When pickleball killed gully cricket, and sports stopped being free

Now, I see tweens heading to the nets in branded gear for their scheduled weekly playtime. Playing “outside” is no longer the default. Schoolkids have traded the dirt patch in their gully for a pre-booked pickleball court, and mum-made nimbu paani for vending-machine Gatorade.

What’s changed is not just where we play, but how we understand play itself. What was once spontaneous and free now comes with a time slot, a fee, and a fixed boundary. The game hasn’t disappeared—it has simply been relocated, from open gullies to enclosed courts, from imagination to infrastructure. And in that shift, something quieter has been lost: the freedom to begin without permission.

When playtime began with a holler

There was a time when sport didn’t need organising—it only needed an ungodly shriek from your buddy. A friend yelling your name from downstairs was enough to get a game going. No messages, no coordination, no “Are you free at 6?” You just showed up. The rest figured itself out.

We played with whatever we could find. A scuffed tennis ball stood in for a leather one, a withered shuttlecock was good enough for badminton, and chalk—when we could find it—became our boundary lines and makeshift nets. Wickets were plastic chairs, school bags, or three uneven bricks stacked with great optimism. Streets doubled up as cricket pitches, parking lots became badminton courts, and any open space was fair game as long as a watchman didn’t chase us away.

There was no concept of “gear”, only jugaad. No fixed teams, only shifting alliances negotiated mid-game. Rules weren’t written down; they were argued into existence. And time? Time stretched endlessly, until it didn’t. We played till our throats went dry and our heads spun in the heat, because going home for a water break came with a risk—mum might not let you back out. Most evenings ended not with a final score, but with a parent’s voice cutting through the chaos, dragging us back inside.

It wasn’t perfect. It was messy, loud, and occasionally unfair. But it was ours—unrestricted, unmonitored, and most importantly, unpaid.

Now, that kind of play feels almost impossible to stumble into. Not because children don’t want to play, but because the spaces and the systems that once allowed it have quietly disappeared.

The booking economy of play

Today, sport begins with a slot. Before a ball is bowled or a rally begins, there is a booking to be made, a payment to be processed, a time window to be respected. Play has moved from the street to the system.

Across cities, new-age sports have found their homes in neatly packaged complexes—pickleball and padel courts, indoor cricket nets, golf simulators—each offering a curated, pay-per-hour experience. What was once improvised is now standardised. The ground is level, the lines are permanent, the equipment is uniform. There is comfort in that predictability, but also a quiet cost.

Teenagers now plan their games exactly the way my boss plans our Google Meet calls—coordinating schedules, triple-checking everyone’s attendance, and eventually showing up 15 minutes late. Even leisure carries a sense of intent. You don’t just wander into a game anymore; you arrive for it. And when the hour is up, so is the play. The rhythm of sport is no longer dictated by energy or daylight, but by a booking app.

Not just play, an entire ecosystem grows around these courts. Smoothie bars, vending machines, branded merchandise, post-game hangouts—these courts don’t just sell the sport but an entire experience. Sport, in this version, is not just played; it is consumed.

None of this is accidental. As cities grow denser and open spaces shrink, play has been pushed into controlled, monetised environments. What we have gained in infrastructure, we have lost in access. Because when play depends on payment, it inevitably becomes selective –available to those who can afford the time, the gear, and the entry fee.

And somewhere in this shift, the question quietly emerges: if play now needs to be booked, who gets left out of the game?

Who pays for playing?

For me, it would have been easier to dismiss this as pure nostalgia and a simple longing for a slower childhood. However, something more structural has shifted. When play moves from streets to systems, it doesn’t just change how we play; it changes who gets to.

The disappearance of gully sport is, at its core, a story about space. As cities grow tighter and more regulated, the kind of unclaimed, in-between areas that once hosted our games—empty plots, quiet streets, half-built complexes—have either vanished or been repurposed. What remains is organised, enclosed, and often monetised.

With the new-gen shift, something intangible slips away. The small negotiations over rules, the spontaneous inclusion of a passerby, the arguments that dissolved as quickly as they began—these weren’t just quirks of childhood but lessons in community and improvisation. They taught us adaptability. Structured sport may be more efficient, even safer, but it leaves little room for that kind of friction.

There is also a quiet filtering at work. When sport becomes something you book, it also becomes something you budget for. Access narrows. The barrier to entry rises—not just financially, but socially. What was once the most democratic form of play begins to resemble yet another curated experience, designed for those who can afford to participate.

The game, of course, still exists. Kids still play, courts are still full, and the joy hasn’t disappeared entirely. But it arrives differently now—scheduled, contained, and often transactional. And in a city where almost everything comes at a cost, perhaps the real loss is this: play no longer begins with us. It begins with a booking.