The court. The rules. The gear.
The players. The boom.
Everything you need to know.
20M+Players
70,641Courts
60Years
$2B+Industry
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It started with three dads, a badminton court, and a missing shuttlecock. Sixty years later, an estimated 20 million Americans play pickleball. It is the fastest-growing sport in the country, and it is not particularly close. Between 2020 and 2025, participation more than quadrupled by most measures. Courts are being added rapidly across the country. LeBron James, Tom Brady, and Kevin Durant have all invested. The question is no longer whether pickleball will go mainstream. It already has.
The game itself is deceptively simple: a wiffle ball, a solid paddle, and a court the size of a large living room. You can learn the basics in a single session and play a real game within the hour. But beneath that accessibility is a sport with genuine strategic depth, a professional tour, and a rapidly maturing business ecosystem worth an estimated two to three billion dollars.
This is everything you need to know.
01
20 feet wide, 44 feet long. The same size as a doubles badminton court. One-third the size of tennis.
A pickleball court is 880 square feet. A tennis court is 2,808. You can fit two pickleball courts inside one tennis court and still have room left over. The ball travels at 25 to 40 miles per hour, not 120. You serve underhand, not overhand. You can learn in thirty minutes, not thirty lessons. And when a game ends in ten to twenty minutes, you play again.
| Pickleball | Tennis | |
|---|---|---|
| Court size | 880 sq ft | 2,808 sq ft |
| Ball speed | 25-40 mph | 80-120 mph |
| Time to learn | 30 min | Weeks |
| Average game | 10-25 min | 60-90 min |
| Games per hour | 4-6 | 1 |
| Starter cost | $50 | $150+ |
| Serve | Underhand | Overhand |
The gear is minimal: a solid paddle, a plastic ball with holes, and court shoes. Scroll to see inside the paddle.
Protects the paddle rim from ground hits
Textured solid surface for spin control.
13mm = power. 16mm = control. The thickness defines your game.
4" to 4.5" circumference. Smaller grip = more wrist snap.
Scroll to see inside
A plastic ball with 26 to 40 holes punched through it. The holes create massive air resistance. The ball slows down quickly, reduces spin, and makes rallies longer. Two types for two surfaces.
40 smaller holes
Harder, heavier (~0.9 oz)
Less drag, faster flight
More durable in wind
26 larger holes
Softer, lighter (~0.8 oz)
More drag, slower flight
Better control
The talent pool is deepening fast. Here are the four players defining the sport right now.
86.8% Career Win Rate
KITCHEN CONTROLMen's #1
27 / USA / University of Maryland / Materials Science
Johns does not overpower opponents. He dismantles them. His game runs on the most precise soft game at the kitchen line in pickleball, dinking with placement that routinely forces errors from players twice his speed. When the opening appears, he accelerates with a backhand roll volley he is credited with popularizing.
He holds the most PPA gold medals of any male player, with a 108-match singles winning streak that spanned multiple seasons. In mixed doubles, he and Anna Leigh Waters have won more than 30 PPA golds together. He studied materials science and engineering at Maryland, and it shows in how methodically he breaks down an opponent's structure.
Women's #1
19 / USA / Nike Athlete / 181 Gold Medals
Waters turned professional at twelve, became the youngest-ever world number one, and has held the position since. Her career win rate sits at 93.8 percent across nearly 900 matches, a record nobody else in the sport comes close to touching.
She has won 181 gold medals and 39 Triple Crowns, more than any player in history. She plays women's doubles with her mother, Leigh Waters, making them the only mother-daughter team competing at the professional level. Her planted-feet forehand drive is the most feared shot in the women's game, and she signed with Nike before she could legally vote.
93.8% Win Rate / 181 Golds
DRIVES FROM EVERYWHERE
2015 Switched from Tennis to PB
BACKHAND DOMINANTMen's Tour Veteran
36 / USA / Former ATP Tour / Head Pro Turned Pro PB
McGuffin reached the ATP top 1500 in tennis before discovering pickleball in 2015 at the Yakima Tennis Club, where he was the head teaching professional. He went full-time within six months and never looked back.
His two-handed backhand drive, carried over from his tennis days, is one of the heaviest groundstrokes on tour. He pairs it with court coverage that borders on reckless — the diving forehand volley is his signature, and the reason he draws the loudest crowds at every PPA event. Among the first wave of tennis crossovers, and still one of the most dangerous.
Women's Top 5 Singles
33 / USA / Washington State & Aquinas College Tennis / MBA
Jansen grew up in eastern Washington, played college tennis at Washington State and then Aquinas College (where she made NAIA All-American), and earned degrees in accounting and healthcare management. Her childhood friend Tyson McGuffin talked her into trying pickleball in 2019.
By 2022 she had reached world number two in women's singles — one of the fastest climbs in the sport's history. Her crosscourt drive, built on thousands of hours of tennis baseline rallies, is her go-to weapon. She has stepped away from singles more than once, citing the physical toll, but keeps coming back.
#22 Current Doubles Ranking
CROSSCOURT BASELINE
Jack Sock
Former ATP #8 / Raw Power
Riley Newman
Aggressive Lefty
Staksrud
Argentina / Power Baseline
JW Johnson
Age 21 / Pickleball Native
Parenteau
Canada / All-Court
Anna Bright
D1 Tennis / Athletic Power
From 3.5 million players in 2019 to over 20 million by 2025. Watch it happen.
The average player age dropped from 41 to 34.8 in five years. The 25-34 age group is now the largest. The "old person sport" label is dead. There are over 70,000 courts across more than 16,000 facilities, with new ones being added daily.
Joel Pritchard and Bill Bell came home from golf one summer afternoon in 1965 to find their families sitting around with nothing to do. They had a badminton court on Bainbridge Island, Washington, but no one could find the shuttlecock. So they grabbed ping-pong paddles, lowered the net, and started hitting a wiffle ball back and forth.
Their neighbor Barney McCallum joined in the next day and began building proper paddles from plywood in his basement. The three of them wrote the rules that weekend. The game was named after the "pickle boat" in crew, the boat where leftover rowers are thrown together. Not after a dog. The dog, Pickles, was born three years later and was named after the game, not the other way around.
Three dads, bored kids, a missing shuttlecock, and a summer afternoon on Bainbridge Island.
1965
Invented
Bainbridge Island, WA. Three dads, ping-pong paddles, a wiffle ball.
1967
First permanent court built in a backyard.
1976
First tournament. Tennis Magazine calls it "America's newest racquet sport."
1980
Thousand Trails introduces it to snowbirds. Spreads to FL and AZ.
1984
USA Pickleball founded. First rulebook. First composite paddle.
1990
Played in all 50 states. Still mostly retirement communities.
2019
3.5M players. Last co-founder Barney McCallum dies at 93.
2020
COVID. Pickleball explodes. Outdoor, cheap, social. Growth goes vertical.
2022
LeBron, Brady, Durant invest in MLP teams. 8.9M players.
2024
PPA + MLP merge. $75M deal. 501K viewers on FOX.
2025
20M+ players. 70,000+ courts. Fastest-growing sport in America.
Twenty-four teams. A $75 million merger. Rally scoring to 21. The biggest names in sports history are investing in pickleball. Here is who owns what.
7 Super Bowl Rings
Team Owner
Brooklyn Pickleball Team
The most decorated quarterback in NFL history chose pickleball as his first major post-retirement investment. Seven Super Bowl rings, five Super Bowl MVPs, and now an MLP franchise. When Tom Brady puts money somewhere, people pay attention.
Team Owner
LRMR Ventures / MLP Investor
Four NBA championships. Four MVPs. The all-time leading scorer in NBA history. LeBron's LRMR Ventures group invested in MLP in 2022, alongside Draymond Green and Kevin Love. His bet: pickleball is the next major American sport, and the team economics will follow.
4 NBA Championships
Kevin Durant
DC Pickleball Team
Drew Brees
Texas Ranchers
Patrick Mahomes
Miami Pickleball Club
Gary Vee
New Jersey 5s
Each MLP team has four players, two men and two women. A match consists of men's doubles, women's doubles, mixed doubles, and if tied 2-2, a Dreambreaker singles tiebreaker. Rally scoring to 21. The league merged with the PPA Tour in 2024 for $75 million. It is not yet profitable, but the bet is that the audience is coming.
Three dads, bored kids, and a missing shuttlecock created the fastest-growing sport in America.
1965 to 2025 / 60 years / 20 million+ players / 70,000+ courts
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