From tennis to pickleball to Beckyball: Tweaks to games are good for athletes and environment.

Headlined "Tennis, everyone?", a 1973 story in The New York Times noted that the number of indoor courts had grown from 30 to more than 1,000, and even suburbs and rural towns were making room to build outdoor tennis courts in parks.

Tennis is still a thing, of course, but many of the courts built during the tennis boom gave way to basketballers, skateboarders or kids on bikes, when kids riding bikes also was a thing.

In the past decade, some tennis courts have been adapted to let people play pickleball, another sports craze that swept across the nation. Played with a paddle and plastic ball with holes, pickleball is a hybrid of tennis, badminton and table tennis played on a smaller court with a lower net. According to the USA Pickleball Association, there now are more than 15,000 pickleball courts in all 50 states.

Just as tennis is hard on the joints and requires too much running and strength for some people, pickleball is too demanding for some folks, according to the email from Yoram Ariely, a Florida man encouraging me to write about Beckyball, his new game that is a hybrid version of pickleball and tennis.

Seeing many empty tennis courts, Ariely designed Beckyball (named after his wife) to be played on existing tennis courts with no need for new nets. It can also be played on softer courts, usually cushioned with some sort of rubber, which is ideal for him because his bad knees act up on hard surfaces.

Beckyball uses pickleball paddles but a reduced-pressure junior tennis ball, which makes it quieter.

Inventing easier versions of popular games is something we do all the time. On vacation years ago in Michigan, the beach volleyball court was occupied by a family that clearly didn't understand the rules of volleyball, as they were catching the ball, passing it to teammates and eventually just heaving the ball back over the net. They told us they were playing "Nuke 'em," which we assumed was their made-up name for people who can't play volleyball. Turns out, Newcomb is a game invented at the end of the 19th century and is still popular with people who find volleyball too difficult.

Hoover-ball, named after President Herbert Hoover, is a variation of Newcomb using a heavy medicine ball. As with Hoover, its popularity was limited, but the 32nd Annual Hoover-Ball National Championship takes place Aug. 3 in West Branch, Iowa.

Suburban kids in summer camps know all about games that have been tweaked to make them more accessible and more fun.

Dodgeball, the staple for my generation during gym class, was coach-approved bullying, where real bullies could pick out weaker children and pummel them with kickballs. I remember one shirtless, nonathletic chubby boy begging kids to quickly hit him with a ball and send him to the bench before a bully could get the chance to nail him so hard that his belly sported a painful, red "Voit" tattoo for the rest of the day. Even among the bullies, the game would feature unsportsmanlike conduct from kids who said the ball never hit them.

Today's kids play a kinder version called Crossover, where kids who get hit with a ball simply switch to the other team. This will frustrate people who demand that children learn that life has winners and losers, but the game ends as soon as every kid ends up on the winning team. Sprout ball lets kids who are hit with the ball sit on the floor, pass balls to friends and rejoin the game as soon as the person who got them out is also out. Gaga is played with a soft foam ball in an octagonal pit, with the players batting the ball as in volleyball in an attempt to hit opponents below the knees and get them out.

One of the most physically and emotionally damaging games when I was a kid was Red Rover, where opposing teams hold hands to form human chains and take turns barreling through the puny arms of the weakest links. Amoeba is a game where kids still hold hands but must quickly hold hands with new kids or fewer kids depending on the number called out by the leader.

A game called Baseball 5 is a fast-paced, miniature version of baseball with only five players and no pitching. Golf now has venues where people stand in one place and hit balls toward targets, which doesn't require acres of space and is easier on the environment.

It's great to see camp counselors, PE teachers and sports executives develop new games that utilize underused spaces and inspire physical activity in kids, adults and seniors who might be turned off by more demanding games.

And if you do invent a new game, you can always name it after someone you love.