NOT YOUR Grandpa’s Game ANYMORE

Pickleball craze is sweeping the country, Arkansas included

By Dwain Hebda

Just a few years ago, the mention of pickleball conjured visions of senior citizens in discount sneakers batting about in the glow of their golden years. But if that’s still your perception of the sport, you’re woefully behind the times. Just ask Mike Bernardino of Little Rock, who’s played the game for four years and for whom the geriatric stereotypes are fighting words.

“The early days of pickleball, when people would try to write articles on it or show videos of it, always showed a bunch of older people lightly tapping the ball back and forth across to each other,” he said. “Sometimes the game can be like that, but the game can also be extremely fast and competitive, which is why you have a pro circuit with 16- to 40-year-olds beating the ball at each other and making incredible runs on the court and all that kind of stuff. It can be very athletic, and that’s one of the appeals of it.”

Bernardino, a retired IT account manager, has been playing pickleball for four years. At 61, he would have been considered a youngster during previous eras, but instead finds himself carried along by a tsunami of pickleball popularity sweeping from one corner of the country to another.

“The thing with pickleball is, you can get with groups that are similarly skilled to you,” he said. “If you’re a college athlete, super-fast and superskilled to hit the ball and you want to play at that level, the game can be very fast and competitive. On the other hand, if you’re a senior citizen and you can’t sprint the way a young person can, it’s still a fun game for you, too.

“I have always been interested in athlet- ics. Heavy racquetball player, heavy volleyball player. When I was in the military, we played all kinds of sports. My wife, who started playing pickleball at the same time as I did, is not as athletic, yet this was something we could easily do together. That’s another attribute of the game — you find a lot of couples playing together who are able to play at different levels and share the same space.”

Pickleball is an American sport and a relatively young one at that. The game was invented in 1965 in Washington state by pals Joel Pritchard and Bill Bell, who were looking for something for their families to do one Saturday. They rummaged around Pritchard’s home, and unable to locate a complete badminton set, dug out an assortment of athletic gear including ping pong paddles, a plastic whiffleball and a badminton net, which they set up on the property’s asphalt badminton court.

The game gained local notoriety quickly, so much so that by 1972 the creators formed a corporation to protect their invention. Four years after that, the first documented pickleball tournament was held at South Center Athletic Club in Tukwila, Washington.

From these humble beginnings, pickleball has grown into one of the more unlikely sports crazes, growing at a rate seldom matched in American history. A study released in January by the Association of Pickleball Professionals estimated there are 36.5 million pickleball players in the United States, ranking the activity third behind cycling (51.4 million) and running (49 million).

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 pickleball attendance in history, per USA Pickleball.

Bernardino said the appeal of the game boils down to minimal equipment, catering to all skill levels and ease of learning the game.

“Pickleball is a sport that’s like a mash of a lot of different sports,” Bernardino said. “Most people say it’s a mash of pingpong, badminton and tennis. The reason being because it’s played similar to tennis in that you’re serving a ball diagonally across courts. You start a session and you’re playing the ball back and you can only let it bounce one time. You can hit volleys and all that kind of stuff. It’s similar to tennis in that aspect.

“It’s very easy to learn how to play. If I had you for a half an hour I would spend like, 15 to 20 minutes explaining the rules and how to hit the ball and we would do a couple of practice shots and then instantly you would be able to play a game.”

The explosion of interest in the game hasn’t gone unnoticed by private and public sports-and-recreation entities alike, resulting in a flurry of added competitive and instructional programs.

Many of these entities have also begun constructing new courts or repurposing languishing tennis courts to pickleball play.

“We certainly stay in tune with what’s happening in our region and in our state, and pickleball has been increasing in popularity over the last 10 years,” said Lee Farmer, recreation superintendent of Parks, Natural Resources and Cultural Affairs with the City of Fayetteville. “It’s been around a lot longer than that, of course, but the real growth has been in the last 10 years or so.

“We started offering, last fall, pickleball lessons to try to improve our efforts to provide the opportunity to play in our community, as people are looking to learn how to play the sport. We already started that last fall and then continued the program this spring and throughout this year.”

Farmer said while the city’s municipal inventory of athletic facilities and parks don’t contain any courts built just for pickleball, the game has helped bring to life several tennis courts that were otherwise underutilized.

“We have four junior-sized tennis courts at Wilson Park, and we were seeing an increasing amount of usage for those once we painted pickleball lines on those courts last year,” he said. “We did the same at Walker Park, which has two tennis courts. We painted pickleball lines on those courts just to try to meet some of the demand of pickleball in our area.

“We’ve done that to just temporarily meet the demand of pickleball play, but in our future planning, we are hoping to build some permanent, dedicated pickleball courts in our system.”

Other organizations have grown confident enough as to the staying power of the game that many are choosing to make substantial investment in facilities. Little Rock Athletic Club announced last month it would be making a seven-figure investment to build a dedicated 22,000-square-foot pickleball facility, expected to be completed next year.

“The indoor pickleball facility we’re building will have eight indoor courts and four outdoor courts,” said Frank Lawrence, CEO of Little Rock Athletic Centers, which owns Little Rock Athletic Club. “It is something that our members are demanding, and it’s something that we’re willing to invest in for the future.”

Lawrence said the decision to pull the trigger comes after years of watching the sport grow in popularity among club members of all ages.

“I think if we’d have done this interview two years ago, it would have been, ‘Hey this is a place where people that maybe had a tennis background could come and they could continue the longevity of their racquet sport.’ But now there is no age barrier; it’s from little kids to the most senior people you could imagine.

“I think the reason is the learning curve is so fast on this. It doesn’t take too long for you to be good enough to play and enjoy it.”

Lawrence also admitted that as a private business, the construction project came down in part to keeping up with competitors and municipal projects that have been springing up in bunches through the area and across the state. Since December, new public court construction has commenced in Bentonville, Rogers, Fort Smith and North Little Rock’s Burns Park, to name a few.

“Locally, we’re seeing the city being invested in courts. All the country clubs now have dedicated pickleball courts, and over the past 12 to 18 months, we have been building our pickleball community,” he said. “We’ve proved the concept within our membership that there was a demand for it, and we didn’t want to sacrifice tennis courts or share those courts with our tennis population. That’s where we really saw the need to make the investment to build a dedicated stand-alone facility.”

The sport is also generating revenue in Arkansas, both for retailers and Arkansas-based Vulcan Sporting Goods of Hot Springs. The company, which is part of Tanners Team Sports, was founded in 2015 as a manufacturer of baseball, softball, tennis, and particularly, pickleball gear. The company makes a full line of paddles and other equipment as well as sponsors tournaments and professional pickleball athletes. The company has even invested in its own court complex, Vulcan Pickleball Park, which is open and free to the public.

Vulcan got into the pickleball industry on the interest of its CEO Vince Signorelli, a move that has paid off handsomely as the sport continues its meteoric rise in participation and popularity.

“Our CEO is a tennis player, and he kind got in on the ground floor of the pickleball craze,” said Lucia DiGiacomo, general manager of pickleball for Vulcan Sports. “We were really lucky to get into that early as [it] really allowed us to get a good foothold in what has been like a gold rush. There have been so many manufacturers pop up just within the last year; it went from a handful to, I think, the list now is close to 300.

“Obviously, that won’t last and it’s going to come down to the brands that got there first and the manufacturers that are creating a superior product. We’re lucky to be one of those.”

The company manufactures five lines of paddles ranging in price from $89 to more than $200, providing equipment to suit every game and every price range. DiGiacomo said the breadth of the product line is a hallmark of Vulcan being a foremost authority in the sport.

“We have a wide range [of equipment], which is a little bit unusual compared to other companies,” she said. “It is so important for people to play according to their preference; it’s all about weight distribution, the size of the paddle, how long the grip is, the thickness of the paddle.

“If you have a lighter paddle, it’s usually a little bit less substantial whereas with the heavier paddles you get a little more power behind it, and it also softens the ball a little bit more. So, there are a lot of different factors, but I’d say throughout our product lineup that’s kind of a pretty good overview of what we have going on.”

Another thing that sets the company apart is its innovation, which allows it to regularly update its product lines. This helps keep Vulcan at the forefront of equipment.

“There are some paddle brands that literally have had the exact same paddles since they came out with them years ago, and they have not updated anything,” DiGiacomo said. “We don’t have any set rule, but we want to keep up with what the game is evolving into. If you had watched pros play two years ago, that’s not the same game that you’re seeing pros play today, and a lot of that has to do with the way the paddles are made and what players expect from their paddle.

“We’re not going to just continue to do what’s tried and true and expect players to be OK with that. We want to do what is new and cutting edge and that’s what we’ve always done. We are always looking for what the next best thing is and try to do it well.”

While it’s always dicey to predict the long-term prospects of a sports craze, for now all entities are finding there’s plenty of interest in the game for all. And for those who have seen other things come and go, pickleball has all the markings of a sport with big things ahead of it.

“Arguably, I think it’s the biggest rise of an individual sport,” Lawrence said. “Crossfit, maybe, or racquetball, perhaps, back in the ῾80s are things that have had some similar momentum, but nothing quite like this has. This is about as big as anything I’ve seen.”