WHACK! Pickleball Takes Over the Coast!

If a tennis ball were hit with the power behind that whack, the ball might sail right over the chain link fence onto a neighbor’s lawn across the street. If a badminton birdie were hit that hard, it might fly into feathers before it could reach the opponent’s racket. If a ping pong ball got the same treatment, bye-bye ping-pong-ball-with-a-major-dent-in-it. But this game uses neither of those balls, nor that birdie, and it’s not exactly any of those rackets, either. It’s a hybrid of all three games, that features a souped-up Wiffle ball, smacked with a majorly dolled-up ping pong paddle, over a net that sits on the ground instead of up in the air and, even though the game can be fast-paced, the holes in the ball slow it down just enough so that people in almost any physical shape, of almost any age, can do the whacking—with a lot of pleasure, camaraderie and fun.

Folks, may I introduce you to the fastest growing sport in America: Pickleball!

Nearly all of us have heard of pickleball by now, but if you’re like me, you have never played it and didn’t really know what it was, or where it came from, or why it’s so popular, or why it’s called pickleball. I’m here to fill you in. One thing we need to clear up from the start: nothing in the game resembles a pickle—the game is named after a boat, not a cucumber. Yes, it’s true that newcomers can get into a bit of a pickle trying to figure out the rather complex scoring and rules of the game, but that’s just a passing inconvenience.

Superficially, the game most resembles tennis, but the foregoing references to badminton and ping pong are relevant, because the game was invented in 1965, when three guys on a badminton court on an island in the state of Washington started experimenting with ping pong paddles and a perforated plastic ball, with not a thought in the world that they were creating the Rube Goldberg of all court games, and most certainly with no intimation of developing a diversion that would become the runaway most-popular new sport in America. Eventually.

May I elaborate? Two of them, Washington state representative (and future U.S. congressman, and fourteenth Lieutenant Governor of Washington State), Joel Pritchard, and his businessman friend, Bill Bell, and were at Pritchard’s vacation home on Bainbridge Island one rainy Saturday in July 1965. They had invited a bunch of neighbors over for an informal picnic, but all the kids were inside complaining about being bored. Pritchard’s son Frank, who was thirteen years old at the time, recalled that day: “I was bitching to my dad that there was nothing to do on Bainbridge. He said that when they were kids, they’d make games up.” The teenager’s snarky response was, “Oh, really? Then why don’t you go make up a game?” Thus challenged, Pritchard and his houseguest set to work.

To get the kids out of their hair, the pair first eyed the abandoned backyard badminton court, which had been asphalted in earlier days by Joel’s parents. Then they went to a back shed to look for racquets and a shuttlecock (also called a birdie) but couldn’t find a full set so, forced to improvise, they nicked a softball-sized perforated plastic ball from a bat-and-Wiffle Ball set that Frank had been given for his birthday earlier that year. They uncovered some table tennis paddles in Prichard’s cabin and sent the kids on their way, outfitted with the makeshift kit. But hours later, the kids still hadn’t come back, so the men went over to the court to find them still whacking the ball back and forth with great gusto. The dads couldn’t resist getting involved then but determined that some elements of the game needed fine tuning.

At first, the net was hung at the regulation badminton height of sixty inches and the ball was volleyed over the net, but as the game progressed, the players discovered that the fat ball bounced well on the asphalt surface, so they pulled the net down to thirty-six inches, which sped things up considerably. The ball was too big for the flimsy ping pong paddles and actually broke some, so when Barney McCallum, a friend and neighbor of theirs who was also present for the get-together at the Prichard’s, saw the problem, he went home that same night and used his band saw to cut out some larger, heftier versions of the paddles. The next morning, he arrived at the Prichard’s with his more robust plywood fabrications.

The trio—Pritchard, McCallum, and Bell—on time off from their important day jobs, continued playing through that summer (telling the kids to go find something else to entertain themselves), bantering friendly arguments, modifying the court markings and serving rules, and tweaking the equipment. They realized they had stumbled upon something special, but they had no idea about any commercial possibilities that underpinned their lark. They established from the outset that they wanted it to be a balanced game that gave no advantages to bigger or stronger players. They were always clear that they wanted it to be egalitarian, accessible for players of any age, gender, or athletic prowess. It was just fun, and more and more people in their neighborhood came over to play.

But at first it was an exceedingly slow history-in-the-making. In the early years, the game was only played during the summertime by friends, neighbors, and relatives in the same little neighborhood on the island. By 1968, three years after its invention, just three permanent pickleball courts had been built, all on Bainbridge, one of them at Barney McCallum’s house.

Not until about 1970 did pickleball “get off the island” and take root in Seattle. In a video recorded in 2015, four years before his death, McCallum said, “When Labor Day came, everything changed here, because these were basically summer living places. So pickleball moved to my place in Magnolia Bluffs, in Seattle. We lived on a kind of cul-de-sac, and the width of a city street happens to be very accommodating for pickleball.” He said that in rainy Seattle, they played rain or shine.

Barney’s son David, recalled, “The game started to make its way over to Seattle, and that group of people were craving exercise in the wintertime. We used to play it out in the street in front of our house. Our neighbors saw this going on, and they were doing a bunch of work to redo their yard, and they decided to put in a court.”

Another thing that helped the game get off the island was that Joe [Joel Pritchard] was running for Congress at the time and his team would set up the game and play it with attendees at his events—a novel way to build a political campaign: “Joe would take the mike and say, ‘We’re going to play a little pickleball now,’ and the people would go, ‘Whaaat??’” laughed David.

The phenomenon slowly spread through the Seattle area and into other areas of the Northwest over the next five years, and in 1975 the National Observer (a short-lived weekly newspaper) published an article about pickleball, followed shortly by a 1976 article in Tennis magazine about “America’s newest racquet sport.”

After that publicity was released, to their surprise, dozens of letters, with enclosed checks, began arriving asking to buy “pickleball kits,” which of course, didn’t exist. McCallum, a businessman with long experience in running his successful envelope manufacturing company in Seattle, applied his know-how in sourcing merchandise. He scurried to buy up every badminton net and all the perforated balls he could get his hands on and began fulfilling the unexpected orders, enclosing a rudimentary rules manual. When asked how much the “kits” should cost, McCallum countered with, “I’d say about thirty dollars…How much would you say?” The volleyed retort was, “How about twenty-nine fifty?” OK! Twenty-nine fifty it was, and the kits got shipped and the game’s history-in-the-making got going a little faster.

Despite the publicity and the creation of the pickleball company, decades passed with little growth in the sport. The website playpickleball.com gives this timeline:

• 1965: Pickleball gets invented

• 1965: Pickleball gets its name

• 1967: First official pickleball court is built

• 1972: The Pickleball Corporation established by the founders

• 1975: National Observer article

• 1976: Tennis Magazine article

• 1976: First pickleball tournament in Tukwila, Washington

• 1978: Pickleball mentioned in The Other Racquet Sports

• 1982: Pickleball grows in Washington state

• 1984: Creation of the United States Amateur pickleball Association (USAPA)

• 1984: The first pickleball rulebook is published

• 1984: First composite pickleball paddle

• 1990: Pickleball is played in all fifty U.S. states

• 1997: Death of Joel Pritchard

• 1999: First pickleball website, pickleballstuff.com, is launched

• 2003: There were just thirty-nine known places to play pickleball in North America, comprising about a hundred fifty individual courts, distributed among ten states and three Canadian provinces.

• 2005: USA Pickleball Association forms with, unfortunately, the identical initials as the amateur USAPA

• 2006: Bill Bell passes away

• 2008: USAPA’s first tournament rulebook published

• 2008: Good Morning America brings pickleball to a wider audience

• 2009: USAPA’s first national tournament in Buckeye, Arizona, with four hundred players from twenty-six states

• 2010: USA Pickleball Association launches the International Federation of Pickleball (IFP)

• 2015: USA Pickleball continues to grow: USAPA passes ten thousand members

• 2016: Pickleball establishes a national certified referee program

• 2016: Pickleball Magazine launched

• 2017: USA Pickleball Association and the International Pickleball Teaching Professional Association (IPTPA) create The Pickleball Hall of Fame and induct pickleball creators and pioneers: Joel Pritchard, Barney McCallum, Sid Williams, Arlen Paranto, Mark Friedenberg, Billy Jacobsen

• 2017: Association of Pickleball Professionals (APP) Tour launches

• 2019: Barney McCallum passes away

• 2020: USAPA becomes USA pickleball

• 2021: Pickleball named the “fastest growing sport”

• 2023: USA Pickleball membership grows to seventy thousand members and

an estimated nine million pickleball players (over the age of six years) in the US

• 2023: Professional Pickleball Association moves the USA Pickleball National Championships to Dallas, Texas

Things were gathering momentum by 2008 as word got around: The USAPA published the first official rule book and announced that North America offered four hundred twenty places to play the game, in forty-three states and four provinces. Pickleball kept gaining adherents and the timeline gained speed:

By 2013 the association had four thousand members and just two years after that, in 2015, it had ten thousand members. Also, in 2015 the association listed twelve thousand eight hundred courts (indoor and outdoor), meaning that in twelve years more than twelve thousand courts had been constructed in North America. According to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association (SFIA), pickleball now boasted more than two million players.

2016: Seventeen thousand members, forty-six hundred places to play.

2017: Places2Play.com [a pickleball website] reflected nearly fifty-nine hundred locations. USAPA membership doubled in two years and climbed to twenty-two thousand by December.

2018: USAPA membership surpassed thirty thousand. Total number of courts, per Places2Play locations, was nearly seven thousand and there were nearly twenty-one thousand known courts across the U.S.

2019: The Sports Fitness Industry Association report indicated pickleball continued as one of the fastest growing sports in the U.S. as participants reached 3.3 million.

In the two years between May 2020, and May 2022, over a million Americans would lose their lives to the Covid scourge. As researchers learned more about the transmission of the virus, “social distancing” became de rigueur, and indoor gatherings were nearly abandoned because of the danger of becoming “superspreaders.” It became clear that if you wanted to be with other people, the outdoors was a lot safer. And outside, you didn’t need to wear a mask! It was as though pickleball had been designed for the moment.

Today, there are conflicting statistics, but the key message is that pickleball is on a fast track of popularity and Covid was the instigator of an exponential growth spurt. The website playtimescheduler.com claims that fifty-seven countries are using that site to schedule games in forty-seven hundred fifty-five cities at thirteen thousand two hundred ninety-five court locations. The website picklrnation.com claims that the sport has increased 223.5 percent over the last three years and is played in more than seventy countries, and that “its rapid expansion is supported by developing infrastructure, with more than fifty thousand fields in the United States.”

The commercial juggernaut is predicted to continue, too. According to pickleballportal.com, “Market reports based on recent pickleball statistics project the [pickleball] market to reach a value of over $2.3 billion by 2028.” Sheesh. Headlines sprinkled around the internet like the following indicate the sport’s ever-increasing popularity: “‘PickleHall’ takes over a cavernous, now-defunct PEP Boys big box store in Orlando, Florida.”

From the start, the founders and first players had recognized and embraced the conviviality of the new sport. “It was a social game. People interacted, people entertained with the game,” said Barney McCallum. “Pickleball was a sideline for all of us. We had no idea of the commercial part of the game. It was strictly for our pleasure, pure and simple. We would take friends that were visiting us, and go down to the Pritchards, and play pickleball. And that got to be the thing.”

Hundreds of websites memorializing the game’s history, YouTube training videos, and online stores touting Pball’s ever-expanding array of equipment, shoes, clothing, and other swag fail, in their sum-ups of the game’s storied past, to capture what must have been one of the most fervent community-building activities ever conceived. How many hot dog and potato salad get-togethers accompanied the game’s development? How many belly laughs and high jinks didn’t get videoed? How many indoorsy kids were turned into zealous devotees by the sheer infectious fun and inclusiveness of it? As a youngster on the island, Carol Stover recalls playing on the McCallum’s court. “We had games going all the time. It was very competitive and lots of fun.”

Another neighbor, then-twelve-year-old player Patty Wells, was a close pal of Betsy McCallum, Barney’s youngest child. She recalled, “The court would just be loaded with moms, dads, teenagers. It would be Betsy and Barney against me and Dad. So, you could take two people that were much more skilled [and pair them] with two youngsters, and it still was a ton of fun.”

When Covid hit, millions of Americans flocked to pickleball. The Sports & Fitness Industry Association named pickleball the fastest-growing sport in America three years in a row: 2021, 2022 and 2023. The industry association reported, astoundingly, that the number of pickleball players in the United States over the age of six had jumped from 4.8 million in 2022 to 8.9 million in the following year, 2023. The growth has not stopped: The association says that last year, 2024, there were at least 13.6 million players in the U.S.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the pickleball juggernaut would become enveloped in controversy sooner or later, and it did—when the people most closely associated with the game’s creation disagreed on how the sport had gotten its name. Ultimately, the staff of USA Pickleball, the national governing body for pickleball in the United States and publishers of Pickleball Magazine, waded in to resolve the controversy, and here is what they wrote in their official journal:

In the summer of 1965, pickleball was founded by Joel Pritchard, Bill Bell, and Barney McCallum on Bainbridge Island, Washington. Within days, Joan Pritchard, an avid rower, had come up with the name “pickle ball”—a reference to the thrown-together leftover non-starters in the “pickle boat” of crew races. Many years later, as the sport grew, a controversy ensued when a few neighbors said they were there when Joan named the game after the family dog, Pickles. Joan and the Pritchard family have held fast for decades that the dog came along a few years later and was named after the game.

It’s an undisputed fact that pickleball began, and was also named, in the summer of 1965 by Joan Pritchard. If Pickles was around then, the dog story could be true. If Pickles wasn’t born until after 1965, the dog story would be confirmed as just a funny newspaper interview hoax—later confessed by Joel Pritchard.

Proof of when Pickles was born could help resolve the two-story name debate. As the official magazine of pickleball, we decided to dig up the past and report the truth, regardless of the venerable feathers being ruffled. We looked for dog records, uncovered photos, and interviewed several people who were there from 1965–1970. Based on evidence, we learned that the dog was born in 1968—three years after pickleball was first played and named. In other words, the Pritchard family story stands true that pickleball was not named after the dog, but rather in reference to the local pickle boat races.

“A group of us had been playing badminton for some years, but were locked out of all interior gymnasium play after Covid hit,” remembers Greg Menken, President of the local Volley Llamas Mendocino Coast Pickleball Players. “That was when we decided we needed to do something outdoors, but none of us was really into tennis. Word about town was that pickleball was starting to catch on. We were intrigued that so many seniors were picking it up, so we bought some balls and paddles and started chalking the Mendocino High School tennis court, since there were no dedicated pickleball courts. No one knew how Covid was being transmitted then, so each of us labeled our own pickleballs and nobody used their hands to return each ball to its rightful owner! One by one, mutual friends started showing up…and the rest is history.” With its growing popularity and only two regulation courts at Bainbridge Park, pickleball players needed more dedicated courts. In November 2022, the city of Fort Bragg and Fort Bragg Unified School District allocated $130,000 to restore four tennis courts at the Fort Bragg Middle School. That work included installing eight pickleball courts adjacent to the two newly resurfaced tennis courts.

Julie Lanzarin came to Fort Bragg after a lifelong career of coaching in Marin County and recognized a need for more leadership in the nascent pickleball community. She is the Volley Llama Club’s Coach and Tournament Director and is the only Certified Professional Pickleball Registry (PPR) Coach in Mendocino County. “I came from a coaching background. I was the assistant athletic director at Branson School in Ross, California for ten years, also coached volleyball and badminton at San Dominico.” She got interested in pickleball when people in her San Anselmo neighborhood began putting up a net and playing in the street.

In her new home on the north coast, Julie took an online training course to become certified, then passed an extensive online test. When I took a class from her, I found a patient, enthusiastic, dedicated teacher who displayed an infectious love for the sport.

I went to an exciting tournament at the Middle School courts last October. It was not entirely a local affair. Players came from Redding, Chico, Willits, and lots of other places far from the coast, which, it turns out, is a common occurrence during the hot summer months inland when playing is too sweaty to tolerate. They come for the game and for the fog!

In the last rounds, sixty-five-year-old Roland Reyes from Willits was looking for a partner. Julie quickly paired him up with then-twelve-year-old August Haye. Roland side-eyed the youngster skeptically but went ahead with the round robin. The outcome was that—TA-DAAA: They WON the tourney!

August is one of the students Julie fostered to become a young Pball phenom on the coast. I asked him how a thirteen-year-old came to play pickleball among all those senior citizens.

“The first time I ever saw pickleball was two years ago, at the gym next to the Flamingo Hotel in Santa Rosa, when I saw a bunch of kids my age taking a class. It looked similar to tennis, which I was really into at the time, so I went over to the teacher after the class and asked what this new sport was. I am very grateful to her, because she allowed me to hit a couple of balls and explained the rules to me. I fell in love with the simplicity and competitiveness of the game, so I kept returning for the few days I was staying. On my last day with her, she said I had a real talent, and I should keep playing where I lived. A couple of days later, I saw a flyer for a pickleball clinic for kids, started by Mendocino Coast Recreation Park District (MCRPD). I am also eternally grateful to MCRPD and Kylie Felicich for creating that clinic, because if I had never partaken in that class, I never would have met the wonderful Julie Lanzarin, I never would have known about the people that play on Saturdays, and I never would have started playing pickleball!”

August elaborated on why he became such an enthusiastic convert: “I love how pickleball brings people together in a way that tennis never had for me, because instead of it being two people on opposite ends of a large court, you are mostly playing in pairs, working in tandem with someone to win the match. One of the main reasons I started looking for pickleball in Fort Bragg was because there was never anyone playing tennis at the courts when I was around, but you can always find people playing pickleball on the weekends, and maybe even the weekdays! It is such a loving and supportive environment, and everyone really just wants to play. Whether you are new to the game or a seasoned veteran, there is always space on a court for you.”

I asked August how it felt to win a tournament with a person many years older than he. “I will admit, I did feel like an outsider at first, playing with a lot of people much older than I am, and I felt like there might be a disadvantage, playing with someone who might not be as fast or as mobile as me. But when you are on the court, playing and celebrating together, that feeling vanishes. Roland Reyes especially was such a kind and generous person (he even offered me snacks between games!), and we collaborated really well. After the first game we won, I started to feel like this impossible dream might be possible; an old man with a wrist guard and a small kid with a borrowed paddle could be able to win a competitive tournament! When we won, I knew the feeling that I had at that moment reinforced everything I felt about pickleball: I was proud of myself, my partner, and thankful to every single person who had helped me on this journey. It means so much!”

August has since moved to Oaxaca, Mexico with his family for the year and I wondered if he had been able to find a pickleball cohort there. “Yes! I knew the first thing I wanted to find when we arrived was pickleball! And I did. My pickleball community in Oaxaca has been a wonderful influence for me, helping me develop my play styles and also being a safe space to practice my Spanish.”

Julie Lanzarin notes that, “Tennis is hard on the body. You can’t play tennis forever, but you can play pickleball at any age.” However…“We’re finding it a challenge to get the kids onto the court. If we had kids who came after school on Wednesdays, the early-release day, it would be so much fun to have them play.” Still, she holds hope that more kids like August and his well-matched friend Blu Abuliak will get equally enthralled by the game. She is looking forward to beginning a new MCRPD pickleball program, indoors at Mendocino High School, February 3 through March 9: Beginner Clinic from 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.; Intermediate and Advance Open Play from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Everyone, including kids, is invited.

Yep, the Whack! heard round the world is a phenomenon with no end in sight for its growing popularity. “Here on the coast,” says Lanzarin, “including players who come in from Ukiah, Willits, and Hopland, there are almost a hundred fifty dedicated players: I have thirty-seven Volley Llamas who compete and twenty-six who play but don’t compete, for a total of sixty-three local people. Out-of-town people: forty-nine who compete, fifteen who don’t compete. They come from far and wide: Redding, Sacramento, Arcata, Roseville, San Francisco, Philo, Cloverdale, Marin, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Canada, Alaska.” She and the entire Volley Llamas Club invite people to come join them on the courts.

If you are interested in checking out the fun, Julie offers this advice: “To play in Fort Bragg you need to sign up on the PlaytimeScheduler.com website (it’s a website, not an app). When you want to play, you add your name, and your parameters, e.g. your level of play. Monday and Wednesday are for beginners, Tuesday and Thursday are for intermediates. Very rarely do we have all eight courts in use.”

If you don’t want to invest in equipment yet, you can join the club for $20 a year and you will have access to the equipment: Balls, nets, extra paddles (although most people buy their own paddles, which can range from $25 to $300. Julie recommends getting a paddle at the lower price range, until you know what fits your style and level).

Coach Julie goes on, “The three most important qualities to play pickleball? Consistency, vigor, and a good pair of shoes.” Shoes? “They’ve got to be a court shoe, not a running shoe,” she explains. “Running shoes can cause accidents because they stick out in the back and can trip you up in the heat of a match.”

And most importantly, “You have to have fun—that’s why I play, for the social aspect and for fun.”

Look for four upcoming one-day tournaments in Fort Bragg this year: March 29, June 21, August 9, and October 11. Find Volley Llamas Mendocino Coast Pickleball Players on Facebook. Schedule games at PlaytimeScheduler.com. More info, email: Julie Lanzarin, niraznal@me.com