I am a pickleball fan, and so, of course, I go looking up how it all began. 😉 I found an interesting video, and so I took notes, and this is what I got out of it:
Barney McCallum was a man who lived on Bainbridge Island in 1965. He had a neighbor/friend named Joel Prichard. He and Joel worked together in an envelope business and were great friends. Joel was a politician and a congressman of the United States.
One day, when the men came back from playing golf, their kids were bored, giving the adults a hard time. So Joel and some other men picked up a wooden paddle and a plastic baseball and headed to a badminton court with the kids. They wanted to show the kids how to be creative, going back and forth to create a game. From there, adults started taking over the game. Barney realized that ping pong paddles wouldn't work since they would break, so he had to create some other sort of paddle. He went to his band saw and first sketched out three different versions of a paddle. Then he cut it out of wood. And there he had his first wooden paddle made.
It wasn't exactly a game yet. So the adults made up rules as they went along. The scoring part was a big argument. They had tried doing tennis, badminton, ping pong, etc. Eventually, the scoring system was developed.
Dick Brown, one of the men, would always run up to the net and spike the ball aggressively. His height was 6 feet 4 inches. And the badminton serve line was 6 feet 6 inches. So the men decided he would have to stand behind the badminton serve line to spike it in the air. And that's what we call now in the game of pickleball, the kitchen.
Joel would go to the net and put it as high as his waist, which was 36 inches. They did it like that so they would know if anyone messed up the net.
Since Joel was a congressman of the United States, he would play pickleball at one of his political events. That's mostly how pickleball came to life. Joel would get people to play, and after a while, everybody wanted pickleball paddles. So Barney had to keep making paddles for people and make it into a business.
Years and years later, pickleball is super popular!
There's so much more I haven't mentioned in this blog post that I got out of the video. But you can go watch it for yourself! It's worth it, trust me.
Here's the video I watched: