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The True Story: The Birth of Pickleball

By Frank Pritchard

NOTE: Joel Pritchard, father of the author, was a businessman who also served as a 36th District State Representative (the district included Magnolia) and Lieutenant Governor of Washington State.

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There have been inaccurate accounts and even fables about pickleball that have taken root over the years. I will now tell you the true story. How do I know? Because I, Frank Pritchard, was there.

 

It was 1965, and my family—my parents Joan and Joel, and the four Pritchard children—made our annual move from Magnolia to Bainbridge Island for the duration of the summer. Once school was over, we packed up and went to “the island.” My paternal grandparents had purchased property there in the 1920s and had added to and improved it over the years. It included four “houses,” a garage with a workshop, and, most importantly for our story, a badminton court in the center of the property. The “houses” were not designed for year-round living—only for spending the summer at the beach. They had meager sources of heat and no insulation, and they made weak attempts at being level. It was basically glorified camping, but it suited us just fine.

 

Also on the beach, about six doors down, were Carol and Barney McCallum—another family transplanted from Magnolia for the summer. They were close friends of my parents, and they saw each other year-round. In fact, Barney and my father had worked together at Griffin Envelope Company before Barney started his own business, McCallum Envelope.

 

That July, my parents’ good friends Tina and Bill Bell came for their annual two-week visit. Even though their three children were younger than us, we always enjoyed our time with them. I had just turned thirteen, so I was nobody’s idea of charming or cooperative. I mention this because it set the stage for the genesis of pickleball.

How it all began

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It was a beautiful Saturday, and my father had just returned from playing golf with Barney and Bill. I was standing on the steps to our house, and as my father approached, I stated in a typical teenage fashion, “I hate it here. There’s nothing to do.” My father replied that when they were on Bainbridge as kids, they used to make games up. I said, “Then why don’t you go and make a game up?” I believe I said this with a good deal of snottiness in my tone. My father loved a challenge, so he replied, “Okay, I will.”

 

I had been given a plastic ball and bat set for my birthday, and the Wiffle ball was lying on the lawn. He picked it up and set off for our shed.

Joel and Frank Pritchard playing pickleball on the original Bainbridge Island court. Obviously, Dad wasn’t fussy about footwear!

Courtesy of Pritchard family. Circa 1968.

Putting the pieces together

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After about an hour, curiosity got the better of me, and I walked up to the badminton court. My father and Bill Bell were in the midst of their first effort to create a new game. My dad had taken a leftover badminton net and lowered it waist-high. (For many years, his waist’s height served as the official measurement for the net until it was changed to a regulation 34 inches.) He had also fashioned some very crude, very scary looking paddles from inch-thick plywood he’d found.

 

I recall my father saying to Bill, “You know who we need—we need Barney.” A call was placed, and it was either that day or the next that Barney got involved. And that was a good thing. Barney came up with the paddle design of 3/8-inch plywood. Barney was also the one who found the right ball for the game. It soon became apparent that Wiffle balls tended to split at their center after a short time in use. After much trial and error, Barney found a ball made by the company Cosom that is essentially what is in use today.

 

From that point on, the game was pretty much set, and it became the favorite pastime on Pleasant Beach. There were a few tweaks to the rules as time went on: first the single bounce, then the double. And, of course, no standing at the net and slamming the ball down the other team’s throat. I’ve always called that the “Dick Brown rule,” created due to fellow Magnolian Dick Brown hovering right at the net—all six-foot-four of him. I don’t know where the term “the kitchen” came from for the non-volley zone, but you needed to stay out of it! I also don’t know who created the present-day scoring system, which I personally find unnecessarily complex.

The beloved family dog, Pickles—named after the game,

not the other way around!

Courtesy of the Pritchard family. Circa 1968.

How the game got its name

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As for the name, that came from my mother’s imagination. She grew up in Marietta, Ohio. Marietta College (my parents’ alma mater) was situated on the Ohio River and had a strong rowing program. My guess is that it was a fairly big deal in that small town, and it was natural that my mother picked up knowledge of crew. My mother decided that this new game should be a take on the crew term “pickle boat.” The way she explained it to me was that rowers were put in the pickle boat if they didn’t make the first or second boats. Whoever was left was just thrown in that boat. Since our game was a bit of this game and that game thrown together, my mother thought it could be called “pickle ball.” I thought it was a dumb name at the time. But it stuck, and it was never called anything else (although it is now officially “pickleball,” one word). I can’t imagine it being anything but that.

 

How the game did not get its name

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The game was not named for our dog Pickles. The dog was named for the game. My sister Annie came up with it. The game was named in 1965, and we didn’t get Pickles until 1968. End of story. I should add that Pickles (a wonderful dog, by the way) was a cockapoo. She’s been made into several breeds by many people, but that’s what she was.

 

The confusion around the name began when my father and Barney met with a reporter from a national paper several years later. This was the first national press they were getting. They told him how the game got its name, but also mentioned how some people thought it was because of the dog. The reporter told them to use the dog story because it was cute and memorable. So that day, my father and Barney agreed to always use that version of the story. And they pretty much did, until they day they died. My mother has never been given credit for her role in the game’s creation. And it’s one thing I like to set straight whenever I can.

Joan and Joel Pritchard playing on the original court.

Courtesy of the Pritchard family. 1968.

A national phenomenon

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It is hard to comprehend how this game, which started with a whine, became a national phenomenon. Pickleball is seemingly everywhere these days. Lord knows, it set the stage for more commercials about medications for seniors than one can count. But I believe this game—which has gotten millions of people up, moving, and having fun—would please its creators more than anything else. I also have to imagine that if my family hadn’t vacationed on, at that time, very rural Bainbridge Island, and if I hadn’t complained of being bored, the game might never have been created! Life’s truly funny that way.

Frank Pritchard grew up on Magnolia and Bainbridge Island. He and his wife Teresa now live in Yakima, Washington.

Some of the Rest of the Story: Manufacturing

By Doug Smith and Janet Valentine

As some of you know, pickleball was invented on Bainbridge Island in 1965 by Joel Pritchard, Bill Bell, and Barney McCallum. What you don’t know is that I, Doug Smith, along with Janet Valentine, was instrumental in getting pickleball off the ground, and that Barney McCallum is my uncle.

 

My good friend and coworker Janet Valentine and I were a two-person operation in Uncle Barney’s envelope factory, initially on Western Avenue. It then moved to the corner of Northwest 48th Street and Leary Way Northwest, currently home to the Fremont Brewing production facility. We developed the company’s distribution network for sporting goods stores. Janet answered the phone and did all bookkeeping tasks, and I was the shipping clerk preparing orders sent daily via UPS and FedEx ground services. I worked for the company for twenty-five years, and Janet was there for thirty years—including some time after Uncle Barney sold the company to his son David in 2016.

Beginning with woodworking

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Janet and I formed a relationship with a small woodworking company in Clearview, Washington. They would purchase sheets of plywood and use band and jib saws to cut pickleball paddle shapes. We had three models of paddles: the Diller, the Master, and the Pro II with a leather grip. At the same time, we imported a less expensive paddle called the Swinger from Taiwan, and we put them in double packs: two paddles and two balls in sets that sold in retail store outlets like Osborn & Ulland, Big 5, and Olympic Sports. When we started, we expected to sell to elementary, middle, and high school PE programs. They were our target market because schools had badminton courts, and PE teachers could lower the nets down to a height of three feet and thus have another game besides badminton and tennis for teaching racquet skills.

 

This was before the internet, so our marketing was a four-color brochure showing students playing pickleball, indoor badminton, and outdoor tennis along with a price list and the rules. These items were inserted into a 9x12 envelope and sent to PE teachers, camps, YMCAs, parks and recreation centers, and military morale and recreation programs. Sending out thirty thousand mailings took a lot of work on Janet’s part.

Curating the courts

 

Crucially, we needed locations for pickleball courts. When Thousand Trails began building pickleball courts at their RV campsites across the US, the game picked up popularity with traveling seniors. These courts were critical in the early development of the game for the retail market. Later, large senior living communities in Arizona had demand for these courts, so they built permanent pickleball courts at their facilities. The seniors in RV parks and planned communities in Arizona and California were key to the game’s initial growth. In the Northwest, it was a company called Sport Court, which installed courts in people’s backyards, that began building the first local pickleball courts.

An early pickleball brochure circa 1990s.
Courtesy of Monica Wooton.

Advances in the game

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Although the rules and paddle shape have remained consistent over the years, Janet and I had to make some changes in order to advance the game. We had a machine built to drill holes in a solid, rotationally molded ball. Those small holes are for outdoor use and are still in existence; however, the balls are now made overseas and imported to the US. We developed the molded ball for marketing reasons. Otherwise, schools and institutions would purchase regular baseball-sized Wiffle balls from their local sporting goods stores, resulting in no sales for us. We had to make a different type of ball that would have two features: a small hole pattern and better durability, meaning it would not break between the holes or split at the seam.

 

Next, an increasing number of retail customers started asking Janet if we had graphite paddles. We decided to upgrade from wooden paddles to ones developed by Arlen Paranto, a Boeing engineer who began making graphite-type paddles from materials found at the Boeing Surplus store. Many a time, Arlen and I would meet down at Boeing Surplus and comb through the excess graphite panels outside, which had lots of rivets in them. I’m sure people wondered what we were doing and probably considered us odd. We needed to find panels that fit in our cars, and ones with the fewest rivets, because we had to use jig saws to cut around the rivets. Armed with these panels, Arlen started making lightweight composite paddles in his garage. I copied him, and we began full-scale manufacturing of composite graphite paddles to meet the growing demand.

The first sets

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Schools typically ordered two dozen balls and eight to twelve paddles because they had four to six badminton courts in their gyms. However, the first sets my Uncle Barney put together had four paddles, six balls, and a heavy-duty net. We included instructions for pouring concrete into a five-gallon bucket and, after getting steel net posts, inserting them into the drying cement. In summary, if you wanted to set this up in your driveway or cul-de-sac, you had to be a DIYer and make your own net-post system to hold our heavy-duty net.

 

It was tough selling the “Uncle Barney set” when we told customers they had to use fifty-pound sacks of ready-mix concrete, find two-inch steel posts, and drill holes for the eyelets to hold the net with heavy rope attachments. Instead, our customers wanted a portable net system that could be set up in ten minutes. Janet and I didn’t have the time to create a portable pickleball set because we were still a two-person operation, but we had to make it work. After all, Janet’s phone was ringing off the hook with retail customers wanting something portable. We ended up with the portable set consisting of two water-fillable bases, four sections of PVC net-posts, two couplings, one lightweight net with heavy rubber-band attachments, chalk for making lines on cement, four paddles, and four balls, all contained in a four-color box. They were very popular, and we sold a lot of them throughout the US.

More help

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Two other people who helped get pickleball off the ground were Jim and Donna Weller, stockholders in our company. Together we would attend two trade conventions: the National Physical Education Show and the National Parks and Recreation Show. We rented a display booth with a VCR/TV system and showed pickleball being played in gymnasiums, in senior centers, and outside on tennis courts. Additionally, Jim set up a demonstration court at the back of the exhibit hall with a portable net and paddles. People enjoyed learning about our sport because they could actually play the game right then and there. Jim and Donna also sold sets with two paddles and two balls for ten dollars, which gave the delegates something tangible to take home with them.

A P.S. from Doug Smith

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As you can see, the growth of pickleball included many fits and starts. We had to learn to adapt on the fly. And without doubt, the main reason for pickleball’s success lies with Janet Valentine. For thirty years, she ran the company and fostered long-lasting relationships with sporting goods dealers and retail customers. She is the unsung hero.

Janet Valentine, general manager, did the development of our team sporting goods distribution network with large sporting goods chains Sports Authority and Big 5 Sporting Goods, and the buying groups Team Sporting Goods (TAG), Sports, Inc., and Athletic Dealers of America (ADA). She did the accounts payable and accounts receivable work, interfacing with our retail and sporting goods distributors over the phone.

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Doug Smith, manufacturing manager, was involved with the manufacturing companies of the pickleball paddles, balls, sets, and nets, and also working in the warehouse, packaging up orders for UPS and FedEx.

Pickleball Gets More Than Popular…It’s Official

By Monica Wooton

Pickleball has worked its way from backyards to city courts to national competitions, and now it is an international sport with an eye toward making it to the Olympics.

 

As pickleball grew, standardized rules and equipment were established, and it soon became an official sport played by many different organizations and leagues. The International Pickleball Federation (IPF) is a volunteer organization dedicated to pickleball.

The International Pickleball Federation (IPF), the world governing body of pickleball, was established to perpetuate the development and growth of the sport throughout the world. The IPF’s goal is to introduce pickleball to all nations so that they may embrace the sport as one of their national sports, and ultimately to achieve official recognition by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in order to establish pickleball as an Olympic sport. (1)

As of this writing, a merger is underway to combine IPF with the World Pickleball Federation. This merger promises that it “represents a pivotal step in solidifying pickleball’s place on the international sports stage, with aspirations to achieve Olympic recognition” (2).

 

With the cooperation and blessing of the Pritchard family, apparel industry veterans Darren and Steve Gable started a specialty clothing company, J. Pritchard, honoring the founders (Joel and Joan Pritchard). Here is an excerpt of a story written by Amanda Huntsman for Newport Beach Living magazine:

The Gables are former professional beach volleyball players who were looking for another sport to be competitive in. After being introduced to pickleball, they fell in love with it. They started entering competitions and noticed there was no meaningful clothing brand based on pickleball. Being in the apparel industry for over 25 years, they decided to create their own collection. They researched the origins of the game and learned that it was invented by The Pritchard Family in 1965. The Gables felt that in order to have the most authentic pickleball brand in the market, it only made sense to connect the founding family about the collection.

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The conversation started with a message left on one of the family members, Frank Pritchard’s home answering machine. They followed that up with a handwritten letter. Both the voicemail and the note expressed how the Gables wanted to pay homage to what Frank’s parents had started by building a premium heritage collection.Frank wanted to meet in person, so they flew to Washington State to meet him. After hitting it off, he agreed to allow the Gables to use the name in exchange for 2 promises: 1) It had to be a premium collection, and 2) his mom had to get credit for naming the sport. (3)

Pickleball’s popularity and cultural impact are rapidly growing, and this entertaining sport with backyard origins continues to prove itself time and time again on the international stage.

J. Pritchard pickleball wear.

Courtesy of the J. Pritchard Company. 2025.

Notes

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  1. “Welcome to the International Pickleball Federation,” International Pickleball Federation, 2025, https://theipf.org/.

  2. “Welcome to the International Pickleball Federation.”

  3. Amanda Huntsman. “Shop Local – Meet J Pritchard,” Newport Beach Living, 2024, https://www.newportbeachlivingmagazine.com/articles/blog-shop-local-meet-j-prichard.

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