An upstart sport draws big money and crowds

Anna Leigh Waters, a 17-year-old from Delray Beach, Florida, is the world’s top-ranked pickleball player and is widely considered to be the face of America’s fastest-growing sport. But from where she stands, she is still relatively unknown, even among a majority of the racket sport’s fans.

“Pickleball has gotten a lot bigger, and there are millions of people playing it,” Waters said last week. “They go to a local park and play, but most of them have no idea there’s a professional side of it.”

This week, Waters is at Brookhaven Country Club in Farmers Branch, a suburb of Dallas, to compete in the Pickleball World Championships, one of the sport’s largest tournaments in the world. She is trying to defend her multiple titles — Waters is ranked No. 1 in women’s singles, doubles and mixed doubles in the Pro Tour of Pickleball, according to the Professional Pickleball Association — in a competition that includes all of the game’s marquee stars, including the top-ranked male players, Federico Staksrud and Ben Johns.

The tournament, which began on Monday and will run for a week, is being treated by its organizers as a coming-out party for the pro game — a way to seize some of pickleball’s popularity as a casual pastime and direct it toward the highest levels of the sport.

“This is a statement tournament,” said Bryce Morgan, the president of the PPA. “Financially, we may lose a dollar or we may make a dollar. But this is where we see pickleball going and what it can become, and this is us standing behind it.”

Although pickleball was invented in the 1960s, it began to develop as a professional sport only recently, with the PPA and its rival tour, the Association of Pickleball Players, rising as a direct result of the sport’s surge in popularity during the pandemic. (“I’ve been working in professional pickleball for two years, and I’m considered a veteran,” Jeff Watson, the vice president of communications at the PPA, observed drolly.)

Helping the PPA stand out from the competition is Connor Pardoe, who founded the association in 2019, channeling income from his family real estate business into what he initially thought would be nothing more than an amusing hobby. “I thought I’d do it part-time, maybe host six tournaments every two months, as something fun to do,” he said. “It just grew really quick.”

It helped that, as Pardoe, 29, put it, “the field was wide open.” While Americans were discovering pickleball in record numbers, tournaments were scarce. The ones that did have cash prizes offered low purses and had minimal production values.

Based out of Salt Lake City, Pardoe brought his considerable resources to the table — and, perhaps more important, his willingness to go into the red. “It was OK to lose a million bucks, or to lose 2 million bucks, if we were going to try to grow something,” he said. “So what we were able to do quickly was put on really good events, to bring in stands, to spend a couple hundred thousand dollars building the event out. Pickleball hadn’t really seen anything like that.”

The money gave the PPA’s events an air of legitimacy that swiftly attracted the sport’s top talent. Within years, thanks to Pardoe’s largesse, pro pickleball matches were transformed from spartan affairs to splashy bouts that looked, well, professional.

“It was a huge change,” said Waters, who had been playing amateur tournaments as an adolescent and signed with the PPA after the pandemic lockdowns.

“We went from having temporary nets to legit nets, and from taped courts to painted courts. The crowds were getting a little bigger, then the venues were a little nicer, and then suddenly, wow, we’re in an actual stadium. It was nuts.”

This week’s championships represent the apotheosis of the PPA’s efforts to legitimize professional pickleball.

“We wanted to make the Super Bowl of pickleball,” Morgan said. “Our tour is 25 stops across the country. This is probably like five or six times the budget of those events. We’re blowing it out. We’re building a 3,000-seat stadium. We’ve got concerts every night. There’s curated food. Every pro is coming. We have a wheelchair night. Seniors are playing. It’s really everything under the sun that is pickleball.”

Morgan conceded that the scale of the tournament partly reflected a desire to showcase the sport at its best rather than simply to meet the demands of the audience. Morgan and Pardoe have been busy courting major sponsors and arranging TV deals. But while ticket sales have been strong, much of the audience for each match is drawn from the tournament’s other lucrative venture: the amateur division.

Since the beginning, Pardoe’s professional pickleball events have welcomed open registrations from amateur players around the world and those registration fees have helped bankroll the cost of courting the marquee names. (Like tennis, pickleball pays its stars appearance fees for participating. Johns, the men’s pro, is expected to make at least $2.5 million this year through fees, tournament winnings and endorsements.) When those amateurs are not playing matches of their own, they’re free to watch the professionals compete. The setup gives the tournament a built-in audience.

“When we started, it was a necessity,” Pardoe said. “It was our number one source of revenue.”

Nearly 3,500 amateur pickleball players from 47 states registered to compete this week across more than 300 brackets. Many are eager hobbyists hoping to show off the skills they’ve honed at their local park, but a growing number are those who want to take their love of pickleball to the next level. Only half a decade ago, pickleball was the kind of sport that you could play only for fun. Today making a living doing it is possible: Waters, as the top-ranked pro, is worth millions, and hundreds of other aspirants are now in pursuit of their own fortune.

Like many Americans, Jessica Mason, 26, got her start with pickleball during the pandemic. She made the ambitious decision at the beginning of this year to quit her full-time job as a registered nurse in Atlanta in order to pursue pickleball professionally.

“I was seeing all these girls that I had been beating in tournaments six months prior suddenly going all-in, taking it more seriously, and I felt like I was at my job just falling behind,” she said.

Mason has spent the year traveling around the country practicing and playing in tournaments, slowly climbing up the rankings in the hope of becoming a top pro. “The nursing job I can always fall back on,” she said. “But this has turned into my dream.”

The PPA and the Pickleball World Championships have made that dream feasible. The money and the infrastructure of professional pickleball have been put in place, and the sport now looks like a high-grade, well-established operation.

The only thing missing right now are the grassroots fans — the spectators who will attend the Tour or the Worlds, or tune in and watch them, without participating themselves. Most people who admire LeBron James can’t dunk a basketball. But would it be possible for a pickleball fan who doesn’t play the game to emerge?

“The average pro pickleball player takes the game seriously,” Waters said. “The average person? No. They’re just not educated enough about it.”

For the time being, Pardoe said, the PPA isn’t focused on converting nonfans into viewers.

Its goal is to capture even a fraction of the estimated 40 million people in the United States who have played pickleball in some capacity this year — to convert their interest in playing the sport to watching it played at a higher level.

He likened it to golf.

“Who do you know who watches golf and follows it professionally but who does not golf themselves?” he said. “And look at that sport and how successful it is.”

The goal, in short, is to build a following for the professional side of the sport from within.

“How do we get the people who are playing pickleball to care about who Ben Johns is, or to care what paddle Anna Leigh is using?” Pardoe said. “Or even to tune into the broadcast and show up to the events? If we can do that, we’ll be successful.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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