Pickleball is redefining retirement in the US

WHEN my dad decided to retire at the end of last year, my mom and I were pretty worried.

How was he going to spend his time?

The answer turned out to be pickleball. We shouldn’t have been surprised – the game is quite literally everywhere in the US these days.

My dad is among the 4.8 million Americans who picked up his paddle in 2022, making the combination of badminton, ping-pong and tennis the fastest growing sport in the country.

The once-obscure racket sport is expanding so rapidly – participation grew 159 per cent between 2019 and 2022 – that its unusually dedicated fan base is running out of courts to play on. Longtime pickleballers explain that they used to play on tennis courts, converting the space by lowering the net by two inches in the centre and taping out new lines. But the game became so popular that they outgrew existing courts, and angered tennis players along the way.

So players started creating courts wherever they spotted empty space; they popped up in virtually every public park. In New York’s Central Park, the iconic Wollman Rink has been turned into multiple pickleball courts for the summer. In New Hampshire and New Jersey, private courts have opened inside abandoned shopping centres. The game is reshaping American cities.

Even with this expansion, you almost never see an empty court.

At least half a dozen people described to me their relationship with pickleball as an “addiction”. My dad says the fanaticism is down to how easy the game is to pick up – regardless of what shape you’re in – and its community of dedicated players. Most pickleball games use a rotation system, where you end up teaming up with and against strangers at almost every game. Players become fast friends, and use group chats and an app to coordinate games.

When I visited my dad’s usual game last week, he recognised every single car in the parking lot. A 65-year-old friend of his, Rick Meismann, tells me: “I don’t care for people, and I haven’t met a person here that I don’t like.”

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Dad is not the only one who spends his days on the pickleball court. Bert Maupin, who recently retired after 40 years in IT, jokes that pickleball is his job now.

Big asset

The game that Meismann, Maupin and my dad attend on a tri-weekly basis has revitalised the Chattanooga, Tennessee, community centre where they play, its director, Jeff Strong, tells me.

It all started when Pam Hoover and her husband, Tim, came to the Tyner community centre last year to vote in an election. The gym struck them as the perfect place to set up a court.

Now, most of the city’s 18 community centres offer pickleball. The matches draw so many seniors that Strong is planning a whole slate of programming around them, including bingo and summer camp games such as cornhole.

“The game is a big asset,” Strong says. The retirees who initially came for pickleball are now volunteering at the centre’s summer camp for inner-city youth. The day I visited, the Tyner’s four courts were filled with two dozen participants aged 61 to 85, “dinking”, or playing.

But not everyone is thrilled by the proliferation of pickleball courts. The paddles make a distinctive popping sound as they whack the plastic ball. Some city councils are working to block the development of new courts to limit the noise, while a handful of homeowners associations have resorted to lawsuits.

Aside from tennis players and those who live near courts, pickleball has another important detractor: my mother. 

“It’s a great outlet for him,” Mom says of Dad’s pickleball habit. “It’s just that he overdoes it. He comes home so tired that he can’t move . . . I do not want my husband shuffling through my house.”

Dad doesn’t disagree. “That is all true,” he says.

Still, he and his friends keep playing. Hoover, 69, broke her wrist and bruised her tailbone during a game, yet she still comes to the community centre three times a week to watch her husband and their friends play.

“In your golden years, it just makes everything a bit more golden,” says Pam Randolph, 68.