Guides · History
Pickleball is young enough that its origin is not a legend but a set of remembered afternoons, told by people who were there and who disagree about the details. It was invented in one summer, on one island, by three families trying to keep their children busy. Everything that makes it feel like a proper sport, the rulebook, the tournaments, the pro tours, the arguments about the kitchen, came later, mostly much later. Here is how it happened.
Joel Pritchard, a Washington state legislator who would later be a congressman and lieutenant governor, came home to his family’s house on Bainbridge Island, a short ferry ride from Seattle, with his friend Bill Bell, a businessman, to find their families bored. The property had an old badminton court. They went looking for badminton equipment and could not find a full set, so they improvised with ping-pong paddles and a perforated plastic ball, and started hitting it back and forth over the badminton net, which stands at 60 inches.
Over the following days they found the ball bounced well on the asphalt, lowered the net to 36 inches, and started to make rules. A third friend, Barney McCallum, was brought in during that week and became the one who wrote things down and, in his workshop, cut the first proper paddles out of plywood. The three of them are credited as the founders. The court they started on, 20 by 44 feet, is a doubles badminton court, and that is still the size of a pickleball court today.
The rule that makes the sport its own, the non-volley zone, came from the same week. The founders wanted a game the whole family could play, and a tall adult standing at the net smashing everything would have ended that. So they drew a line seven feet from the net and said nobody could volley from inside it. That one decision produced the dink, the drop, and the patient game the sport is known for.
There are two stories, and the founders’ families have been telling both for sixty years.
The first is Joan Pritchard’s, Joel’s wife, who said she called it pickleball after the pickle boat, a term from crew racing for a boat filled with the leftover rowers who did not make the other crews, because the game was thrown together from the leftovers of other sports: a badminton court, ping-pong paddles, a wiffle ball.
The second is the dog. The Pritchards had a cockapoo called Pickles, and the story goes that the dog chased the ball and the game was named after him. The problem, which Joan Pritchard and later researchers pointed out, is that Pickles arrived in the family a couple of years after 1965 and was, by their account, named after the game rather than the other way round. The dog story is better, so it is the one most people repeat. The boat story is the one the family stands by.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1967 | The first purpose-built pickleball court is constructed in the backyard of Bob O’Brian, a friend and neighbour of Pritchard’s on Bainbridge Island. |
| 1972 | A corporation is formed to protect the name and the sport as it begins to spread around the Pacific Northwest. |
| 1975–76 | National press notices; the first known tournament is held in 1976 at South Center Athletic Club in Tukwila, Washington, with many of the entrants being tennis players who had barely seen the game. |
| 1984 | The United States Amateur Pickleball Association (USAPA) is organised and publishes the first official rulebook. The same year Arlen Paranto, a Boeing industrial engineer, makes the first composite paddle from the honeycomb panels used for aircraft floors, the ancestor of every modern paddle. |
| 1990 | Pickleball is reported as being played in all 50 states. |
For thirty years pickleball grew the way a folk sport grows: through school PE programmes, YMCAs, and, above all, retirement communities in Arizona and Florida, where snowbirds learned it in winter and took it home in spring. It was easy on the joints, social, and playable on a converted tennis court with a portable net. By the 2000s the sport had a stereotype, older players in the Sun Belt, which was both accurate and about to become very out of date.
The USAPA was re-formed as a non-profit in 2005, revised the rulebook in 2008, and in 2009 held the first USAPA National Tournament in Buckeye, Arizona, with around 400 players. An international federation was formed in 2010. The infrastructure of a sport, ratings, sanctioned events, certified referees, was assembled through the 2010s, mostly by volunteers.
Two professional tours were founded a year apart: the PPA Tour in 2018 and the APP Tour in 2019. Prize money, television deals and sponsorships followed, and a generation of players who had grown up playing the sport, rather than switching to it after tennis, started to win. In 2020 the USAPA rebranded as USA Pickleball. In 2021 Major League Pickleball launched with a team format and, later, celebrity team owners from the NBA, NFL and elsewhere.
The rulebook kept moving too. The let serve was abolished in 2021, the drop serve was added the same year, the two-bounce rule got its current name in 2018, and the finger-spin serve was banned from 2023. If you learned the game before those changes and have not played since, the serving rules guide will surprise you.
Then the pandemic happened. Pickleball was outdoors, could be played at a distance, needed almost no equipment, and could be learned in an afternoon. The Sports & Fitness Industry Association named it the fastest-growing sport in the United States in 2021, 2022 and 2023. Its participation counts went from a few million players to close to 20 million by 2024, roughly tripling in three years, with the fastest growth among players under 35. Tennis courts were repainted, cities argued about the noise, dedicated pickleball venues opened in shopping centres, and Washington state made it the official state sport in 2022.
Growth has since spread outside North America, to Europe, India, Australia and East Asia, in some places alongside padel, the other paddle sport having a similar decade. The comparison guide covers how the two differ. Olympic inclusion is a stated goal of the international federations but has not happened as of 2026.
Sixty years on, the court is still a badminton court. The net is still 36 inches. The kitchen is still seven feet and the serve is still underhand. Games still go to 11. The paddle is carbon fibre instead of plywood and the ball is moulded rather than a toy, but a player from Bainbridge Island in 1965 could walk onto a court today, be told about the two-bounce rule, and play. That is unusual for a sport, and it is most of why the game still feels like the thing three dads made up to keep their kids out of the house.
The free online pickleball game on this site keeps the 1965 rules: the badminton-court footprint, the 36-inch net, the seven-foot kitchen, the underhand serve, and games to 11. The one liberty it takes is rally scoring, which the founders did not use and the pro leagues now do. The about page explains why.
Keep going: the rule the founders drew on that first week, the kitchen, and the court they drew it on, in court dimensions.
Or play the 1965 rules in your browser.