Pickleball started with three bored kids, a missing badminton set, and a wiffle ball. Sixty years later, it's the fastest-growing sport in the country, backed by NBA champions, Super Bowl winners, and a 75 million dollar pro league. Here's the full story, how the game is actually played, and how it got this big.
How Pickleball Actually Started
In the summer of 1965, Joel Pritchard and Bill Bell came home from a round of golf on Bainbridge Island, Washington, to find their families bored with nothing to do. According to HistoryLink.org's account of the invention, Pritchard's property had an old badminton court, but nobody could find a full set of racquets or a shuttlecock.
So they improvised. They dug up some table tennis paddles and a perforated plastic ball, lowered the badminton net, and started hitting it back and forth. It worked better than expected. The following weekend, neighbor Barney McCallum joined in, and the three of them spent the summer writing rules for what would become pickleball.
The name itself has two competing origin stories. According to USA Pickleball's official history, the more credible account traces it to "pickle boats," a rowing term for a boat crewed by leftover, mismatched oarsmen, which Joel's wife Joan thought fit a game built from spare parts of other sports. A second, more popular story credits the family dog, Pickles, who liked chasing the ball. USA Pickleball investigated that claim and found the dog wasn't born until 1968, three years after the game already had its name.
By 1967, a neighbor had built the first permanent pickleball court. In 1968, Pritchard and his friends filed papers to incorporate Pickle Ball Inc. and start promoting the game beyond the island, according to HistoryLink.org's account. From there, it spread slowly through Washington State for almost two decades before the sport had any kind of national organization.
Milestones on the Way to the Mainstream
The jump from a backyard game to a national sport didn't happen overnight. A few moments along the way explain how it got there.
● 1976: The first known pickleball tournament was held at South Center Athletic Club in Tukwila, Washington, eleven years after the game was invented.
● 1984: A Boeing engineer named Arlen Paranto built the first composite pickleball paddle, using the same fiberglass and honeycomb materials Boeing used in commercial aircraft. That same year, the sport's first governing body, the United States Amateur Pickleball Association, was formed.
● 1990: Pickleball was confirmed as being played in all 50 U.S. states for the first time.
● 2008: The sport got its first national television exposure with a segment on Good Morning America.
● 2017: The Pickleball Hall of Fame inducted its first class, including all three co-founders.
How to Play Pickleball
Pickleball borrows a little from tennis, badminton, and table tennis, but the rules are simpler than all three. Here's what you need to know before your first game.
The Court and Equipment
● The court is 20 feet wide by 44 feet long, the same size for singles and doubles, according to the official USA Pickleball rulebook.
● The net stands 36 inches high at the sidelines and dips to 34 inches at the center.
● Each player uses a solid paddle and a perforated plastic ball, similar to a wiffle ball.
● The non-volley zone, better known as "the kitchen," extends 7 feet from the net on both sides. Players can't hit the ball out of the air while standing inside it.
How Serving Works
The server stands behind the baseline and hits the ball underhand, below the waist, sending it diagonally into the opponent's service box. The serve has to clear the kitchen. Miss the box or land short, and it's a fault, which hands the serve over to the other side.
The Two-Bounce Rule
After the serve, the receiving team has to let the ball bounce once before returning it. The serving team then has to let it bounce once as well before playing it. Only after those two bounces can either side start volleying the ball out of the air. This rule is what keeps points from ending in three hits and forces actual rallies.
Scoring
Standard games are played to 11 points, win by 2, using what's called side-out scoring. Only the serving team can score a point. If the serving team loses the rally, possession passes to the other side instead of a point. In doubles, each team gets two server turns per side-out, except at the very start of the game, when the first serving team only gets one.
According to USA Pickleball's 2026 rulebook, rally scoring, where a point is awarded on every rally instead of only on serve, is now an approved provisional format that tournament directors can choose to use, with exceptions for events like the USA Pickleball National Championship. Most recreational and club play still uses traditional side-out scoring, so that's the version worth learning first.
From a Handful of Courts to a National Boom
USA Pickleball formed in 1984 to standardize rules and grow the sport, but for most of its life, pickleball stayed a niche activity, mostly popular with retirees in warm-weather states. That changed fast starting around 2020.
● According to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association (SFIA), roughly 4.2 million Americans played pickleball in 2020.
● By 2025, SFIA's 2026 Topline Participation Report put that number at 24.3 million players.
● That's 171.8 percent growth over three years, and close to 479 percent over five, per SFIA's data.
● SFIA has named pickleball the fastest-growing sport in the country for five years running.
● Core players, those playing eight or more times a year, grew from 1.4 million in 2020 to 7.5 million in 2025, according to the same report.
● As of 2025, the USA Pickleball court database listed over 82,600 courts across more than 18,000 locations, with new courts being added at a rate of roughly 39 per day.
What's changed most isn't just the number of players. It's who's playing. Pickleball built its early reputation as a retirement-community sport, but SFIA's most recent data shows players aged 13 to 24 now post the highest participation rate of any age group. A game invented to entertain bored kids in 1965 is, six decades later, still doing exactly that.
The Rise of Professional Pickleball
Pickleball didn't have a real professional scene until surprisingly recently. The Professional Pickleball Association (PPA Tour) launched in 2017 as an individual, bracket-style tour. Major League Pickleball (MLP) followed in 2021 with a team-based format closer to how the NBA or NFL structure their seasons.
For a couple of years, the two leagues competed for players and sponsors, sometimes bitterly. That rivalry ended in February 2024, when, according to a joint announcement from both organizations, PPA and MLP completed a merger backed by 75 million dollars in outside investment, forming a single parent company called the United Pickleball Association. More than 150 professional players, including the top-ranked athletes in the sport, signed multi-year contracts as part of the deal, and combined player payouts jumped by nearly 250 percent compared to the year before.
Why Athletes and Celebrities Keep Buying Into Pickleball
Part of what pushed pickleball into mainstream conversation is who decided to invest in it. Starting in 2022, Major League Pickleball began attracting some of the biggest names in professional sports as team owners, not just casual fans.
● LeBron James, Draymond Green, and Kevin Love bought an MLP expansion team together in September 2022.
● Tom Brady partnered with tennis Hall of Famer Kim Clijsters to purchase a team through Knighthead Capital Management.
● Drew Brees bought a team shortly after retiring from the NFL.
● Kevin Durant and business partner Rich Kleiman invested through their company, Thirty Five Ventures.
● James Blake, a former top-ranked tennis pro, helped launch MLP itself back in 2021.
● Patrick Mahomes, Naomi Osaka, and Jeremy Lin joined ownership groups as the league expanded to 24 teams in 2023.
● Non-athlete investors joined in too, including Heidi Klum, Eva Longoria, Gary Vaynerchuk, Kate Upton, Dierks Bentley, and Mark Cuban.
None of this happened because pickleball needed the money. It happened because some of the most recognizable names in sports and entertainment saw a fast-growing, low-cost, TV-friendly game and wanted in early. Their involvement did what athlete ownership always does: it pulled a wider, younger audience toward a sport that most of them had never tried.
Why Pickleball Keeps Growing
A few things explain why pickleball caught on faster than almost any sport in recent memory.
● It's easy to learn. Most new players can rally within their first ten minutes on the court.
● It's cheap to start. A paddle and a pair of court shoes cost far less than gear for most other racquet sports.
● It's social. Doubles play is the default, which makes it as much a way to spend time with people as it is exercise.
● It works at any age. A retiree and a teenager can play a competitive game against each other, which isn't true of most sports.
Put those together and you get a sport that spreads through friend groups, offices, and families instead of staying contained to one demographic. That's the same pattern that turned running and yoga into mainstream habits, just compressed into a much shorter timeline.
What This Means If You're Just Getting Started
If pickleball's growth is what finally got you curious enough to pick up a paddle, you're joining a sport that's still figuring itself out at the recreational level just as fast as it is at the professional one. The rules above are really all you need to start. The gear is affordable. The hardest part for most beginners isn't learning to play, it's figuring out what to actually wear on the court once the games start running long.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who invented pickleball?
Joel Pritchard, Bill Bell, and Barney McCallum invented pickleball in the summer of 1965 on Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Why is it called pickleball?
According to USA Pickleball's own research, the most credible explanation is that it's named after "pickle boats," a rowing term for a crew made up of leftover players from other boats. A popular but disproven story claims it's named after a dog named Pickles, who wasn't born until three years after the sport got its name.
What are the basic rules of pickleball?
Games are played to 11 points, win by 2, on a 20 by 44 foot court. Players must let the ball bounce once on each side before volleying it, and nobody can hit the ball out of the air while standing inside the 7-foot non-volley zone at the net.
How fast is pickleball growing?
According to SFIA's 2026 Topline Participation Report, participation grew 171.8 percent between 2022 and 2025, reaching 24.3 million players in the United States. SFIA has ranked it the fastest-growing sport in the country for five straight years.
Do celebrities really own pickleball teams?
Yes. LeBron James, Tom Brady, Kevin Durant, Drew Brees, Patrick Mahomes, and Naomi Osaka are among the professional athletes who own or co-own teams in Major League Pickleball, alongside celebrities like Heidi Klum and Mark Cuban.
Whether you're picking up a paddle because of a friend's group chat or a Sunday league at the local park, welcome in. When you're ready to gear up, our men's and women's collections are built for exactly this kind of movement.
