When was pickleball invented? In the summer of 1965, on Bainbridge Island just across the water from Seattle, by three dads who were trying to stop their kids complaining about a boring Saturday. There was no grand plan and no sporting body behind it. One of them had an old badminton court on his property, nobody could find the shuttlecocks, and what they did find was a bag of ping-pong paddles and a perforated plastic ball. That afternoon is the whole origin of the game you played last week.
Sixty one years later it is the fastest-growing sport in the United States and it is filling courts in every Australian state. Here is the honest version of how it started, including the bit about the dog, which almost everyone has backwards.
Who invented pickleball
Three men, together, in 1965: Joel Pritchard, a Washington state politician who later went to Congress and became lieutenant governor, Bill Bell, a friend and business owner, and Barney McCallum, who joined the following weekend and ended up being the one who made it a real game rather than a one-off muck around.
Pritchard and Bell came back from golf to find their families sitting around with nothing to do. The property had a disused badminton court, so badminton was the plan until the search for a shuttlecock came up empty. They improvised with ping-pong paddles and a plastic ball with holes in it, and they set the net at badminton height, about five feet.
Then came the detail that actually created a new sport. The ball bounced well off the asphalt, so they dropped the net to waist height, roughly 36 inches, and the game stopped being badminton played badly and turned into something closer to table tennis on a big court. That is the moment pickleball exists. McCallum arrived the next weekend, got hooked, and started cutting better paddles out of plywood in his garage, because ping-pong paddles were never going to survive a serious rally.
The three of them wrote the first rules together, borrowing from badminton and keeping the oddities that have since become the character of the game: the underhand serve, the two-bounce rule, and the no-volley zone we all now call the kitchen. If you have ever wondered why the serve has to be hit underhand when every other racquet sport lets you throw the ball up and swing, this is why: the rules were written by people who wanted their kids and their mates to be able to return it.
Why is it called pickleball?
Two stories, and the popular one is the wrong way round.
The story the Pritchard family tells, and the one USA Pickleball supports: Joel's wife Joan had rowed, and she said the game reminded her of the pickle boat, the crew term for a boat thrown together from whatever oarsmen were left over after the real crews were picked. A game cobbled together from badminton, table tennis and whatever was in the shed is a pickle boat. The name stuck.
The story you have probably heard: it was named after the family dog, Pickles, who kept running off with the ball. Lovely story, and the timeline does not support it. The Pritchards got Pickles a few years after 1965, and the dog was named after the game, not the other way around.
So the dog is real, the dog did chase the ball, and the dog is not the reason the sport is called pickleball. If you want the primary source rather than our word for it, USA Pickleball publishes its own history of the game, and the timeline below is drawn from it.
Pickleball history: the timeline
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1965 | Invented on Bainbridge Island, Washington, by Joel Pritchard, Bill Bell and Barney McCallum. Badminton court, ping-pong paddles, perforated plastic ball, net dropped to 36 inches. |
| 1967 | The first court built specifically for pickleball goes in, in a neighbour's back garden on the same island. |
| 1972 | Pickle-Ball Inc. is formed to make and sell equipment, so you can finally buy a paddle instead of cutting one. |
| 1976 | The first known tournament, at the South Center Athletic Club in Tukwila, Washington. Most players still used wooden paddles. |
| 1984 | The USAPA is formed and publishes the first official rulebook, which is where the modern rules really begin. |
| 1990 | Played in all 50 American states. |
| 2019 | The USAPA becomes USA Pickleball, by which point the sport has outgrown its own governing body's name. |
| 2020s | Named the fastest-growing sport in the United States several years running, and the growth arrives properly in Australia. |
The thing worth noticing in that list is the gap. Nineteen years from a back garden to a rulebook, and another thirty five before the rest of the world paid attention. Pickleball was a slow burn for most of its life, which is why plenty of Australian players assume it was invented about five years ago.
How the game reached Australia
Later than America, and much faster once it arrived. The sport is now played in every state, the national body is Pickleball Australia, and the growth here has followed the same route it took in the US: existing courts first, purpose-built courts second. If you have joined a session at a tennis club recently you have seen it happen, because a tennis court takes four pickleball courts with nothing more than tape and portable nets, and a badminton hall needs even less convincing.
Two other signs of a sport that has settled in rather than visited. Australians now rate themselves properly through DUPR, which only matters when there are enough players to need a ladder. And on our side of it, more than 2,200 players have bought gear from us, which is not a national statistic but it is a real one, and four years ago it would have been a handful of curious tennis players.
If you are reading this because someone dragged you to your first session, the rules have not changed much since 1965 and they are still quick to learn: start with how to play pickleball, then how to keep score, and the full rules of pickleball in Australia when you want the detail. Coming over from tennis is its own adjustment, which we covered in pickleball vs tennis.
What 61 years did to the gear
The rules travelled well. The equipment did not, and that is the real difference between 1965 and now.
Those first paddles were plywood, cut by hand, heavy and dead. A modern paddle is a carbon fibre face over a polymer honeycomb or foam core, and the whole reason players argue about what the face is made of and what thermoformed and foam core actually mean is that those materials changed how much spin and control one player can get out of one swing. The Six Zero Quartz at $99 is a carbon-faced paddle that would have looked like alien technology to Barney McCallum in his garage, and it is the cheapest one we sell. Browse the rest in beginner pickleball paddles or the full range of pickleball paddles.
We do not stock wooden paddles, and we are not going to. They are a novelty now: heavier, duller off the face, and nobody who has hit with a composite paddle wants to go back after one session. The honest 2026 version of "three dads and a bag of ping-pong paddles" is two paddles, a tube of balls and some tape on a tennis court.
The ball is the part that changed least. It is still a perforated plastic ball, just engineered rather than borrowed: the Franklin X-40 12 pack at $47.95 is the outdoor standard most Australian clubs play, and the difference between indoor and outdoor holes is explained in indoor vs outdoor pickleballs. The rest of the pickleball balls we carry sit alongside it.
If you want to recreate the 1965 afternoon properly, with two people and a court you have borrowed, the Pickld Starter Set at $238.95 is two Quartz paddles, Franklin balls and covers, or the Franklin Dagger 2-player set at $139.99 if you want to spend less to find out whether it sticks. Free AU shipping over $150. The pickleball sets that include a net are there too, for the people who have a driveway and no club.
When was pickleball invented, and other quick answers
When was pickleball invented? In the summer of 1965, which makes the sport 61 years old in 2026.
Who invented pickleball? Joel Pritchard, Bill Bell and Barney McCallum, on Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Where was pickleball invented? On a disused badminton court at Joel Pritchard's property on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle.
Why is it called pickleball? After the pickle boat in crew, the boat made up of whatever rowers were left over. Joan Pritchard named it.
Was pickleball named after a dog? No. The Pritchards' dog Pickles came along a few years later and was named after the game.
What was the first pickleball paddle made of? Ping-pong paddles on day one, then hand-cut plywood. Carbon fibre and polymer cores came decades later.
We started Pickld for a much less interesting reason than three bored dads, and you can read that story here. The net height and court size they settled on in 1965 are still the ones we all play, and if you are marking out a court this weekend the numbers are in our net height and court dimensions guide.
Got a bit of Australian pickleball history of your own, a club that started before anyone had heard of the sport, or a photo of a wooden paddle in a shed? Hit reply and tell us. We would rather record it than let it disappear.
Chris
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