In the book Why Do People Queue for Brunch? Journalists from The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald try to explain modern-day mysteries, such as does handwriting still matter? What are rogue waves? What do our teeth reveal about us? In the chapter What’s Pickleball?, Angus Dalton writes about the USA’s fastest-growing sport. Pickleball, a racquet sport that can be played in and outdoors, has gone global with famous fans and players, and pickleball associations and leagues found around the world including New Zealand. In this extract, he explains how it came about and what the future might hold.
Where did Pickleball come from?
In the summer of 1965, businessman Joel Pritchard (who went on to become a US congressman) invited friend Bill Bell to stay at his summer home on Bainbridge Island, off Seattle in Washington State. After the pair returned from a game of golf, they were confronted by Pritchard’s sulking 13-year-old son, Frank. “I was bitching to my dad that there was nothing to do on Bainbridge,” Frank later recalled to Pickleball Magazine. “He said that when they were kids, they’d make games up.”
Frank retorted at the time: “Oh, really? Then why don’t you go make up a game?”
The men took to the backyard badminton court with two ping-pong paddles, a perforated plastic ball from Frank’s baseball practice gear and an inventive spirit. They recruited neighbour Barney McCallum – who was later instrumental in developing the game’s rules and equipment – to make larger paddles. The game they pulled together from various sports reminded Pritchard’s wife, Joan, of the friendly races she’d watched at university regattas. Oarsmen who had been dropped from the main competition would compete in “pickle boats”, an old maritime term for the last boat in a fleet of trawlers to return to port, charged with the pickling of the catch. Joan dubbed the new game “pickleball”. (The Pritchards later owned a cockapoo called Pickles but, contrary to myth, the game was not named after their dog.)
The family built a proper pickleball court two years later and spread the word. In 1976, the first pickleball tournament was held in Washington State and by 1999 there were clubs in every US state.
Often described as a blend of tennis, badminton and ping-pong, pickleball also shares features with chess, says Australian coach Ian Hutchinson. It’s a game of strategy where players try to stay two or three shots ahead. “It’s also partly cricket, but only the sledging part,” he adds. The game’s close quarters certainly encourage banter – it’s played on a hard court about a quarter the size of a tennis court – and while it can be played as singles, doubles is more popular.
How did Pickleball take off?
Since those early days in Seattle, a governing body for pickleball has emerged. The International Pickleball Federation, based in the town of Chevy Chase in the state of Maryland, had 77 member nations by 2024. Its goal: to get pickleball accepted as an Olympic sport.
Jen Ramamurthy, the Brisbane-based director of the Pickleball Australia Association, says many people picked up pickleball during the COVID-19 pandemic when they could roll out a net on their driveway. “It really skyrocketed. There’s a phrase out there that pickleball is the most popular game no one’s ever heard of.”
Like most addictive exploits, pickleball is easy to pick up. Newbies can play a competitive game within about an hour, says Ramamurthy. “You can have a 9-year-old, a 27-year-old, a 50-year-old and a 70-year-old on the court together and still have a good game. That’s quite rare.” The annual Australian Pickleball Championships include hybrid events in which players with a disability, some in wheelchairs, compete alongside non-disabled players.
The game has gone upscale in North America – it was the new golf at resorts from Miami to Mexico, according to Architectural Digest in 2022. It’s also, unsurprisingly, popular on cruise ships. And a wave of trendy city businesses were bundling craft food, karaoke and cocktails with pickleball as developers set up courts in old warehouses, reported The New York Times.
Celebrities jumping on the bandwagon have added to the game’s appeal. Bill Gates, who grew up in Seattle, has revealed he was in love with the game even before he started Microsoft in 1975. Former talkshow host Ellen DeGeneres has released a line of gorilla-themed pickleball paddles. And The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert hosted a pickleball tournament featuring pop musician Kelly Rowland, actor Emma Watson and Australia’s Murray Bartlett, who won an Emmy for his star turn as a manager at a Hawaiian resort in the TV series The White Lotus.
Some stars are putting money into pickleball. Cricketer Steve Smith became the first owner of a team in Australia’s professional major league, which arrived in 2023, when he bought the rights to the Sydney Smash. “I was drawn to pickleball for its incredible power to connect people,” he said. In the United States, basketball superstar LeBron James invested in the Major League Pickleball (MLP) competition after its debut in 2021. Kyrgios and Osaka and National Football League champion Patrick Mahomes are among the co-owners of the MLP’s Miami Pickleball Club. Swimmer Michael Phelps, model Heidi Klum, basketballer Kevin Durant, tennis player Kim Clijsters, rapper Drake and actor Michael B Jordan all own shares in other MPL clubs.
In 2022, a typo-laden Twitter spat broke out between [Australian tennis player] Nick Kyrgios and former tennis doubles No. 1 Rennae Stubbs, who vowed never to watch pickleball, let alone invest in it. “I would rather watch pain[t] dry,” Stubbs tweeted. “Why all these tennis players think Pickleball is worth investing in & not the game that made them all the $$$ is beyond me.” Kyrgios fired back: “I think LEBRON JAMES & KEVIN DURANT have a bit more of an idea [o]f what to invest in.”
But it’s everyday retirees who are also a big driver of pickleball. “There are retirement villages now that are building pickleball courts instead of bowling greens,” says Hutchinson. One luxury retirement developer in country Victoria advertises “pickleball, billiards and late-night happy hours”. Pro and amateur competitions have both masters and open divisions.
Former primary-school teacher Sarah Burr is a pickleball star at 38. Before professional pickleball landed in Australia, she had to travel to the United States to compete for serious prize money. Now she captains Gold Coast Glory in the Pacific Pickleball league, which in 2024 offered $700,000 in total winnings, the largest cash prize pool outside the United States. “Normally, when you’re in your mid-30s you’re having to retire from a competitive sport, particularly professional sport,” says Burr. “Whereas with this, you can be my age starting out, or you can be 50-plus starting out, and actually touring and making money.”
So how do you play pickleball?
You’ll need a small paddle and a plastic Wiffle ball (Wiffle ball is a scaled-back version of baseball invented in the 1950s). The court is 13.4m long and 6.1m wide (the same size as a doubles badminton court). The net is 91.4cm high at the posts and 86 in the middle (5cm lower than the centre of a tennis net).
The ball must bounce within the baselines and sidelines but most red-hot pickleball action happens at the edges of a “non-volley zone” either side of the net, known as the “kitchen”. Play begins with an underarm cross-court serve from the baseline, which must clear the kitchen and land in the diagonal service box. The server gets one attempt and there are no lets. They must allow the return to bounce once on their side before hitting it. Then it’s game on. Only the serving team can score a point. If the receivers let the ball bounce twice on their side or hit the ball into the net or out of the court, the server wins a point. If they volley with a foot in the kitchen, a “fault” is called and the point is lost.
While pickleball and tennis share some similarities, they are frenemies at best, particularly in the United States, where little-used tennis courts are being flipped for pickleball (four pickleball courts fit on one tennis court). “There is definitely a little bit of backlash,” says Burr. “Usually, the issues come if it’s tennis players who are losing their facilities to pickleball courts.” Hutchinson believes the sports can co-exist. “From a revenue perspective, I think tennis centres would be crazy if they didn’t start to diversify at least some of their courts into multipurpose tennis and pickleball courts.”
Pickleball advocates say the sport’s hand-eye co-ordination, positioning and volleying skills can help prepare kids for tennis and pickleball offers ageing or injured tennis players a way to stay active. But there are limits. Tennis types, dubbed “bangers”, are quickly put in their place, says Hutchinson. “A lot of tennis players are still trying to imagine they’re playing with a racquet with strings and a soft ball, and they’re so used to doing topspin, whereas in pickleball you don’t get much benefit from spinning the ball because it’s a hard ball and hard paddle. With a tennis player banger, it’s about trying to get them to slow the ball down. The better the [pickleball] player you get, funnily enough, the more finesse and the softer the game you play.”
Can pickleball undermine your tennis game, the way squash sometimes does? Sarah Burr, who hasn’t played tennis in a while, says she’d struggle with tennis now that she’s so enmeshed in pickleball’s unique mix of shots and the slower pace you need to win. But she says people who play both games regularly can easily switch between the two. Pickleball can also affect other racquet sports. “I picked up a badminton racquet about a month ago and I was hopeless because my brain’s so calibrated to the pickleball paddle,” says Hutchinson.
But, come on, how do you win?
Sets are played to at least 11 points, after which you must win by a margin of two points. Winning a point comes down to subtlety and strategy. “The team that makes it forward to that kitchen line first and stays there is usually the team that wins the point,” says Burr.
Hutchinson notes that players are “trying to manoeuvre people out of position and then wait for them to hit a loose shot or what’s called the ‘pop up’, where they get it up by mistake, which then allows the other team to hit it down for a winner through the middle.”
A dink – a drop shot into the kitchen – can be a formidable weapon. “Doing drop shots into that seven-foot area is actually a very important strategic part of the game because that neutralises the opposition to be able to hit any attacking shots,” says Hutchinson. “Because the ball is plastic, it doesn’t bounce that high. So, dropping it over the net into the kitchen, it dies pretty quickly.”
Some trick shots are borrowed from tennis: between-the-leg “tweeners”, around-the-post winners. Others are unique to the sport. Players can leap across the kitchen for a smash and land off-court for a shot called an Erne (named for Erne Perry, the pro player who popularised the move). Leaping in front of your partner for the shot is called a Bert (as in Sesame Street).
“There’s another really wacky shot that just happened recently, almost by accident, when a girl wrapped both hands around the paddle, hit [the ball] behind her head and landed this shot,” says Burr. “Her name’s Mary, so now that’s called the Mary-go-round. There’s literally just crazy stuff like this happening all the time.”
