After playing golf one Saturday during the summer of 1965, Joel Pritchard, congressman from Washington State, and Bill Bell, successful businessman, returned to Pritchard’s home on Bainbridge Island, Washington, near Seattle, to find their families sitting around with nothing to do.
Joel and Joan (pronounced “Jo-Ann”) Pritchard lived in Seattle and spent their summers at their home on Bainbridge Island. In the summer of 1965, the Pritchards invited Bill and Tina Bell to stay with them at their Bainbridge compound. One day after golfing, Joel and Bill returned home to find Joel’s disgruntled 13-year-old son, Frank, in one of those moods.
Frank, now 68, recalls, “I was [complaining] to my dad that there was nothing to do on Bainbridge. He said that when they were kids, they’d make games up.” Frank responded to his dad, “Oh, really? Then why don’t you go make up a game?”
Joel, 40 at the time, loved a challenge, so he and Bill took off to the backyard badminton court where the 44 x 20-ft. regulation court had been asphalted earlier. The steady Seattle rain necessitated the paving of their court. From the back shed, they grabbed a plastic, perforated ball, located a pair of table tennis paddles, set up the badminton net, grabbed the ball and played that first game.
Broken paddles became a problem, so the men fashioned some paddles in Joel’s father’s garage workshop. It was at this time that the game started to take form. Frank recalls his dad saying, “You know who we need? We need Barney.”
Barney McCallum lived six doors down on the beach and was very handy. He was able to construct more reliable, better-looking paddles. He quickly became an integral part of the game’s equipment, rules and formation.
Within days, Joan Pritchard had come up with the name “pickle ball”—a reference to the thrown-together leftover non-starters in the “pickle boat” of crew races. Many years later, as the sport grew, a controversy ensued when a few neighbors said they were there when Joan named the game after the family dog, Pickles. Joan and the Pritchard family have held fast for decades that the dog came along a few years later and was named after the game.
One day, during the summer of 1965, the Bells and Pritchards were sitting around and made the decision to come up with a name for the game. Joan stepped up and said, “Pickle Ball.” She then explained the reference to leftover rowers who would race for fun in local “pickle boat” crew race competitions. Joan grew up in Marietta, Ohio, and attended Marietta College. At that time, the school had one of the strongest crew programs in the country. Locals would all gather together to watch the races. Although Joan was never a racer, she was a loyal fan of the Marietta crew teams.
Frank recalled, “To hear my mother tell it, they sort of threw the leftover non-starter oarsmen into these particular pickle boats. She thought pickleball sort of threw bits of other games into the mix (badminton, table tennis) and decided that ‘Pickle Ball’ was an appropriate name.”
He added, “I first heard my mother utter the words pickle ball when we were actually on the court. It was in that first summer of 1965 and the name stuck. I never heard the game called anything but Pickle Ball.”
The property had an old badminton court, so Pritchard and Bell looked for some badminton equipment and could not find a full set of rackets. They improvised and started playing with ping-pong paddles and a perforated plastic ball. At first they placed the net at badminton height of 60 inches and volleyed the ball over the net. As the weekend progressed, the players found that the ball bounced well on the asphalt surface, and soon the net was lowered to 36 inches.
The following weekend, Barney McCallum was introduced to the game at Pritchard’s home. Soon, the three men created rules, relying heavily on badminton. They kept in mind the original purpose, which was to provide a game that the whole family could play together.
The first permanent pickleball court was constructed in 1967 in the backyard of Joel Pritchard’s friend and neighbor, Bob O’Brian. In 1972, a corporation was formed to protect the creation of this new sport. In 1975, the National Observer published an article about pickleball, followed by a 1976 article in Tennis magazine about “America’s newest racquet sport.” Also in 1976, the first known pickleball tournament in the world was held at South Center Athletic Club in Tukwila, Washington. David Lester won the men’s singles, and Steve Paranto placed second. Many of the participants were college tennis players who knew very little about pickleball. In fact, they practiced with large wood paddles and a softball-sized plastic ball.
Pickleball pioneer Sid Williams began playing and organizing tournaments in Washington state in 1982. The United States Amateur Pickleball Association (U.S.A.P.A.) was organized to perpetuate the growth and advancement of pickleball on a national level. The first rulebook was published in March 1984. The first executive director and president of U.S.A.P.A. was Williams, who served from 1984 to 1998. He was followed by Frank Candelario, who kept things going until 2004.
The first composite paddle was made by Arlen Paranto, a Boeing industrial engineer. He used the fiberglass/Nomex honeycomb panels that commercial airlines use for their floors and part of the airplane’s structural system. Arlen made about 1,000 paddles from fiberglass/honeycomb core and graphite/honeycomb core materials until he sold the company to Frank Candelario.
By 1990, pickleball was being played in all 50 states. Soon, Pickle-Ball, Inc. was manufacturing pickleballs in-house with a custom drilling machine. In 1997, Joel Pritchard passed away at age 72. Though he was Washington State’s lieutenant governor from 1988 to 1996, he is probably better known for his connection to the birth of pickleball.
In 1999, the first pickleball internet website, Pickleball Stuff, launched and provided players with information, equipment, and products. The game was introduced for the first time in the Arizona Senior Olympics through the efforts of Earl Hill in 2001. The tournament was played at Happy Trails RV Resort in Surprise and drew 100 players. It was the largest event ever played to that point. Over the next few years, the event grew to nearly 300 players.
In 2005, a new corporation for the sport was established as the USA Pickleball Association (USAPA). Mark Friedenberg was named the first president. USAPA became a non-profit corporation. USAPA cooperated with several websites to have them discontinue their Places to Play links and consolidate all their entries into the USAPA database, creating a single reliable source for players to find sites to play. Today this website is places2play.org.
The USAPA rules committee, headed by Dennis Duey, published the USA Pickleball Association Official Tournament Rulebook on May 1, 2008.Pickleball was included for the first time at the National Senior Games Association (NSGA), and the number of places to play grew to 420 in North America. This did not account for courts at private homes. That year, ABC’s Good Morning America aired a live, in-studio segment on pickleball that included a brief demonstration. This was the first mass media exposure for the sport.
The first USAPA National Tournament for players of all ages was held in Buckeye, Arizona, November 2-8, 2009. The tournament drew nearly 400 players from 26 states and several Canadian provinces. To help foster the growth of the sport on an international level, USAPA established the International Federation of Pickleball (IFP) organization and corresponding website (ifpickleball.org) in 2010. Justin Maloof joined USAPA as its first full-time executive director in 2013, by which time USAPA had 4,071 members and a new logo and red, white, and blue color scheme more consistent with other US national sports governing bodies.
In 2014, the Pickleball Channel launched, making it the first professional media group for the sport. USAPA surpassed 10,000 members, and according to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, there were now 2 million pickleball players. After 6 years in Buckeye, USAPA moved the USAPA National Championships to Casa Grande.
In 2016, USAPA created a national certified referee certification program. Pickleball Magazine launched as the sport’s first full-color, professional print and digital publication. USAPA members receive a free digital copy and a discount on a mailed subscription. The first US Open Pickleball Championships were held in Naples, Florida, and included the first nationally televised broadcast of pickleball on CBS Sports Network. The Super Senior International Pickleball Association (SSIPA) was created and partners with USAPA and sanctions all their tournaments.
USAPA soon expanded its number of regional competitions from 8 to 11. USAPA and the American Sports Builders Association partnered to co-author the first official pickleball construction book for the sports industry, Pickleball Courts – a Construction & Maintenance Manual. USAPA and the International Pickleball Teaching Professional Association (IPTPA) launched a Pickleball Hall of Fame. Inaugural inductees were Joel Pritchard, Barney McCallum, Sid Williams, Arlen Paranto, Mark Friedenberg and Billy Jacobsen.
In 2018, USAPA membership surpassed 30,000. The National Championships were moved to the world-renowned Indian Wells Tennis Garden in Indian Wells, California. Registration for the newly branded Margaritaville USA Pickleball National Championships exploded to more than 2,200 participants. The event featured more than 17 hours of live-streamed content to a nationwide audience on ESPN3 and a 1-hour segment aired nationally on ESPNEWS. The event also provides the highest cash purse ($75,000) in the history of the sport.
The Sports Fitness Industry Association in 2019 indicated that pickleball was one of the fastest-growing sports in the U.S. as the number of participants reaches 3.3 million. In 2020, USAPA rebranded as USA Pickleball, aligning it with other U.S. sports’ governing bodies. Media exposure continued to drive awareness with several national segments on NBC’s The Today Show, CNBC, BBC News, Live with Kelly and Ryan and stories published in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Forbes, Allure, The Boston Globe, The Economist, USA Today, Sports Illustrated, Parade and Axios.
The 2022 Margaritaville USA Pickleball National Championships drew nearly 2,300 registered players, with the professional players competing for $150,000 in prize money. The Indian Wells Tennis Garden hosted 5,522 fans at the peak of Championship Sunday, the largest-ever pickleball attendance in history.
The Sports & Fitness Industry Association named pickleball the fastest-growing sport in America for the third year in a row, pointing to a total of 8.9 million players in the U.S. over the age of six years old, an increase from 4.8 million in 2022. The spread of the sport is attributed to its popularity within community centers, PE classes, YMCA facilities and retirement communities. The sport continues to grow worldwide as well, with many new international clubs forming and national governing bodies now established on multiple continents.
This article first appeared in the January/February 2021 issue of Pickleball Magazine. To subscribe, visit pickleballmagazine.com.
Reprinted with permission of USA Pickleball. Article is edited for grammar and punctuation.
