Channel over the summer. Even as she’s welcomed a different rhythm, Bouchard continues to push herself in new directions.
“Change is hard no matter what we’re talking about in life,” Bouchard says. “It’s easier to just keep doing the same thing than to change, right?”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Genie Bouchard’s Big Switch.
