The Rich History of Pickleball

Pickleball is the most rapidly growing sport in the United States. It is a fast-paced game that is similar to tennis and badminton but has its own unique characteristics.

People play pickleball on a level court that is 20 feet by 44 feet. At the center is a net, similar to a tennis net, that is 36 inches high. Extending 7 feet on either side of the net is a designated non-volley zone known as the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen are service areas where players station themselves.

In a game, players serve and exchange a lightweight ball back and forth using paddles made of wood or composite materials. Players earn points when the opposing team member commits a fault, such as failing to return the ball, hitting it into the net, or letting it bounce more than once.

Even though the game has exploded in popularity over the last decade, pickleball has a long history that began in 1965 on the island of Bainbridge, near Seattle, Washington. Congressman Joel Pritchard and his friend Bill Bell, a businessman, were coming back home after playing golf. They first stopped at Pritchard’s home, where they found their families bored.

Pritchard’s son Frank complained that there was nothing to do on the sleepy island of Bainbridge, and his father told him that when they were young, they used to invent games. Frank challenged his 40-year-old dad to do it. So the congressman did.

Pritchard and Bell went to the house’s back shed, picked up a plastic ball, found a pair of table tennis paddles, set up a badminton net, and played the first game of pickleball. They came up with rules for the game as they played and refined them as they went along. For example, they originally set the net at a height of 60 inches but later lowered it to 36 inches.

Later on, they called their friend Barney McCallum to help make pickleball equipment like paddles. McCallum became an instrumental figure in the development of the game. The three named the game in reference to the local pickle boat crews that raced in boat competitions for fun.

In 1967, Joel Pritchard’s neighbor Bob O’Brian constructed the first pickleball court in his backyard. In 1972, the founders started Pickle-ball Inc. to sell pickleball starter kits from McCallum’s house for $29.50.

In 1975, both the National Observer and Tennis magazine ran stories on pickleball. In 1976, the first pickleball tournament was played at the Southcenter Athletic Club in Tukwila, Washington. Six years later, pickleball pioneer Sid Williams started playing the sport. He enjoyed it so much that he began organizing tournaments all over Washington.

In 1984, the sport’s pioneers formed a national governing body, the USA Pickleball Association (USAPA), and tasked it with promoting the sport across the country. Williams was its first executive director.

USAPA was successful in promoting pickleball in the United States. By the 1990s, there were pickleball players in all 50 states. However, it was after 2000 that the game really picked up. In 2003, there were 150 pickleball courts strewn across 39 locations in the United States and Canada. Five years later, there were 1,500 courts in 420 locations in North America.

In 2009, USAPA held the first national tournament in Buckeye, Arizona, drawing in about 400 athletes. A year later, USAPA formed the International Federation of Pickleball to promote the game beyond North America.

In 2014, the Pickleball Channel, the first dedicated TV station for pickleball, launched. In 2015, USAPA surpassed 10,000 members and the number of pickleball courts grew to 12,800. At the time, the Sports and Fitness Industry Association (SFIA) estimated that over 2 million people played pickleball. Seven years later, in 2022, SFIA named pickleball the fastest-growing sport in America, with 4.8 million players.

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Comparing American Football to Soccer and Rugby

The sport of American football, also known as gridiron football, was invented during the late 19th century by Walter Camp. The first official game of gridiron football, named for the many lines crossing the field, was contested between athletes from Princeton and Rutgers in 1869. The game spread quickly as a popular college sport, and ultimately evolved into the most watched form of entertainment in the United States.

Camp drew heavily on two much older sports while developing the rules of gridiron football – European football, known as soccer in the US, and rugby. In fact, Harvard University initially resisted joining other colleges and developed its own rugby-soccer amalgamation called “Boston Game.” By 1874, however, Harvard athletes had experimented with the more traditional style of gridiron football. The first Harvard-Yale football game was played the following year.

By comparison, the rules of modern soccer were formalized in England in 1863, though examples of similar games stretch back as far as second century BC China. Like American football, soccer began as an alternative to rugby. Today, soccer is the most popular sport on the planet, with an estimated global audience of about 3.5 billion fans.

Soccer and football share a number of similarities. These include 11-man teams and the key objective of progressing from one side of the field into the opponent’s side of the field and moving the ball into the opponent’s goal (in soccer) or the end zone (in football). The most significant difference is the fluidity of play. The game clock never stops in soccer, and transitions between offense and defense are more comparable to basketball in that they can happen multiple times in quick succession. Play in football, on the other hand, features frequent stops, and any transition between offense and defense requires a new group of players to come onto the field.

Invented in 1823, rugby is the oldest of the three sports in modern terms. That said, rugby evolved directly from an early version of European football. William Webb Ellis, credited as the creator of rugby, inadvertently invented the sport when he simply disregarded the established rules of soccer and, in his excitement to score a goal, carried the ball in his hands. Rugby and gridiron football share several similarities. For example, unlike soccer, both rugby and football are full contact sports.

Following in Ellis’ footsteps, Walter Camp both played the sport of football and occupied a key position on the board of the Intercollegiate Football Association (IFA), tasked with formalizing the rules of the game. He helped the IFA make a number of decisions that have distinguished the sport and differentiated it from its European influences.

To start, Camp and the IFA did away with the scrummage, or scrum, a chaotic sequence in rugby used to determine which side has possession of the ball. Instead, Camp and the IFA developed football’s system of downs, in which teams have four attempts to progress 10 yards down the field, which starts anew if they succeed. If teams fail in this endeavor, they give up possession of the ball (with no scrum). Other major decisions made by Camp and the IFA involved the creation of the 11-man team, as opposed to rugby’s 15 players, conception of the quarterback position and the line of scrimmage, and the sport’s scoring, which is still used today.

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