In 2014, Chuck Vietmeier, the director of product marketing at Gamma Sports, was studying an annual sales spreadsheet when he noticed something odd. About eight individuals had purchased a total of 225,000 grips from the Pittsburgh-based company. Vietmeier realized that pickleball manufacturers were buying Gamma’s grips and putting them on their American-made paddles.
Lesson learned. The following year, Gamma, whose roots are in tennis, released its first pickleball paddle and began riding the wave of one of America’s fastest-growing sports. And it’s been quite a ride.
“I don’t see a (participation) ceiling yet,” Vietmeier said. “I don’t even think that’s close. … I haven’t heard anyone say, once they tried it, that they didn’t like it. They’re hooked.”
Pickleball is often described as a fusion of pingpong and tennis. It is played with paddles and a whiffle ball on a court less than half the size of a tennis court.
The Sports and Fitness Industry Association recently reported that participation in racket sports declined 1.8% in 2019, but those losses were offset by surging interest in pickleball, which grew 4.8% last year. Its 7.1% growth rate makes it one of the five fastest-growing sports tracked by SFIA over the past five years, trailing only BMX, cardio tennis, and trail running. Between 2014 and last year, participation rose from 2.4 million players to 3.4 million.
“We definitely see a huge upside in pickleball,” said Mike Barnes, who co-founded manufacturer Selkirk Sport with his brother, Rob, and father, Jim. “As people are transitioning out of other sports, pickleball is perfect. It’s an easy sport to get into. It’s a very short learning curve, and you can have fun the first day. You don’t need to take a bunch of lessons before it starts to get interesting and fun.”
It took pickleball about 50 years to become an overnight success. The story goes that following a round of golf, the late Washington Rep. Joel Pritchard and friend Bill Bell returned to Pritchard’s Bainbridge Island home, where their families had gathered. Their children were bouncing off the walls with nothing to occupy them. So like many parents, they improvised. They cobbled together some pingpong paddles and whiffle balls and had the children hit them over a badminton net. It’s not clear where the sport’s odd name originated, but the best guess is that it’s connected to Pritchard’s dog, Pickles, who loved chasing down errant shots.
Over time, Pritchard and his friends lowered the net, established rules, and in 1967 built the first dedicated pickleball court at a neighbor’s house. The game started to gather steam in residential communities, particularly among the over 50 crowd. The playing surface is less than half the size of a tennis court, and it’s ideal for mixed doubles because unlike tennis, there’s less emphasis on power and speed. Vietmeier said the governing body, USA Pickleball Association, is moving cautiously on developing new equipment technology because it doesn’t want increased power and spin to drive away recreational players.
“It makes women and men equal on the court,” said Diana Easthope, a 64-year-old Detroit-area pickler who plays regularly with her husband, Mike, 66. “Men don’t dominate this sport. They dominate tennis, they dominate racquetball, but they don’t dominate this.”
The social nature of the game has driven its growth. Vietmeier, in fact, was first introduced to the game when he walked by a pickleball court and a stranger handed him a paddle and invited him to play.
“I played college tennis,” he said. “That would never happen if I walked by a tennis court.”
In fact, pickleball is attracting many young tennis players. Ben Johns, a 21-year-old University of Maryland student, is the nation’s top-ranked male player, and Simone Jardim, the top-ranked female, is a former Division 1 tennis player and coach. It’s also their business. Johns runs Pickleball Getaways, a tour company, and Jardim and her husband, Chad Edwards, run Peak Performance Pickleball Academy in Bonita Springs, Florida.
This year’s Minto U.S. Open Pickleball Championships, scheduled to be played in April in Naples, Florida, were canceled because of the coronavirus. But 2,634 players, ranging in age from 12 to 94, were set to play, according to tournament organizer Terri Graham. That’s up from 850 in 2015, the tournament’s first year. (Players compete in different divisions based on skill level.) CBS Sports Network had planned to air the first live national pickleball coverage on April 25.
“I’ve never been involved with a sport that is so popular with older people and also younger people,” said Graham, who used to work in Wilson Sporting Goods’s racket sports division.
The lockdown didn’t stop many avid picklers. Vietmeier noted that Gamma sold a six-month supply of pickleball nets over 45 days, indicating that people were building makeshift courts at their homes because they couldn’t play on public courts.
With growing interest comes innovation. Selkirk’s Barnes brothers started playing pickleball in 2009 and launched the company in 2014 with the goal of building high-performance equipment. This month, Selkirk will introduce the Vanguard paddle, which will crack the $200 price point, roughly $50 more than the most expensive paddles currently at retail. The company claims that the two layers of carbon-fiber weave will create a bigger sweet spot and higher ball speed.
The Barneses expect pickleball’s popularity to continue growing among baby boomers, but they also believe products such as the Vanguard will appeal to young athletes taking up the sport.
“We think the growth could be exponential,” Rob Barnes said. “We wake up every day and think, ‘This is going to be a lot bigger than we ever thought it would be.’ We think 10 or 20 years down the road, it could be one of the biggest sports in the country.”
Martin Kaufmann has covered sports for more than two decades, including 16 years as senior editor at Golfweek.
