Is pickleball the new shuffleboard? Or is it something for everyone?

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Frank Cerabino's new book, "I Dink, Therefore I Am: Coming to Grips with My Pickleball Addiction," available in print and e-book versions. 

In one respect, pickleball is the new shuffleboard.

If you’re a comedian, you trade in using well-understood generalities to make jokes.

For something to be funny, it has to be understated. So, for example, you don’t call somebody “old," you just say “he eats the early-bird special” and that connects the dots for your audience.

Shuffleboard, like early-bird dinners, has long served as one of those comedic code words for old. Even in serious pieces.

An essay on aging in The New Yorker magazine published in 2017 talked about the perception of older people “creeping off into a twilit world of shuffleboard and sudoku.”

These days, most shuffleboard courts are empty. Those stereotypical older people who used to play shuffleboard behind the guard-gated entrances of their condo compounds are now playing pickleball.

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And that has made pickleball the new shuffleboard, which means the comedic world is starting to use pickleball as its new stand-in for age-based humor.

Which turns out to be both right and wrong at the same time.

Pickleball and shuffleboard have similar origin stories. But they made radical departures in their development, very much like when early man ventured to walk on the ground while apes kept to the trees.

Pickleball is a recent newcomer to sports. And it started, more or less, by accident.

As the story goes, it was 1965, when a few dads from vacationing families in Bainbridge Island, Washington, crafted a driveway game to keep their bored kids busy during their gloomy-skied summer vacation.

Using a badminton net, a plastic ball, and paddles carved out of wood, businessman Bill Bell, Barney McCallum and their Congressman friend, Joel Pritchard, imagined the game and tinkered with it. They eventually brought their driveway court game back to Seattle, where it became part of Pritchard's campaign shtick.

As the story goes, the game was named after a family cocker spaniel, Pickles, who liked to run after the errant balls. But like most charming stories, it turns out to be untrue.

At least according to Pickleball Magazine, which did a real investigative journalism piece on the name of the sport. Imagine that.

You’ve got your Woodward and Bernstein and the Watergate break-in on one end of the spectrum in your “journalism matters” folder and your Pickleball-coverup story on the other end.

The game’s name, the magazine said, came from Pritchard’s wife, Joan, and it was derived from the sport of crew. The rowers who weren’t good enough to race in the more competitive boats were consigned to what was called “the pickle boat.” 

And so “pickleball” was a disparaging reference to the athletic abilities of the game’s original players: the game played by the least athletic members of the team.

As for Pickles, the dog, well, Pickleball magazine did some Pulitzer-level research to debunk that theory. Starting with the undisputed fact that the game was called “pickleball” in 1965, the magazine went to work.

“Proof of when Pickles was born could help resolve the two-story name debate,” wrote Wayne Dollard, the founder of Pickleball Magazine. “As the official magazine of pickleball, we decided to dig up the past and report the truth, regardless of the venerable feathers being ruffled.”

Right on, Wayne!

“We looked for dog records, uncovered photos, and interviewed several people who were there from 1965-1970,” he wrote. “Based on evidence, we learned that the dog was born in 1968 — three years after pickleball was first played and named.”

I believe that’s called uncovering the smoking spaniel.

Cute-dog story debunked. Once again proving the journalism axiom: Too much reporting gets in the way of a good story.

As for shuffleboard — the kind you play on the ground, not on a table in a bar — it has been around since at least the 13th century, when it was played by King Henry VIII of England.

(It must have taken a special kind of bravery to play against a guy who could simply arrange for your beheading after you beat him.)

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Shuffleboard’s origins are far less mysterious. And in other news, nobody really cares.

It landed here in America mostly in 55-and-over adult communities, where it provided vertical recreation and competitive opportunities for retirees who found it more doable than senior-league softball and more heart-healthy than canasta.

At first, pickleball seemed to be headed to a similar retirement community path. After those early pioneers of the game brought it to the Pacific Northwest, It took root mostly in the retirement communities of Arizona.

In 2001, pickleball made its debut at the Arizona Senior Olympics in an RV park in Surprise, Arizona. It drew 100 players.

Since then it grew like crazy, mostly in the southwest and sunbelt states, with it becoming the most popular game in senior communities.

The National Senior Games Association, based in Surprise, Arizona, now has to cap pickleball participation in its annual games to 1,400 players.

But unlike shuffleboard, it didn’t only appeal to aging baby boomers. Younger players have discovered pickleball, and it’s changing the game.

Pickleball courts these days are being designed with larger footprints around them to allow harder-hitting, faster-running young players to return balls from out-of-bounds areas that older players could only dream of reaching.

As a result, the game has morphed to exist on multiple levels.

You might have a retirement-age foursome laughing and gently hitting rainbow shots over the net on one court. And then playing next to them are four 20-year-olds who are flying around the court, and posting near the non-volley line in an aggressive, percussive, display of quick reflexes that appears to be part of a different game.

Anna Leigh Waters began playing pickleball when she was 10 years old. Hurricane Irma had driven her and her mom to leave their Delray Beach home and stay in Pennsylvania for two weeks.

That’s when she played pickleball for the first time with her mom, Leigh Waters. From that experience, the mother and daughter teamed up to become a fearsome doubles team, and national champions within two years.

By the time she reached her teens, Anna Leigh Waters was already a decorated champion in singles, doubles and mixed doubles.

Professional pickleball player Ben Johns, who is ranked No. 1 in singles, doubles and mixed-doubles by the Pro Pickleball Association (PPA), turned 22 in 2021. He started placing in professional pickleball tournaments when he was 17.

These days, Franklin sells his signature paddle, while he and pickleball buddy Dekel Bar, age 27, have formed Pickleball Getaways, a company that puts together exotic pickleball-based vacations.

“By utilizing the unique backgrounds, skills, and knowledge of its team members, Pickleball Getaways provide exciting all-inclusive vacations combined with world-class pickleball instruction and organized recreational play,” the company’s website said. “We do all the travel planning so that our customers can show up with just their luggage and paddle for a unique and memorable trip.”

The company’s pickleball trips for the summer of 2022 to Croatia and Portugal were sold out nearly a year in advance.

If you happen to be one of the world’s best shuffleboard players, there aren’t business and merchandising opportunities like this.

I know. I spoke to one of them.

Eric Hahmann, at 35, is the youngest professional shuffleboard player in Florida. Hahmann, who has been nationally ranked No. 2 in points and has won national tournaments, isn’t about to quit his day job.

“Can you make a living playing shuffleboard?” I asked.

“Oh, God no,” he answered, then laughed.

Unlike pickleball, shuffleboard has remained mired in its retirement community past.

“The tournaments are still dominated by older people. There’s more access to them for courts,” Hahmann said. “Each retirement park has courts.”

Hahmann is one of the leaders of the St. Petersburg Shuffleboard Club, which dates its founding to 1924 and bills itself as the oldest shuffleboard club in the world.

Today, it’s the largest club too, with more than 1,300 members, and Hahmann said they are having success in getting some young people to play.

But it’s nothing like pickleball.

“It’s the access,” he said. “For shuffleboard, you need a decent grouping of courts. You need the sticks and discs and they have to be in good condition.

“Pickleball is at most parks. You can turn a tennis court into two pickleball courts,” he said. “And people are more familiar with tennis than they are with shuffleboard.”

There’s also a merchandising issue. Pickleball is heavily merchandised with manufacturers relying on pro-player endorsements to sell products.

Take Tyson McGuffin, for example, one of the best pickleball players today.

McGuffin started out as a wrestler. He came from a family of wrestlers, and his father and brother were both wrestling coaches.

McGuffin graduated to tennis, and in his 20s made a living as a tennis coach while being ranked as one of the best tennis players in the state of Washington.

Then he found pickleball, which suited both his warrior gene cultivated through wrestling and his eye-hand-coordination that came from tennis. It took him all the way to national championships and the endorsement deals that followed.

McGuffin strikes quite a youthful pose: He’s got an arm full of tattoos above his paddle hand, and a ball cap he likes to wear backwards.

He looks like a pickleball pirate, the kind of guy who would get a long, hard look from the security guard at your average retirement community.

But if you’re trying to project youthful vigor to a middle-aged reservoir of pickleball-curious people, McGuffin’s your guy.

He’s one of the faces of Selkirk sports, a leading manufacturer of high-end pickleball paddles.

“Oh yeah, baby, this is it,” McGuffin says in a promotional video while trying out one of the newer Selkirk models. “Oh. Love the precision. Love to be able to direct the ball anywhere I want on a dime.

“Love the added feel with some easy pop.”

Like golfer Tiger Woods and tennis player Roger Federer, McGuffin has his own stylish monogram, which appears on his branded apparel sold by Selkirk.

I asked Hahmann whether being what is essentially the Tyson McGuffin of shuffleboard has gotten him any similar promotional deals.

“There’s no sponsor money in shuffleboard,” Hahmann answered. “Nearly all of the equipment is made by one company in Florida, and they've been family owned for 90 years.”

As pickleball grows in interest, aggressive merchandising has followed.

Tennis stores and apparel websites now feature pickleball items. You can buy court shoes that call themselves pickleball shoes, and tennis bracelets are now sold alongside pickleball bracelets, some with little dangling charms of hearts and paddles.

The Sports and Fitness Industry Association determined that in 2014 there were about 930,000 people who played pickleball eight or more times a year.

Over the next six years, that number of pickleball players who played more than eight times a year grew to 1.4 million players, while another 2.8 million casual players tried the sport — making it the fastest growing sport in America.

All the while, the average age of pickleball players has fallen to where it is now, about 38 years old.

The average age of players may be falling, but the majority of those dedicated players who play regularly are still 55 and older.

Take The Villages, for example. It’s a sprawling adults-only retirement community in North Florida that spans three counties, covers 32 square miles, and is home to about 130,000 people.

Recreation in The Villages is paramount, and pickleball plays a starring role. There are reportedly 108 pickleball courts scattered throughout the communities there, and the calendar of tournaments at The Villages draw hundreds of players.

It’s also home to a slew of pickleball clubs with colorful names such as Geezers and Gals, The Patient Picklers, and Bob’s Bad Girls. 

Shuffleboard is holding its own in The Villages, which touts its 187 courts, 800 players and 80 teams.

But outside these retirement communities, shuffleboard, unlike pickleball, seems to be withering.

The few times I’ve played shuffleboard at my community center courts, the rest of the courts in the eight-court complex were empty.

These two games may both serve as comedic premises for age-related humor. But they are on different trajectories.

USA Pickleball reports that the more than 8,700 pickleball courts are growing by 67 new courts every month. And that’s not counting the home court I made in the street in front of my house.

Even the coronavirus pandemic, it seems, did nothing to stop the spread of the sport, with USA Pickleball claiming a 21% growth in new players during the first year of COVID-19.

I’m not surprised. After all, I was one of those new players.

“Have you tried playing pickleball?” I asked Hahmann, the shuffleboard pro.

“Yes, I have,” he said. “A buddy of mine is really good at it.”