Pickleball popularity creating demand for more venues

On Memorial Day this week, more than 40 people showed up to play pickleball on the indoor tennis courts at Dave Marshall's facility at the Plantations. They plinked and dinked, laughed and cussed, celebrated wins and losses, huffed and puffed.

Most of all, they had a good time.

Ranging in age from the low 20s to the mid-70s, the players were not a close-knit group of people playing together for a long time. Most were people who have moved to the area in recent years. Many are retirees, representative of what is quickly becoming the dominant population sector in eastern Sussex County.

Rotating onto different courts and playing with different people each game, the players can use the game to develop new friendships between rounds.

But most of the focus is on pickleball - the fastest-growing sport in the United States. The reasons are many: anyone can play, the Wiffle-like ball doesn't sail or land in the next county, decent serving doesn't require the mechanical skills needed in tennis, and most of all, the game is just plain fun and sociable.

And, it doesn't lend itself to talk about politics and religion.

Pickleball is often played on tennis courts, though the the pickleball court is about half as large. In some cases, different-colored lines are painted on the courts to differentiate pickleball and tennis boundaries. That often brings howls from tennis players, but they are quickly becoming a minority in court use.

In other instances, as was the case at the Plantations on Monday, the pickleballers mark their boundaries with colored masking tape. When their two- or three-hour sessions end, the players strip the tape from the courts and smiles return to the faces of the tennis players.

The Memorial Day play-in was nothing unusual for Delaware's Cape Region. In addition to the Plantations facility, pickleball groups can be found just about every day at Sports at the Beach near Georgetown, on the Canalfront Park courts in Lewes, on courts tucked behind the shops inside the Brush Factory on Kings Highway in Lewes, and at The Factory facility in the Nassau Commons complex.

From boredom to fundom

According to a variety of articles on the internet, pickleball developed in 1965 when a few Bainbridge Island men - in Washington state's Puget Sound - came home one weekend day from a round of golf to a house filled with bored children. The badminton net was a balled-up mess as it usually is, the shuttlecocks were either missing or damaged, the kids were still bored and the moms were looking for relief.

Necessity is the mother of invention, or should that be mothers are the necessity of invention? One of the men decided to set the net lower, use a Wiffle ball instead of a shuttlecock, cut a few wooden paddles - oversized ping-pong paddles - from a sheet of plywood, and voila, a new game was born.

In the sport of crew, leftover crew members from different boats join together to create a hybrid crew for what is known as a pickle boat. One of the relieved moms, seeing a new sport cobbled together from pieces of ping-pong, badminton, Wiffle ball and tennis, started calling the new game pickleball in honor of that hybrid tradition. It stuck.

Now local pickleballers are looking for more places to play their multigenerational sport. The current demand for venues is outpacing supply.

Many eye the tennis courts at Cape Henlopen High School, which they see being used sparingly. Isn't there a way?

They're happy that new schools being built in Milton, Lewes and Rehoboth Beach are being designed with pickleball courts in their mix. And they're happy to see new communities being developed throughout the area including pickleball courts in their amenities packages. There are also rumblings about construction of a major indoor and outdoor pickleball complex on state recreational land between Lewes and Rehoboth Beach.

All of that has potential and promise, but like those Bainbridge Island parents faced with antsy, bored children, local pickleballers want their solution sooner as opposed to later.