That same year, a Dayton Daily News story took a deeper dive into the game.
“Choose your pickle — dill, cucumber, sweet, sour, or ball,“ Carol Potter wrote. ”Ball? Yep, you read it right. Pickleball has barreled into town and is being played right in Kettering at the Rose E. Miller Recreation Center.
The game is played on an indoor court, a backyard court or even on a driveway, and all you need are a paddle, a ball and a net.
“Billed as ‘America’s newest racquet sport,’ pickleball is described as giving one as much exercise as tennis, but the court is a little smaller.”
More than 40 years later, what‘s new about pickleball isn’t the game itself but its exploding popularity. That‘s evident in the number of new places to play across the Miami Valley.
• Pickleball Kingdom in Centerville is scheduled to open sometime this year at 985 S. Main Street.
• Two miles away at 359 Miamisburg Centerville Rd., another facility, Picklerage, is also scheduled to open soon.
• In Hamilton, a pickleball facility called Dill Dinkers will open next month at 1740 S. Erie Blvd. in the Hamilton Crossings Shopping Center.
• Long’s Sideout Sports & Spirits in Xenia plans to build six pickleball courts this year.
• In Riverside, Black Barn Pickleball at 4740 Linden Ave. is opening its first building.
• In Springfield, three pickleball courts just opened to the public downtown as part of the City Hall Plaza renovation project.
According to a report by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, pickleball has been the fastest-growing sport in America for three straight years, growing by 223.5% in that span.
“It‘s been exponential,” said Jeff Jett, a local coach and player who co-founded Black Barn Pickleball. “I started playing in 2020. It‘s just grown 50% to 60% every year. The first year or two, I felt like I knew everybody, and then, bam, I hardly know any of these people. There’s just so many people playing.”
An addictive game
At a quick glance, pickleball looks like tennis, but there are many differences.
• A pickleball court measures 20x44 feet. By comparison, a tennis court measures 78x27 for singles play or 78x36 for doubles.
• Tennis is played on grass, clay, or hard surfaces. Pickleball is played on asphalt or concrete or on a gym floor indoors.
• A pickleball racquet is solid and does not have strings like a tennis racket.
• The ball in pickleball looks like a Wiffle ball.
• In tennis, players can hit the ball before or after it bounces. In pickleball, the ball must bounce once on each side before volleys are allowed.
Jett sees pickleball as a game for all ages.
“I’ll be 57,” he said, “and when I started five years ago, I was one of the younger people. Now it‘s amazing; there are so many young people playing. It‘s teenagers, 20-somethings, 30-somethings and so many more tennis players flipping over into pickleball.”
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
While tennis purists used to make fun of pickleball, Jett said, when they try the game, they spread the word, helping the game grow. According to USA Pickleball, there are 68,458 courts in the United States, with 18,455 new courts added in 2024.
“It‘s tough to explain the addictive part of it,” Jett said. “It kind of reminds me a little bit of golf, where you can have 17 awful holes, and then you hit the green on 18 and knock a putt in and it sucks you back for the next round. You just can’t perfect it. If you just lost, you want to improve on it. A game is over in 12 to 15 minutes tops. You think, ‘Well, just one more. I can’t end that way.’ If you won, you think, ‘Wow, this is great. I want to keep this going.’ The joke is, ‘Just one more.’ That‘s kind of the theme of pickleball. Let‘s play just one more.
Tennis to pickleball
Jade and Jackie Kawamoto, twin sisters who played tennis at the University of Dayton, graduating from UD in 2018, were introduced to pickleball by their dad and now are professional players in Major League Pickleball and in the Professional Pickleball Association.
“In 2019, our dad started playing pickleball at a local community center on the basketball court,” Jackie said. “He was a tennis player and kind of thought it was a fun, new, unique twist on a racket sport, but not as hard on the body as tennis. So he introduced us to it, and we got addicted really fast and kind of never looked back. We never dreamed of having a professional career at the time.”
The sisters, who live in Indianapolis, turned pro in 2021 when Major League Pickleball launched.
Jackie ranks 11th in doubles on the PPA Tour, and Jade is 14th. They teamed up to reach the semifinals of their last tournament, the Veolia North Carolina Open, in April and also played on separate mixed-doubles teams.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
“Major League Pickleball is a team kind of tour,” Jackie said. “You have two guys and two girls or three guys and three girls on each team. The PPA tour is more like a tennis-style tournament. You enter with your own partner, or you can play singles. That‘s more of an individual-based tournament.”
The sisters play for fun, too — sometimes with their parents. They encourage newcomers to give the sport a try.
“Once you learn the scoring, it’s pretty easy sport,” Jackie said. “The beauty of it is you can play with literally anyone. It defies, race, gender, age. At the local parks, people are very open to playing with new people.”
A welcoming sport
Kelsey Schuering launched the Dayton Pickleball Association website three years ago after seeing a number of Facebook groups related to the sport.
“I just started going to all of the indoor clubs in town, asking them what they wanted promoted,” she said. “I went to all the public places in town, and if they had a representative, I worked with them. Then I slowly got involved in reaching out and getting connected with people who had tournaments in town, people who wanted to be sponsors of pickleball, people who wanted to put on events and leagues and everything like that. It‘s evolving every day.”
The site lists courts where there is open play. For example, it‘s first come, first serve at the eight courts at Snyder Park in Springfield and at the 12 courts at J.F. Kennedy Park in Kettering.
Credit: David Jablonski
Credit: David Jablonski
Schuering said the association has 300 members and a database of 4,000 people she emails every month. Keeping up with all the new facilities opening is difficult, but she said the pickleball community is excited about the growth.
“My only worry is will these places do well year round,” she said. “A lot of the Dayton community is used to being able to go to public courts for free. So I’m really curious to see how a lot of these places are going to do memberships. I know some will kind of be indoor, outdoor, but the majority of them are going to be indoors, which is great for the winter.”
Asked to explain why so many people have fallen in love with pickleball, Schuering said, “I think that it‘s easy to pick up. You don’t have to have a racquet sport background. It started that way because it was considered the old people sport, and people picked it up because it was easy.
“But the first reason I started playing was because I could play with parents and grandparents, and it was something that we could all go do together. It wasn’t going to a bar, going to a restaurant. It was exercise, getting outside. If there’s little kids around, they could jump in and have fun. It was just something that anyone of any age and any athletic ability could do, and you’re really starting to see that more. It‘s obviously not an old-people sport by any means. So many people are doing it now. It‘s a welcoming sport. It‘s a community sport.”
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