$450 paddles and millions in prize money: has pickleball sold out?

As a family sport becomes more elite and more commercial, its founder’s son mourns the loss of a game once ‘played for fun’

In Frank Pritchard’s telling, it was only meant to be a bit of fun. Or rather, a lot of fun.

Pritchard was there in the summer of 1965 when his father, the congressman Joel Pritchard, and two friends devised the game of pickleball at the house they rented for the summer on Bainbridge Island in Washington state.

They “invented” it using what they found lying to hand – a plastic, perforated wiffle ball, paddles shaped from plywood, and a net usually used for badminton.

The primary intention, says Pritchard, was to entertain a group of bored children and adults during the kind of long, hot school summer holiday that manages to lodge itself in many of our memories.

Almost 60 years later, pickleball has become the fastest-growing sport in the US with around 8.9 million participants. For a while there were several, rival professional leagues, which sought to emulate the NFL or NBA, with a pro circuit not dissimilar to tennis’s ATP.

Last year, the Professional Pickleball Association (PPA), supported by the sports entrepreneur Tom Dundon, agreed to merge with the Steve Kuhn-backed Major League Pickleball (MLP). The creation of another league, Vibe Pickleball, in which Mark Cuban had a stake, was floated but later included in that merger.

There are international world rankings – and people can bet on pickleball as with any other sport.

This year, players competed for $5.5m in prize money across 25 events, an increase of 83% on the winnings of 2022. The league claims its pro players earn an average of $96,000.

Meanwhile, its celebrity investors and A-list aficionados – Serena Williams, the Clooneys and Emma Watson, among others – have ensured media exposure.

But what would the game’s founder Joel Pritchard have made of the game’s extraordinary growth? Has pickleball become too big for its boots?

Frank Pritchard, 71, says he dislikes the way the game has become too much about making money. He thinks his father would feel the same.

“He would be disappointed to think it had become this huge commercial venture right, with ‘killer instinct’,” Pritchard says from the city of Yakima, the heart of Washington’s agricultural industry.

“It was always played for fun, and you could have intense games, but there was no discord. There was no fighting, there was no yelling. None of that. This was for fun and getting people together.”

He rues how pickleball has already turned into an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars with investors such as Kuhn, of Austin, Texas, who would love to turn those millions into billions.

Reflecting on the recent Saudi state-backed LIV Golf deal controversy, he adds: “When there’s money to be made, there’s potential for that kind of stuff, and for bad behavior and trouble.”

Steve Paranto is another member of Pritchard’s generation who thinks the game has changed completely.

He should know. In 1976, Paranto was a double finalist at the first official pickleball tournament, held in Tacoma, Washington, playing in the singles and men’s doubles. He was runner-up in both matches.

For many years, Paranto’s father, Arlen, designed, produced and sold the composite paddle that since 1984 has become standard. Up until then, people used wooden paddles that were much heavier.

Today, paddles can cost as much as $450. Adidas promises its “Adipower” multi-weight paddle allows players to “benefit from power in offence with extra control in defence”.

Paranto, a national champion many times, was inducted into the pickleball hall of fame in 2019. It came two years after Arlen – a one-time Boeing engineer who died in 2019 – was honoured as an “inventor”.

Today, Paranto, 70, plays and teaches pickleball most days in Clackamas, Oregon. As an aside, he suggests that today he’d still beat most players his age.

Paranto decries the gold rush mentality that has taken hold by some, referring to the existence until recently of three rival leagues as evidence of the sport being like the “wild west”.

He puts the surge in pickleball’s popularity down to both the pandemic, which presented people more free time, and A-list fans such as Leonardo DiCaprio.

Does he worry about how big the game has become?

“Well, it’s inevitable when a sport goes this big, that’s going to happen,” he says. And there are pluses and minuses. Its growth brings in more players; a downside is that once a game becomes professional, the sportsmanship seen at an amateur level goes away.

“There are lots of people trying to figure out how to make money in the sport that maybe don’t have a love and passion for the sport, but they have a love and passion for money,” he says.

He is also worried that the ability to place bets on pickleball – in 2021 Genius Sports signed a deal to promote PPA that included live streamed games and betting – could be open to abuse.

“There’s going to be some issues with that when you can bribe a player for $10,000 when he doesn’t make $10,000 in a tournament. There’s going to be people susceptible to bribes,” he says.

Frank Pritchard was one of four children, and the only son, of Joel and Joan Pritchard. His father, who died in 1997 aged 72, served in the state legislature, and in 1972 was elected to represent Washington in Congress, where he spent six terms. He would later serve as the state’s lieutenant governor.

An obituary in the Seattle Times suggested he was a politician who preferred to work across the aisles when he could.

“He was a loyal son of the Republican party, but he butted heads with the conservative wing of the GOP over his support of Eisenhower in the 1950s,” it wrote.

“Courageous is the only word to describe his early unflinching support for abortion rights, and his leadership of a pro-choice initiative endorsed by Washington state voters in 1970, three years ahead of the supreme court’s ruling on Roe v Wade.”

There was no mention of his status as the creator, along with his friends Bill Bell and Barney McCallum, of pickleball. Today, diehard fans travel across the country to play on one of the original courts.

Steve Matthews, from the midwest, says: “My wife and I travelled from Indiana to Seattle last June on Amtrak, for 3 weeks, just to visit Bainbridge Island – pickleball mecca.”

On a recent Saturday morning at the Miller Park courts near Seattle’s Capitol Hill, older players appeared concerned about what was happening to the game they played as much as six days a week.

David Benezra, 55, an engineer with Amazon Web Services, questions why there is a need to turn a profit. “Why does everything have to make money? Can’t we enjoy it for the sport?”

Some players believed the game getting bigger, and the professional aspect growing, would only help the sport.

Ben Lomas, 23, was about to play with Bryn Mader, also 23.

Both were new to the game, but also considered themselves enthusiasts.

“I think it’s good what is happening. It should be in the Olympics,” he says. “If other sports can have professional leagues, why not pickleball?”