Pickleball, which is played with paddles and a Wiffle-like ball, has exploded in popularity in recent years. During the pandemic, more than a million Americans began playing it, bringing the total to around five million. Stars and athletes play pickleball (Michael Phelps, Leonardo DiCaprio, the Clooneys); so do grandparents, parents, and children, pickleball court dimensions often together. It’s simple to grasp—“easy to learn, hard to master,” many told me—and is social and inexpensive. Its design, which includes a no-volley zone near the net, minimizes running, as does the vast popularity of doubles. For these reasons, it can blur the lines between sport and hobby, amateur and pro, celebrity and mortal. In June, at a court near Pittsburgh, a petite grandmother named Meg texted her daughter a photo of herself with three burly strangers. “The guy in the green shirt and I whooped the other two,” she wrote. “Then everybody else there wanted to take our photo.” All three were Pittsburgh Steelers.
The Boca Raton tournament was held at a tennis center, and it displayed the sport’s particular brand of homespun giddiness. People played pickup games on mini courts by an arepa stand; kids posed with a smiling yellow pickleball mascot. A small village of venders’ booths sold refreshments (restorative CBD drinks, fresh fruit salads) and pickleball products (a self-massager, pickleball vacations). Two wiry middle-aged women passed me in matching shirts that said “energy”; one, nearly skipping, pickleball court dimensions was talking about how happy she was. At a nearby match, a man, apropos of nothing, hollered, “Pickleball!” He seemed to speak for everyone.
The event was sponsored by the Association of Pickleball Professionals (A.P.P.), whose founder, Ken Herrmann, a kind-eyed fifty-six-year-old, reminded me of the tube-sock-wearing summer-camp director of my youth. “You come to tournaments and he’s handing out iced teas,” one player said. Amateurs and pros play in the same tournaments. “You would never have amateurs at a tournament at Flushing Meadows with Agassi and Connors and Roddick,” Herrmann told me. “But, here, you as an amateur can play on the outer courts, and then you’re standing in line to get lunch and you’re right behind J. W. Johnson—‘Hey, J. W.!’ That’s kind of neat.” He thinks of J. W.—“a clean, handsome, polite young man”—as “the Pete Sampras of pickleball.”
Johnson, like many other players, came to the sport from tennis. A Novak Djokovic fan, he once dreamed of going pro; in 2018, his family moved to Florida from Kansas to advance his career. His mother, Julie, fifty, thought she’d “play tennis every day,” she told me. “Then I started playing pickleball. I just—I don’t know what it was.” She smiled, looking wistful. Soon, J. W. pickleball court dimensions and his sister Jorja, then thirteen, began accompanying Julie to her matches, taping pickleball lines on their driveway, and signing up for tournaments. Now all three are nationally ranked champions. J. W. is taking a year off before college to focus on pickleball; Jorja, for the same reason, attends school online. Their dad, “more of a tennis guy,” Julie said, is a recent convert.
Pickleball can be snappier than tennis, as when dinking escalates into frenetic, close-range volleys known as “hand battles.” In Boca Raton, spectators had the quick, frenzied head movements of a cat ready to pounce on a toy. The game offers pleasures familiar from tennis—rallies sustained amid startling attacks; stunning angles overcome, or not—but very little drama in the way of serves, which are underhand. (A bedevilling underhand spin serve, the Navratil chainsaw, has proved controversial.)
Most of the sport’s popularity is in the recreational realm, in public parks, converted tennis facilities, and the expanding zone of party-friendly pickleball restaurants. But, since 2020, a burgeoning pro scene has been accelerated by two tours in the U.S., the A.P.P. Tour and the P.P.A. (Professional Pickleball Association) Tour, which, combined, run more than fifty tournaments a year. The prize money isn’t huge, but sponsorships augment it, and hundreds of players have restructured their lives in order to follow the circuit. Some earn a living—Ben Johns, the sport’s biggest star, estimates that he made two hundred and fifty thousand dollars last year—but many lose money. Members of the pro-am community and the economy surrounding it hope that this will change as the sport grows.
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