PITTSFIELD — On any given sunny summer day in the Berkshires, people are pulling off knapsacks, changing shoes, donning visors, stepping onto courts, forming foursomes, touching paddles and using a gentle little stroke called a dink.
This is pickleball, a racquet sport played with a paddle and a plastic ball resembling a whiffle ball with a relatively short history and an explosion of interest, nationally and now internationally, that is also taking hold in the Berkshires.
Today is National Pickleball Day.
Courts have popped up from Great Barrington to North Adams over the past few years.
Berkshire Mountain Pickleball, a volunteer association of pickleball players, started in 2019 with just 10 players, said founder Michael Gilardi, who teaches every Saturday. Today, there are more than 400 in that group playing on a total of 16 public courts in Pittsfield, plus six about to be dedicated in Pittsfield’s Springside Park.
“It’s not about winning; it’s about having fun,” said Meryl Rudin, 65, who admitted she’s addicted to America’s fastest growing sport. Why does she love it? “Because it’s good for your body, mind and spirit.”
Pat Mele is the director of pickleball at Bousquet Sports.
Pickleball is easy to learn but difficult to master, said Pat Mele, director of the pickleball program at Bousquet Sport, where Rudin and seven other women were rotating play every 12 minutes.
The sport has many rules — the official rulebook numbers 86 pages — including one that rewards the person serving for hitting an opponent in the opposite court. That particular rule is a bit uncharacteristic of the game which, at least in its recreational form, is characterized as generous, congenial and friendly.
There’s a version of the game called skinny singles, which can be played among three. The game can also be played singles one-on-one, but the most common grouping is doubles.
There are an estimated 36.5 million Americans playing the sport, according to the Association of Pickleball Professionals. It’s now played in more than 20 countries as well.
Friends gather and get ready to play pickleball at Bousquet Sports in Pittsfield.
“Pickleball continued its incredible rise in America,” according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association’s 2023 Topline Participation Report. “Participation nearly doubled in 2022, increasing by 85.7 percent year-over-year and by an astonishing 158.6 percent over three years.”
The sport has gained traction among younger players, with the average age of player coming down to 34.5 in 2022. It was 38.1 in 2021 and 41.0 in 2020.
The best female player in the world is 16-year-old Anna Leigh Waters. Ben Johns, the No. 1 male player, is 20. No. 2, Tyson McGuffin, is 30.
Invented in 1965 on Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound near Seattle, it started on a backyard badminton court after a full set of equipment couldn’t be found. Using table tennis paddles and a whiffle ball, children improvised at the home of then-U.S. Rep. Joel Pritchard. With friends Barney McCallum and Bill Bell, Pritchard later lowered the net and the three worked out the rules.
How the game got its name is the matter of some debate: One theory has it named after Pritchard’s dog, Pickles. A second theory, espoused in The Sporting News, is that the pickle was borrowed from “pickle boat,” a term used in rowing for a boat made up of a crew who have been thrown together which typically places last.
In either case, the sport has grown in popularity and so has the industry. There are pickleball knapsacks, pickleball paddles ranging in price up to $250, pickleball shoes, visors and socks.
Globally, pickleball equipment “garnered a market value of $65.64 billion” in 2022, according to Fact.MR, and is expected to accumulate a market value of $155.4 billion in 2023 by registering a compound annual growth rate of 9 percent.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic at the end of 2020, Mill Town Capital purchased the former Berkshire West, transforming it to Bousquet Sport. In October 2021, the new owners painted two indoor pickleball courts over existing tennis courts “just because it was growing and we heard about it and we knew we should probably accommodate it a little bit,” said Eric Cooper, executive director. By December 2021, two more indoor tennis courts were painted with lines for pickleball.
“By June we were clearing land to build six dedicated outdoor courts,” said Cooper, which are now getting heavy use. “It happened quickly. Our community has grown rapidly. And impressively. It all happened within the pandemic.”
A group of friends play a pickleball game on the Lenox Community Center tennis courts. The courts have been recently resurfaced. There is an effort to raise money on additional pickleball courts.
And that’s not all. As part of its multimillion dollar renovation and expansion of Bousquet Sport, Mill Town Capital is constructing six dedicated indoor pickleball courts as well.
The Country Club of Pittsfield has the Ladder League and the Women’s League, which play on outdoor courts. The Boys and Girls Club of the Berkshires in Pittsfield has four indoor wooden courts after Gilardi of Berkshire Mountain Pickleball introduced the sport there.
There are also opportunities to play pickleball on public courts in North Adams, Adams, Dalton, Lee, Lenox, Pittsfield and Great Barrington as well as at the Berkshire South Community Center. In Williamstown, people play on tennis courts at Williams College.
“This is a sport obviously that you can play with your grandkids and play in your 70s, 80s,” Mele said. The game has an adaptive version for players using wheelchairs, which Mele said can be highly competitive as well.
Rick Cimini returns a shot to his opponents playing pickleball at Bousquet.
Rick Cimini, 62, of Pittsfield, who was playing doubles Friday at Bousquet Sport, said he finds scorekeeping the hardest part of the game.
“It’s a game of patience,” said Christine Lipton, 47, of Pittsfield, who explained a bit more about dinking at the kitchen, the informal name for the area closest to the net. “You want to go back and forth until the ball gets a little bit higher and then you slam it.”
Lipton was introduced to the sport by her brother.
“He came to my house during COVID with his pickleball net,” she said. “From there, I started playing a little bit that summer.”
The limitations of COVID may have helped pickleball take hold and expand across the United States, when indoor interaction was difficult.
Lipton said she now plays five days a week.
Christine Lipton plays a friendly game of pickleball.
“It’s just so fun. I like it because it’s different than tennis in that you can make noise,” she said, adding that she enjoys the strategy. “Everybody has fun.”
Isabel Rose, 65, of Stockbridge, said she’s able to play pickleball despite vision loss in one eye.
“It’s so social,” Rose said. “Everyone who plays is just the nicest of the nicest. We have a great time.”
A group of players is heading to Florida to play at a pickleball clinic.
Sue Haddad, 64, of Dalton, said she has gone to Florida as well, and played in pickup games there — as well as closer to home in the Berkshires.
“You just put your paddle in and you play with whoever is up next,” Haddad said.
Despite its innocent name, pickleball is not without its victims. Haddad broke her wrist on the court — well, actually she was talking with someone and somehow managed to trip backward.
“There’s injuries,” Haddad said, adding she knows a few other people who have broken their wrists while playing, but mostly there are pulled muscles. “At 64, where are you going to make new friends?”