Pickleball: What's Not to Love?

By Michael Strzelecki*

The country’s silliest-named sport is making serious inroads into the Boyertown area. The pickleball craze that is sweeping the nation is setting deep roots at the Boyertown Community Park, home to three courts dedicated to the game. The courts are crowded on an almost daily basis, lines form to play, and the battered courts barely have time to come up for a breath.

Pickleball is a mash-up of tennis, ping pong, and badminton. It is played on a court about one-fourth the size of a tennis court, with a three-foot-high net dividing the court halves. Basic paddles are used to hit a heavy wiffle ball back and forth. It is typically played as doubles (two players on each team) but there are also singles games. There are arcane rules governing where players can stand and how to keep score.

Pickleball is the fastest growing sport in the country. The Association of Pickleball Professionals recently released a study saying that there are 36.5 million pickleball players in the United States, a huge chunk of them entering the game since the onset of Covid. Many people saw pickleball as the ideal antidote to the Covid lockdowns - players are close enough to socialize and interact yet still maintain proper social distancing.

Even though pickleball is blazing across mainstream America, it is also garnering favor with celebrities. Private pickleball courts are usurping backyard tennis courts and pools. Leonardo Dicaprio plays pickleball daily and loves discussing it in interviews. George Clooney laments how he is unable to defeat his wife on their backyard court. Larry David, Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, Jamie Foxx, and the entire Kardashian clan are regular participants, among others.

Many professional athletes have taken to the sport, some as cross-training and others as just pure entertainment. Former Major League Baseball all-star pitcher Ken Mercker is now a professional pickleball player. A pickleball game once broke out in the Chicago Cubs’ clubhouse. Even former professional tennis players like Andre Aggasi, John McEnroe, Andy Roddick, Michael Chang and others have moved to the smaller courts, and are playing in pickleball tournaments where purses exceed a million dollars.

The emergence of pickleball can be traced to the year 1965, on Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound, Washington. Three fathers were at wits end dealing with bored kids on a summer vacation. This was a world before iphones and video games. One of the dads fished through the pile of jetsam in his garage and pulled out an assortment of backyard leisure paraphernalia. He placed a badminton net close to the ground, found a few random paddles, and procured the only ball he could find - a wiffle ball. And just like that, pickleball was founded.

Over the course of the week, the trio of dads established rules and refined the game. One of their goals was to invent a game that kids and adults could play on equal footing. To do this, they removed the serve as a dominant element of the game (pickleball serves are easy to return, unlike tennis serves), and they kept players away from the net to prevent unnecessary smashes. The pickleball game played professionally today remains almost identical to the idea implemented by these foresightful founding fathers.

How pickleball got its name is a bit more hazy. One of the fathers said that they named the game after their dog, Pickles, who would routinely steal the wiffle ball while in play and flee with it creating a yard-wide chase. His wife, however, says the game was named for a rowing term. In crew, the “pickle boat” is the crew boat that is made of all remaining athletes after the other boats have been assigned. Pickleboats usually feature a mish-mash of rowers of different sizes and abilities - some men, some women. Essentially, like the game of pickleball.

Bill Gates’ family was friends with the inventors of pickleball, and as such, he has been an active pickleball player since the early 1970s. In an interview, he said that he continues to play at least once a week and more during the summers.

Two leading stalwarts in the Boyertown pickleball scene are Jean Phillips and Anita Meehan. Both ladies are long-time Boyertown residents and long-term pickleball competitors, playing the game well before the first pickleball courts were introduced at the Boyertown Community Park in 2017. They can be seen playing there several times a week and are part of a group that organizes and spearheads many of the local pickleball activities.

I asked them what first attracted them to pickleball. “I have always been athletic and played multiple sports in high school and college,” explains Anita. “As a Boyertown YMCA member I played racquetball weekly for years. Around 2006 I joined a biking group, the leader of which spent part of each winter in The Villages in Florida—a mecca for pickleball. He more or less introduced and promoted pickleball to his friends and acquaintances in the local area—he even had a court in his barn.”

Jean’s roots in the sport were more succinct. “Pickleball was suggested to me by my chiropractor,” she says. “I was hooked from the first day!”

Pickleball certainly can be labeled as being trendy, and one of the problems with trends is that those flames often burn out quickly. This certainly does not seem to be the case with pickleball, as it continues to grow and garner a loyal battalion of participants. Why is pickleball able to sustain such growth? For Jean, it is the continued challenge of the game. “Pickleball is easy to learn but difficult to master,” she contends. “The game involves a ton of strategy, and the game has evolved rapidly over the past two years as more and more tennis players and very young players have picked up a pickleball paddle.”

Anita agrees and sees pickleball as a total-package sport. “Pickleball helps you physically, mentally, and socially,” she stresses. “The sport has elements of ping pong, badminton, and tennis. Play can be slow at times and then all of a sudden a fast-paced ‘firefight’ breaks out. The social aspect, and the friendships you develop, are particularly strong in pickleball. It is also unique in that the community of players is intergenerational – you may have 14- to 80-year-olds playing together on the same court.”

Anita strikes a chord that resonates strongly through the pickleball community and foretells its continued success. There are not many sports where participants of different generations can compete on practically equal footing. With the youth influx into the sport, it is a great opportunity for families to share active time together. Pickleball courts are also great venues for grandchildren to exchange sharp volleys with grandparents. Try spending time with grandma on a softball diamond or ice hockey rink and see how that works.

Jean offers why pickleball is a sport agreeable to beginners. “Pickleball is the only sport that I know of where people can show up and someone will teach them the basics. It's a very social and welcoming sport. Can you imagine showing up at a tennis facility or a basketball court and saying ‘hey this looks fun, could you teach me how to play?’ Well, in pickleball, this happens all the time!”

“While pickleball had a stigma associated with it as being a sport for the retired for quite some time, the evolution of the game has come from the massive influx of younger players,” she adds.

“The professional leagues of PPA [Professional Pickleball Association] and APP are both increasing the visibility of the sport not just in the U.S., but internationally, and are working towards pickleball becoming an Olympic sport! Many colleges are adding pickleball clubs and leagues in anticipation of the future of pickleball becoming an Olympic sport.” Some high schools are now making pickleball part of their physical education curriculum and it is probably only a matter of time before pickleball becomes a sanctioned high school sport.

So what is hindering the growth of pickleball? In Boyertown, it is basically the number of courts available, not unlike the tennis boom of the late 70s and early 80s. The Boyertown Community Park has three courts dedicated solely to pickleball. At the sport’s emergence, this was enough. Grab some friends and there was always a court for the taking.

But pressure has taken its toll on the courts. The surfaces are weathered and in need of attention. With the sports popularity growing, lines now regularly form to procure court space, and pressure will only get worse with the sport’s projected growth.

Anita explains another blemish facing Boyertown’s courts. “Though playable, an issue with the courts from the very beginning has been that the fences on the sidelines are too close to the court, inhibiting the ability to go for the ball, especially on certain serves,” she explains. Essentially, serves made at a sharp angle are often difficult to return due to the fence’s proximity. Some pickleball players have learned to take advantage of this misfortunate design flaw. “This has been coined ‘the Boyertown serve,’” she smiles.

They add that players would have to travel to West Reading or Skippack or Macungie to find other high-quality courts dedicated solely to pickleball. Also, a few tennis courts in the immediate Boyertown are being converted to pickle ball courts.

A lifeline may be coming, however. Boyertown’s three existing pickleball courts were built with a grant from the Pottstown Area Health & Wellness Foundation, as well as matching funds from the Boyertown Rotary Club and the Boyertown Lions Club. Volunteer labor was provided by the Rotary and Lions Clubs as well as local pickleball players. Jean explains that with the support of the Boyertown Borough, the Rotary Club, the Lions Club, and the local pickleball community, a grant application was submitted to the Pottstown Area Health & Wellness Foundation for the current proposal to improve and expand the facility to six courts. The organization has apparently been receptive to the proposal. She says that players have been working to raise matching funds. There are also plans to submit a grant application to another agency.

Jean adds that there is no specific timeline for the project since it depends so much on local fundraising, but not to expect any completed new courts before 2024.

“But we do need new courts,” she explains. “The pickleball courts at the Boyertown Community Park are one of the most used features of the park. There is hardly a day that the courts are not used, and many many days where there is a wait for a court to play.”

Jean wants more people to learn the sport that has found a spot deep in her soul. “All I can say is….man, I love this sport!!”

*Mike Strzelecki is a 1981 graduate of Boyertown Area Senior High School and a freelance travel and outdoors writer. He writes from his home in Baltimore, Maryland. He is author of Baltimore With Children and Urban Hikes in and Around Baltimore. His work has also appeared in the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore's Child, Running Times, Trail Runner, Ultrarunning, and Pennsylvania. He recently retired after a career as an analyst in energy regulation, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, DC.]

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