The Story of Pickleball

It's Saturday, August twenty ninth. I played pickleball last night with a few friends. Have you played? It's a hybrid between tennis and tabble tennis. It's really fun actually. The courts were jam packed with people... so much so that you were only allows to play one game before having to sub out and wait like 20 minutes for your group to play again. So many pickleball courts have emerged in neighbordhoods, so I wanted to dig into how it came to be. The origin story of pickleball is one of my favorite kinds of stories because nothing about it was planned. In the summer of 1965, on Bainbridge Island, Washington, three dads had a problem: their kids were bored. Joel Pritchard, who was a congressman at the time, Bill Bell, and Barney McCallum (mih-KAL-um) were spending the summer with their families on the island, and the children had run out of things to do. Pritchard suggested they invent a new game. They found a badminton net in the garage but no shuttlecock, so they grabbed ping pong paddles and a Wiffle ball. They set the net to 36 inches high because that's just how it happened to sit. Nobody deliberated over it, nobody tested different heights, it was just what fit. The net height in official pickleball is still 36 inches today.

The rules evolved the way rules evolve when you're making up a game with children. Someone would say "what if you couldn't hit it out of the air" and they'd add that. Someone else would say "what about a zone near the net where you can't stand" and that became the kitchen. The kitchen rule, the one that makes pickleball strategy fundamentally different from any other racquet sport, was invented by children arguing about fairness.

There is a long-running dispute about where the name came from. One story says the Pritchard family dog was named Pickles, and he would chase the ball and run off with it, so they named the game after him. The other story is equally good. In crew, a pickle boat is a boat of leftover oarsmen, a motley assortment of whoever didn't make the varsity boats. Since pickleball was cobbled together from leftover pieces of other sports, the name fit. The Pritchard family has said it was the boat, not the dog. The dog may not have even been born yet when the game got its name. But the dog story is better, so it's the one everyone tells. Twenty-four point three million Americans played pickleball in 2025, up from 4.2 million in 2020. That's 479 percent growth in five years, which is a number you normally see in software companies, not sports participation. There are now more than 82,000 pickleball courts in the United States. Fourteen thousand new courts were added in 2024 alone. Cities are converting tennis courts, painting new lines in parks, building dedicated facilities. The sport has attracted $315 million in professional investment, including a $225 million deal led by Apollo Sports Capital a few months ago that merged the two rival pro leagues into one organization.

Sports do not grow like this. Baseball, basketball, football grew over generations. Soccer in America has been "the next big thing" for 40 years and still hasn't cracked these numbers. And this has happened before. In 1980, racquetball had 12 million players. It was called America's fastest-growing sport. Courts were being built in every gym and country club in the country. The first world championship was held in 1981. The Olympic Committee classified it as a "developing" Olympic sport. Racquetball was everywhere.

By 2017, it had 3.5 million players. Most of those courts have since been ripped out and converted into yoga studios or spin rooms.

Three things killed racquetball. The first was the equipment. Better racquets and faster balls meant shorter rallies, which made the actual playing experience worse, especially for beginners. When a sport becomes intimidating to learn, it stops getting new players. The second was television. The ball moved too fast for cameras to track and the rallies were too short to build drama, so the sport could never build a spectator audience or a professional ecosystem that paid for itself. The third was the court. Racquetball required an indoor court, which meant expensive real estate and a membership to access. When gyms realized they could make more money per square foot converting those courts into other activities, they did.

The comparison is almost too clean. Pickleball right now looks exactly like racquetball did in 1980. The question is whether it ends the same way. There are a few things working in pickleball's favor that racquetball never had.

You do not need a membership to play. You do not even need a dedicated court. You need a flat surface and a net. Parks, driveways, community centers, converted tennis courts, the floor of a gymnasium. The barrier to entry is about as low as a sport can get. Racquetball died because it was locked behind gym memberships and expensive indoor real estate. Pickleball sidesteps that entirely.

It's social in a way racquetball never was. Doubles is the default format. The court is small enough that you can talk to your partner between points, and the skill floor is low enough that someone who has never played can rally with someone who has been playing for years. The participation data shows strong numbers across every age group, from 18 to 65 and older. That cross-skill, cross-age appeal is rare.

And it's actually watchable. The ball is bright, the pace is human-readable, the rallies build tension. Whether that translates into a sustainable professional league is still an open question. The $315 million bet from Apollo and others assumes it will. If that bet pays off, pickleball has a media revenue stream that racquetball never had. If it doesn't, the recreational side is big enough that the sport probably survives anyway, just without the ESPN deals and the superstar salaries.

When I was out there last night, I was not thinking about any of this. I was just having fun. And that might be the most important thing pickleball has going for it. People are playing because it's fun. Not training, not competing, not grinding. Fun. I don't know if pickleball will still be everywhere in twenty years. But it's fun to play, it costs almost nothing, and you can do it with anyone. That's a better foundation than most sports ever get. Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you on Monday.