Cometh boredom, cometh pickleball

Bengaluru: The United States of America’s fetish to turn a pastime, occasionally even a culinary experience, into a professional sport is as cringe as it is well chronicled. 

From frisbee World Cups to hot dog eating contests, it’s all done with inexplicable confidence, accompanied by a branding exercise focussed on dopamine triggers. The latest in this fabled list of sports finds its origin in the backyard of a bored Caucasian family of elite standing in the mid-60s. 

Joel Pritchard, who served the United States Congress eventually, was assigned with the job of entertaining his family, and owing to a lack of sporting paraphernalia, he and his friends used what was around to create what is now described as a cusp between tennis and table tennis played on a doubles badminton court.

While there is no certainty to the etymology of the term itself, pickleball was born on a court in Washington State. Now, it rules the world. 

Exaggerated as that statement might seem, there is truth to it because no other sport, perhaps in history, has grown as rapidly as pickleball in the last five years. In fact, for the fourth consecutive year, pickleball has held on to its status as the fastest-growing sport in the country with close to 50 million active players. 

Given the scalability of the sport and the relative ease with which one can establish infrastructure for it, pickleball’s virility had begun to assume pandemic proportions. Then, India happened. 

Between 2019 and 2022, India saw a 159 per cent spike in player rate. We don’t have clarity on what transpired between 2022 and 2025 in terms of growth because while some say it has grown at a rate of 250 per cent, others have been more circumspect. 

Irrespective, what’s certain is that the number of people choosing pickleball between the time of this sentence’s conception and your consumption of it is dramatically more than any other sport in the country. 

“I didn’t do a data dive on the sport,” says Gaurav Natekar, founder of the World Pickleball League. “I went with my gut. I got the sense that this sport was going to be big because of how accessible it is and how you can get people from different generations to play against each other.

“Of course, there are the professionals who add a dash of intensity to the sport, but that’s not the premise of the sport. This is a sport meant to be played by everyone, and by the looks of it, that’s what’s happening.”

Natekar is a seven-time tennis National champion and he’s an Arjuna Awardee for his effort on the court, yet he chose pickleball and even had his first big event last week in Mumbai. While Natekar says picking pickleball was a no-brainer, it wasn’t lost on those in this dialogue that more and more tennis players are gravitating towards pickleball.

To understand this traversing effect you needn’t look beyond the fact that the organisers of the Australian Open recently conducted the AO Pickleball Slam on the final weekend of the Grand Slam, and offered a prize money of $100,000. Pickleball was also part of the Miami Open in March and was demonstrated at the French Open Grand Slam in June.

If that’s not a testament to its popularity, here’s tennis great Andre Agassi: “It's going to add a great deal to sport. Olympics, I absolutely can see it, it's going to maybe even happen sooner than you're hoping.”

Agassi also detailed the reason for the attention the sport is garnering. “I will always defend tennis as the most difficult racket sport in the world. Pickleball is not like tennis, where you have to learn the fundamentals. Or like cricket, you have to learn the fundamentals right, or else you can't really (play the game). You don't really have to (do that) in pickleball. You start getting better and getting challenged. When you get challenged, you ask the person you're playing with, ‘how did you do that?’ They’d tell you, and then you'd try it. Now you're addicted on a different level and your levels keep going up and it's so stimulating.” 

Chatting up GoRally founders Sam Sancheti and Abhinav Shankar on a court in the City you get a sense of what Agassi means, but, unlike Natekar, these two sport-loving software sentients studied the market before putting up courts more frequently than they did code.   

“We quit our corporate careers for this, but we didn’t just jump into it. We studied the trends,” says Sancheti. “One of the strong points which worked for us was that this sport doesn’t require a high level of skill and also there’s very little risk of injuries.”

As it stands, pickleball has more than 100,000 recreational players in India, and close to 500 professionals. More pertinently, the All India Pickleball Association has been looking to get recognised as a National Sports Federation after its conduct of the World Championship in October 2024.

Not bad for a sport born out of boredom, in America no less.