Janice Pauly learned how to play pickleball as a physical education instructor at Ridgefield’s East Ridge Middle School. Now the sport that she once taught to seventh and eighth graders has become a thriving business in her retirement, giving her the opportunity to regularly travel between Florida and Fairfield and Westchester counties while organizing tournaments for up to 500 people.
“We did it for seventh and eighth graders,” Pauly recalled. “Then, after I retired a friend of mine played pickleball a lot. We used to be tennis partners, so I started playing with her, and then after that I started running tournaments. First in Ridgefield, then for the Connecticut Masters Games, and then for the Empire State Senior Games and its sort of gone on from there. I’ve been doing it for about 11 years now.”
Pauly’s work remains focused on the elder market. Both the Empire State Senior Games pickleball tournaments and the Connecticut Masters Games she organizes have a minimum age of 50 for participants. The game continues to become increasingly popular among seniors, but Pauly has noticed that the sport’s reputation is changing lately as younger people pick up the pickleball paddle.
Developed in 1965, Pickleball was created by businessmen in Washington who wanted a sport they could play with their entire families. Originally wanting to play badminton, they discovered the summer house they were visiting was not properly equipped. They decided to substitute a plastic ball with holes in it and ping pong paddles for rackets, and over the course of the summer developed a game that would eventually become a national phenomenon by the 2010s.
“It’s only recently that it’s become very well known,” Pauly said after noting most of its popularity until recently was in retirement communities among seniors. “Now you see pickleball all the time, all these big magazines and national news channels are talking about it, and it’s mainly because there’s money in Pickleball now.
After more than a decade running tournaments, Pauly has seen the game’s more recent transformation from a social occasion for retirees to a serious sport with over a hundred full-time professional players. The emergence of professional leagues, official gear, high profile team purchases such as Mark Cuban’s purchase of six teams, and even televised celebrity competitions like Stephen Colbert’s “Pickled” have brought a large infusion of cash and interest.
“For years and years and years. pickleball was just sort of growing gradually and slowly expanding beyond the base of seniors,” Pauly said. The average age of players had been trending downward for a while, but she said that within the past year the pace has picked up rapidly. She attributes this to Tom Dundon’s purchase of the Professional Pickleball Association (PPA), the software that powers Pickleball Tournaments.com, and Pickleball Central, the leading retailer of pickleball gear.
Dundon is also the owner of the Carolina Hurricanes Hockey team, which were once the Hartford Whalers. He has prior experience in launching sporting business ventures, such as the now defunct Alliance of American Football.
Pauly believed this sudden burst of popularity is a sign of change for the sport but doesn’t expect the explosive growth to continue forever.
“I think it has staying power,” she said, “because of the fact that it is a relatively easy activity to learn to do, you don’t have to be a super athlete in order to play it.”
Those earning a living on the professional circuit are something of an exception, but she thinks that a big part of the game’s appeal relies on interactions off the court. The tournaments that Pauly organizes are typically round-robin events with no eliminations.
“Everybody gets to play,” she said. “Nobody gets sent home. You get to see your friends, it’s more of a social sport than tennis because the games are very short. 20 or 25 minutes for a game, everybody sort of hangs around. It becomes more of a social activity, especially for the older players and even for the younger players.”
Photo by Ron B / Pixabay.
