In a Pickle
What's all the racket about America's fastest growing sport?
“I know this seems like a small thing in the grand scheme of the world, where we’re dealing with big things, like climate change. But, as you can see, it’s a nationwide problem.” -Armand Ciccarelli, on pickleball noise
“Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome.” -Arthur Ashe
Housed in a former ice skating rink, Sports Basement’s cavernous Berkeley location is stocked to the rafters with everything an aspiring athlete could need.
Whether you’re training for a marathon, picking up a new hobby, or just lost your water bottle, you can always find what you’re looking for at Sports Basement.
Every visit feels like a self-care pilgrimage. Whatever you’re buying is worth every penny because it’s an investment in your health. At least, that’s what we tell ourselves.
There’s a distinct thrill to making a last-minute mission to Sports Basement just before closing time. Such a tactical strike triggers a retail version of flow state as you decisively navigate their jam-packed aisles of athletic gear and apparel. That’s the headspace Alexis and I found ourselves in one Thursday after the gym at 7:35.
The pickleball paddles were right by the entrance, almost like they knew we’d be looking for them. Nothing in Sports Basement is a coincidence.
Franklin offered two starter sets, each with two paddles and balls, priced at either forty or sixty dollars. My only decision: Wooden or aluminum paddles. The aluminum felt lighter and more maneuverable—a rare moment of simplicity for an over-thinker like me.
With ten minutes until closing and Alexis now browsing Birkenstocks, I climbed the stairs to check out the racket sports hub.
There, I was both awed and dismayed to find dozens of pickleball paddles made out of high-tech materials like graphite and carbon fiber, each costing hundreds of dollars. What had seemed like an easy choice was now anything but.
As closing time neared, I spiraled, scowling at my phone, skimming article after article, hoping for a clue to help me choose. The more I read, the farther I was from a decision. As closing time threatened to force my hand, two questions remained.
What brand and price point would be best for two beginners—one with an advanced tennis background and the other an enthusiastic amateur who dabbled in squash in college?
When and how did pickleball get this fucking popular and what exactly was I getting into, anyway?
Like most people, I hadn’t heard about pickleball until COVID hit. Suddenly, everyone was playing and talking about this niche sport. While it exploded in the 2020s, I was surprised to learn this sport is actually over 50 years old.
Pickleball was invented in 1965 on Bainbridge Island, a wealthy suburb of Seattle. One summer afternoon, Congressman Joel Pritchard and businessman Bill Bell came home from golf to find their families bored. They couldn’t find the equipment to play badminton, so they improvised a game with ping pong paddles and a wiffle ball, lowering the net and tweaking the rules to make it faster and more fun.
Early paddles were wooden, but in the 80s, a Boeing engineer innovated by using nomex, a lightweight polymer used in aircraft design. By 1990, this quirky game had spread to all 50 states.
It stayed niche until 2020, when COVID-19 inspired many Americans to embrace pickleball as a socially distanced way to stay active.
This growth was not by accident. Several factors made pickleball go viral.
It’s easy to learn but hard to master. The basics of pickleball can be taught in minutes. Anyone with decent hand-eye coordination or a background in racket sports can pick it up and have fun and competitive games quickly. While tennis requires lots of lessons and costly gear to play, pickleball offers instant gratification.
Its rules, equipment, and court encourage precision and finesse over raw power and athleticism, making it more accessible.
The lighter wiffle ball slows down quickly, even when smashed, giving players more time to react.
The smaller court discourages big hits, which often go out of bounds, favoring finesse shots and dinking—pickleball’s term for close-to-the-net volleys.
Since serves have to be hit underhand from below the waist, they’re much easier to learn and return than tennis serves.
Before volleys can start, the ball has to bounce once on each side, preventing quick kill shots.
Players can’t step into the no-volley zone, or 'kitchen,' to volley, preventing cherry-picking at the net.
Lower athletic barrier to entry: The smaller court and slower ball mean less running than tennis—especially in doubles, where you cover only half the space. This makes pickleball a favorite among older athletes. If you want a low-impact, accessible racket sport, pickleball is perfect.
Short and sweet games. Pickleball games are played to 11 and usually last 15-25 minutes. In contrast, tennis matches can last 1-2 hours and involve a Byzantine scoring system that I still don’t understand, even after watching Challengers.
Emphasis on doubles play. Doubles pickleball is wildly popular, turning the game into a social event—perfect for after-work or weekend warriors looking for a fun, laid-back hobby.
Maximizing space. Pickleball’s smaller courts mean public parks can squeeze in way more games—up to four pickleball courts can fit inside a single tennis court. Add in the shorter matches, and you’ve got a recipe for more people having fun in the same space.
All of this helps explain pickleball’s COVID boom. It gave people a fun way to exercise that fit into the time and space available. Since then, it’s exploded. In 2024, the Sports & Fitness Industry Association reported that pickleball is the fastest-growing sport in America for the third year in a row, with a 223.5% increase in players over that timeframe.
While pickleball has always been popular in retirement homes for its low-impact play, today’s average player is closer to 34, exactly my age when I played for the first time.
At my friend's wedding at Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, the weekend had a laid-back, summer camp vibe, complete with a lone tennis and pickleball court beside our cabin. Saturday morning, three friends I’d just met at breakfast needed a fourth for pickleball.
Naturally, I volunteered.
My distant squash experience didn’t help much. After sending about ten shots flying out of bounds, I adjusted and started having fun. By lunch, I had Alexis playing too—and the next morning, we were back at it.
By the end of the weekend, we had a reputation. Over Singapore Slings, I overheard someone say they’d passed by hoping to play tennis—only to find 'very intense people' on the pickleball court. In a matter of hours, I’d transformed from clueless novice to 'very intense.'
It wasn’t surprising. Three years ago, I did the same with Spikeball—starting out ignorant and quickly becoming a zealous, geared-up weekend warrior. Pickleball is just the latest stone in my infinity gauntlet of niche hobbies. I mean, look at this Substack. My first-ever post was a five-part series about spikeball. Since then, I’ve waxed poetic on skimboarding, Wingspan, and open-world video games.
Honestly, the only surprising thing about me getting into pickleball is that it took me this long.
Fort Bragg is a small city on the Mendocino coast named after a confederate general. It’s home to North Coast Brewing (famed for Scrimshaw Pilsner), Glass Beach, and plenty of 'Fort Bragg Forever' signs protesting efforts to change the name. Alexis and I weren’t there for beer or beach-combing. We came to play pickleball.
We’d picked up a pair of Franklin paddles called 'The Decimator,' probably named by the same folks who market Axe body spray. Staying just 20 minutes away in Mendocino, we couldn’t wait to break them in.
We’d scoped out two possible courts on Pickleheads, a website and app that helps you find nearby courts and games. Pull up its map, and you’ll see flags everywhere—like the march of a conquering army. Our target was Fort Bragg Middle School, which boasted eight dedicated pickleball courts.
When we arrived, it was clear there’d be plenty of pickleball played that day—just not by us. A check-in kiosk greeted us, organizing retirees into divisions for a serious tournament, leaving us without a court.
We moved on to our second choice, Bainbridge Park, only to find the hybrid pickleball-tennis courts occupied by elderly tennis players. Deflated, we walked a lap around the park and overheard this gem:
“I’m just glad there are no 'pickleballers' here.”
“Me, too. They’re so loud.”
Our failure to launch in Fort Bragg captures the two big challenges pickleball faces in 2024: growing explosively while fighting off pushback from grumpy neighbors and territorial tennis players.
Turf wars with tennis were as inevitable as they were disappointing. Like golf, tennis is an old-school, exclusive sport that’s not used to sharing space. So when pickleballers started taking over their courts in 2020, tennis players and clubs were caught flat-footed and quickly became angry.
In response, USA Pickleball began a concerted lobbying effort, where field ambassadors in major metro areas pushed local governments to install new pickleball courts or convert tennis courts. With demand soaring, parks and rec departments faced tough choices. Some started replacing tennis courts with pickleball courts, further upsetting tennis players, while others tried hybrid spaces with shared lines for both sports.
The numbers were clear: more people wanted to play pickleball than tennis. It made sense—pickleball is casual, easy to learn, and doesn’t require hours of lessons just to rally. Still, tennis players’ frustration was understandable. It’s rare for a sport to suddenly have to share its dedicated space. Unlike soccer, which can adapt to almost any field, racket sports need specific dimensions and nets. This shift hit the tennis community especially hard because they’d been used to being the top racket sports for decades, with playtime rules and court hierarchies protected by layers of rules, membership fees, and etiquette.
Since when did friends having fun outside become a crisis?
You’d think we could all just settle this like adults, right?
Wrong.
Both sides acted like toddlers just learning the concept of sharing. At San Diego’s Point Loma Peninsula Tennis Club, pickleball players staged a protest, refusing to leave until they were physically removed by police. In Santa Rosa, tennis players vandalized pickleball lines with motor oil, leaving a note threatening to key pickleball players’ cars.
The only people enjoying all this were the media outlets. Slate published a juicy think piece titled: “Turf War: What the pickleball drama tells us about American cities.”
Today, pickleball and tennis are in an uneasy truce. Pickleballers are savoring wins like Cincinnati’s new 18-court complex, while tennis players notch their own victories, like Glendale, Colorado’s ban on pickleball on tennis courts.
Even as the rivalry between racket sports quiets, a more fundamental threat looms for pickleball’s survival: the noise.
The hollow plastic ball hitting the paddle creates a sharp pop—much louder than the soft thwack of a tennis racket. According to Vox, a pickleball hit is about 10 decibels louder than tennis, and because decibels are logarithmic, that difference is huge.
The noise caused a flood of complaints from neighbors and HOAs, with some of the strongest pushback coming from the Bay Area. Ross is currently considering a ban on private pickleball courts due to noise complaints while Saratoga recently spent $100,000 on soundproofing and locks for theirs.
Like the tennis wars, the noise drama was catnip to the media. The New York Times jumped into the fray with a hyperbolic piece dripping with questionable gravitas: “Shattered Nerves, Sleepless Nights: Pickleball Noise Is Driving Everyone Nuts.” This ranked second on my 'don’t you guys have bigger news to cover' list after “Does beer before liquor really make you sicker,” which had one Instagram commenter wondering if they’d cover “Is it true that if you don’t use it you lose it?” next. In the NYT piece, interviewees compared pickleball noise to “a pistol range in your backyard” and “ a torture technique,” and even “worse than cancer,” while a 67 year old Debbie from Scottsdale simply declared: “living here is hell.”
The LA Times described pickleball as “wreaking genteel havoc from coast to coast.” One cynical blogger estimated that a pickleball court in your neighborhood could drop your home’s value by 10-20%, while a California lawyer noted that his firm had handled more than 25 pickleball-related cases.
Both the tennis wars and noise complaints boil down to angry people yelling, 'We live in a society!” In these polarized times, even hobbies spark shouting matches and lawsuits. It was absurd but not surprising
The pickleball panic mirrors the uproar over skateboarding in the '80s and '90s. Like pickleball, skateboarding’s rapid growth forced cities to address noise and new uses for public spaces. Skaters were quickly—and unfairly—labeled as vandals, leading to bans, police crackdowns, and the installation of “skatestoppers” a form of hostile architecture on curbs and railings.
Thankfully, cities realized the solution wasn’t banning skateboarding but building skateparks—giving skaters a place to practice and neighbors some peace. This truce allowed skateboarding to enter the mainstream, ending up in one of my favorite Lupe Fiasco songs and eventually, the Olympics.
Pickleball players could learn from skateboarding’s evolution: build dedicated courts to accommodate the growing player base while keeping the peace with neighbors.
Pickleball’s meteoric rise just been about noise and turf wars. It’s also gone pro. The world’s top player, Ben Johns, now makes $2.5 million per year. Johns plays in one of the three professional pickleball leagues. These leagues have big-name backers like Lebron James, Kevin Durant, Patrick Mahomes, Naomi Osaka, and Tom Brady, all betting on the future of the red-hot sport.
However, aside from the well-known difficulty of making new sports leagues profitable, pickleball may be uniquely ill-suited to becoming a spectator sport. Like spikeball, it’s more fun to play than to watch. The same small courts and forgiving nature that make it accessible also make it less exciting viewing. Instead of the powerful backhands and intense rallies of tennis, high-level pickleball often turns into a 'dink-fest' at the kitchen line—with players resembling Forrest Gump more than Roger Federer.
This is even more true in doubles, where the small court gets crowded and easier to defend—leading to more dinks and less action. It turns out that the same technicality and athleticism that makes tennis daunting to play is precisely what makes it so gripping to watch
But then again, viewership isn’t everything.
Even if it never dominates as a spectator sport, pickleball has already hit the jackpot— raking in cash for the companies cranking out paddles, balls, shoes, and apparel for its obsessed players. The global pickleball market was valued at $1.3 billion in 2022 and is expected to hit $3.9 billion by 2032.
The profits and popularity have even caused Hollywood to take notice.
Ben Stiller is set to produce and star in a pickleball comedy called “The Dink” alongside Andy Roddick and Ed Harris.
Filming starts this November.
I didn’t grow up playing tennis. Racket sports slipped into my life during college. Some of my best athletic memories at Kenyon weren’t on the ultimate frisbee field, but long games of squash with my friend Meghan. After teaching her the basics one afternoon, I was better for exactly one game—by the end of the day, she was beating me consistently. We were both hooked.
We had epic duels in the basement of the Kenyon Athletic Center—lunging, diving, and sweating as we scurried across the court. Best of 3 became best of 5, then best of 7, until closing time or total exhaustion forced us to stop.
It was this feeling I was chasing back home from Mendocino, when Alexis and I tried again to find open courts. We walked to James Kenney, the rec center where I played middle school basketball. After waiting for a mom and her kid to clear the court, we pulled out our Decimator paddles and launched into a few games—then a few more. I was in golden retriever bliss, chasing down wild shots, totally hooked.
Later, walking home, I felt that wrung-out contentment I used to get after long days of skimboarding. The only question was when I would play again.
Three days later, I returned with my friend Matt, only to have our game interrupted by eight men who had reserved the court. I didn’t even know playground courts could be reserved—once again, the game’s popularity was getting in the way of playing. We headed to the Cedar Rose Courts, but they were packed with retirees. As a last-ditch effort, we tried the Ocean View courts in Albany, where—miraculously—one was open at 6 pm on a Wednesday. We played a sweaty hour and a half, and I fought my way from losing badly to losing by a smaller margin. I had a lot of work ahead to hold my own, but it was work I was excited to tackle.
There’s a unique exhilaration to starting a new hobby. Your eyes light up, your mind races, and you can’t wait to share games with friends and sharpen your skills. The newbie gains—quick to achieve and hugely rewarding—dangle in front of you like Christmas ornaments. Suddenly, you're justifying new gear purchases and scrolling through the subreddit, popcorn in hand, devouring the jargon, lore, and drama of a strange new subculture. After watching a white boy name Tanner share tips for improving your game on Youtube, Instagram starts serving you ads for $350 carbon fiber paddles and game-boosting gadgets with comically caucasian names like “The Dinkmaster.”
Writing about my hobbies has taught me that choosing the right sport is a lot like dating. Some are appealing but unavailable, others take more than they give, and some are just quick flings or missed connections.
Three years ago, I fell in love with Spikeball and found both joy and frustration. It was thrilling to play and easy to find a place to play, but getting three other adults to consistently join was tricky. The game’s small player population made regular play difficult, and the only thing consistent about my tournament experiences was how underwhelming they were.
Pickleball only needs one other person, but the game’s popularity means court space might always be tough to find. On the upside, that same popularity guarantees access to players and well-organized casual and competitive games. Plus, people play into their later years—something that’s not true about ultimate frisbee, spikeball, or skimboarding.
Dedicating this many words and this much time to my hobbies feels both ridiculous and wonderful. But what's not ridiculous is the joy, energy, and purpose that come from finding a healthy habit you genuinely look forward to. This type of challenge and learning turbocharges you with focus and motivation, on and off the court. After all, the point of a hobby is to let an arbitrary activity take over your schedule, mood, and bank account—all for that transcendental feeling of completely losing yourself in it.
So far, pickleball has fully lived up to the hype. It pulls me out of the house and my head, and it is a delightfully addictive form of exercise. It combines everything I love about racket sports: the strategy of chess, the clash of a sword fight, and the sweat of a HIIT workout.
Pickleball offers community, exercise, and a mental reset button all in one. It's where I can push myself, laugh at my mistakes, and savor the slow climb from beginner to ‘very intense.’
But the real joy is sharing this ride with others, one unpredictable shot at a time.
So, who’s up for a game?