by Paul Teetor
After three long games, the battle of the sexes was finally over.
The final point of the 12-10 victory was won on an unreturnable smash after a rapid-fire volley. The two, 40-something women, both sporting white sun visors and one with a rubber sleeve on her left knee, had outlasted, out blasted and out dinked the two 30-something men, who weren’t taking the loss very well on this warm spring day at the Manhattan Beach Middle School pickleball courts.
The sweaty, exhausted players touched paddles with each other in the traditional “good-game” gesture, headed for their handy water bottles, picked up their backpacks and appeared done for the day. The two women had won two of the three games and gave each other low-key high-fives, not wanting to rub it in with these two, macho-type guys.
Suddenly one of the losers, a 30-something slickster in a too-tight black T-shirt with the words “I’ve got a dinking problem,” white tube socks that clashed with his stylish Skechers and black wrap-around Ray Bans, let loose with an order disguised as a plea: “O.M.G?”
They all paused. They knew exactly what he meant — and it had nothing to do with God.
They were experienced enough to recognize the pickleball addict’s desperate mantra: OMG.
One more game.
Please: OMG.
Always one more game.
So they did the sporting thing: they played one more game.
They put down their back packs and water bottles, trudged back onto the court, and vowed: This is it.
Gotta go after this game.
Gotta go to a business appointment, gotta go to a lunch date, gotta go do whatever: anything to make this pickleball addict understand that we’re playing one more game and that’s it – win, lose or retire with an overuse injury.
Fifteen minutes later the two women had won again, 11-9. Pickleball games are first to 11, win by at least two points.
So the slickster tried again with an added dose of smarmy charm – “Pretty please, pretty ladies, just one more game.” It didn’t work.
The other three players knew it was over.
Time to get on with your day, move on with your life and keep on pushin’ in the outside world that doesn’t treat pickleball like a cult, a state religion or a way of life.
Pickleball addicts have a saying: don’t let your job interfere with your pickleball.
But for the true pickleball addict, one more game is one too many and a thousand more games is never enough.
Eight days a week
Retired insurance broker Jay Wesley lashed one of his deep, line-drive serves to the opponent’s backhand, watched it force an error on the return, and savored his team’s victory. Coming off the court, he hesitated when asked if he is a pickleball addict.
“Well, I usually play Open Play Monday through Friday mornings at Manhattan Heights,” he said. Then he smiled a rueful smile and confessed: “And on the weekends I swing by the Manhattan Beach Middle School for a few open play games there too. So… I guess that means I’m an addict. I mean, I play seven days a week, so if that makes me an addict……”
The former collegiate ski racer and life-long surfer couldn’t avoid adding the kind of rationalization that most addicts engage in.
“I try to cut back on the weekends,” he said. “The middle school is where the good players go on the weekends, and if I get caught up in a rotation with them in open play I don’t stay too long. I don’t want to mess up their game.”
One of the big attractions, part of the reason for the explosive growth of pickleball in the last 10 years – both locally and nationally – is the concept of open play.
Open play is a radically different concept from reserving a court for your group of players, who all have to get there at the same time. Each court has a Paddle Saddle™ – yes, the name has been trademarked. When you show up at the court you put your paddle in the saddle and wait your turn. You could end up playing with someone you know or with three people you don’t know and whose games you know nothing about.
And you could make some new friends, too.
It’s a win-win for everybody.
Picklers Anonymous
There are a lot of “picklers” – the slang term for pickleball addicts – who would rather not be known as picklers. It’s just not a cool nickname.
Pickleball is not a very dignified name for America’s hottest sport. It’s been growing exponentially since it achieved escape velocity just before the pandemic took hold. There are now an estimated 25 million players in the U.S. alone.
Last year, for the fourth consecutive year, the American Sports and Fitness Industry Association named it America’s fastest growing sport.
Pickleball is moving into the mainstream of American pop culture in a big way. On network TV there are ads featuring bright, shiny people playing pickleball in the background while in the foreground a voice hawks the latest drug with an unpronounceable name for an exotic medical condition you’ve never heard of.
In last Sunday’s LA Times, in the feature called LA Affairs, a single woman wrote about how she had viewed her new pickleball partner — tall, handsome and handy with a paddle — as a potential date and/or mate. Until, in the first game, he started poaching her shots — reaching over to hit balls on her side of the court — and mansplaining that her backswing on volleys was too big.
That pickleball romance died like a too-short lob smashed for a winner.
Pool and the gang
Julie Pool chuckled when her mother started talking about playing pickleball five years ago.
“She was all gung-ho about it, but I laughed at her,” she recalled. “I said it was for old people. It wasn’t on my radar at all.”
That all changed for the medical device marketer when she went on a company retreat in the spring of 2024.
“They gave each of us a pickleball package, with cheap paddles and some balls,” the Hermosa resident recalled. “They even held a little tournament for us. I wasn’t any good because I had never played before.”
But the seed of a pickleball addiction had been planted and it quickly blossomed into a life-changing event.
“I came home to Hermosa, and it was so much fun I told all my girlfriends that we needed to start playing,” she said.
Soon, she and her gang were playing nearly every day. “We met some better players and they taught us how to keep score,” she said.
But the two courts at Hermosa’s Clark Park were hard to get court time on, so the gang started going to Manhattan Heights Open Play for their daily pickleball fix.
“We just started enjoying it so much, and as we got better at it we enjoyed it more and more,” she said.
Eventually she signed up for an intermediate class with MB Parks and Rec, taught by the great Teri and Gunnar Carter, aka Mr. and Mrs. Pickleball. By the spring of 2025 the tall lefty was one of the best players among the regulars who came to Open Play every day.
“I was addicted from the start,” she says. “Once I saw good players on the courts, and how fast and exciting their games were, I really wanted to be a part of it. But I also come for the people I see every day. I’ve made so many new friends here.”
Tennis surrenders
Pickleball is tennis’s first cousin, but the relationship between the two sports has been tense during these last few years of pickleball’s ascension and its challenge for racquet sport supremacy.
But now even tennis players, including some very famous ones, are jumping on the bandwagon.
It’s common to meet pickleball players who volunteer that they are former tennis players transitioning from tennis because the low-impact sport is easier on their back and knees.
Tennis legend Andre Agassi recently won the $1 million Pickleball Slam held in his hometown of Las Vegas. He and his wife, Hall of Famer Steffi Graf, have each endorsed their own signature pickleball paddles.
Another tennis legend, John McEnroe, spent years dissing the new sport, predicting its imminent demise year after year. Now McEnroe has only nice things to say about pickleball, perhaps because he played in the Pickleball Slam, too. He also signed on with a company that is making a “quiet” paddle, an attempt to solve one of pickleball’s most glaring problems – the constant pop, pop sound of paddles hitting perforated plastic balls that has some neighbors demanding they tone down the noise – exactly what happened in Hermosa a few years ago.
Tennis is still a graceful game with beautiful strokes and a proud heritage. It’s just that pickleball is more commercial, more accessible and more in tune with the life-is-a-party, American cultural ethos of instant gratification, mass appeal and easy learning.
Think of tennis as the carefully cooked filet mignon of racquet sports while pickleball is the Big Mac. Your preference all depends on your taste in sports. But the Big Mac is definitely more popular in terms of sheer numbers served.
Granny’s secret weapon
In the summer of 2022 Ryker Demian was an 8-year-old soccer star on track to win a college scholarship.
Then one hot summer day his grandmother, Carolyn Lawson, took him with her to play pickleball at Manhattan Beach Middle School.
That was the day everything changed for Ryker.
“I started playing with my grandma every morning,” Ryker recalled. “Once I started, I couldn’t stop.”
Today, three years later, his long-range goal has changed: now he wants to play on the pro pickleball tour.
“I still play soccer, but I love pickleball more,” he said.
It’s a realistic dream: he’s a rising junior player who just this week took third place – with his 10- year-old partner Hudson Gable — in the open division of a local tournament, beating several adult teams along the way. He is following in the footsteps of his older brother Lawson Demian, 14, who already is one of the best players – of any age — in the Beach Cities.
Lawson has been training at a camp in Florida called The Fort, which develops players for professional play.
“Lawson plays pickleball like nine hours a day,” Ryker said. “That’s awesome.”
Ryker loves everything about pickleball — except one thing.
“My grandma is my favorite partner, but I hate it when people who are like really good see us together on the court and think I’m not very good just because I’m a kid,” Ryker says.
Those people soon learn that Ryker is Granny’s secret weapon: his serve is consistently deep and penetrating, his drive is fast and reliable, his smash is overpowering and his dink game – although he prefers attacking – is getting better all the time.
Ryker is far from alone on the courts. More and more kids ride their bikes to the Heights complex, carry their paddles in their backpacks, and wallop the hell out of the ball every chance they get.
Bad name for a great sport
For picklers who don’t like that nickname, it’s too late to change the name of the sport now.
“For years I resisted playing pickleball just because I hated that goofy name,” Phil Monahan of Redondo says. “But I finally gave it a try a few years ago, loved it the first time I played, and haven’t played a day of tennis since.”
In just three years, he has become one of the best players at Heights, consistently finishing off points with deep, powerful slams or delicately placed dink shots.
Pickleball was invented in 1965, on Bainbridge Island, Washington. It is named after the “pickle boat” in crew races, which is a boat made up of mismatched rowers.
It’s gotten so popular that now there’s no chance of re-naming it with something more accurate – or more commercial — like action ball, fast ball or smash ball.
So who are all these picklers and where are they coming from? Easy Reader set out to answer that question with a random and totally unscientific survey at the Manhattan Beach Heights complex.
We found that they are a typical cross section of the Beach City demographic: primarily but not exclusively white, with a sprinkling of Asian and Latino folks, primarily but not exclusively affluent, and running the age gamut from elementary school students to senior citizens.
Manhattan Beach Parks and Rec alone is graduating more than 400 new pickleball players every year from its instructional classes. Where are they all going to play?
Manhattan Beach Mecca
By default, rather than by any master plan, a quarter mile section of Manhattan Beach has become the center of Beach City pickleball. There are six dedicated pickleball courts at MBMS and just a few hundred yards to the south is the Manhattan Heights complex, with three dedicated pickleball courts and the ability to quickly convert two tennis courts into eight more pickleball courts, depending on the day’s scheduled usage. There is open play every weekday morning and twice on week nights.
Redondo has no dedicated pickleball courts. There are several dual use basketball courts, but you have to bring your own net.
And who has a pickleball net just lying around their house?
Hermosa has only two courts, although it had four before neighbors started complaining about the noise. Then a player suffered a traumatic head injury and won a more than $2 million settlement, prompting the closure of two of the courts. They are scheduled to be reopened within the next year.
Thus Manhattan, which allows non-residents to play on their courts, has become the go-to place for Beach City picklers of all ages and all levels.
Like tennis, only better
While pickleball resembles tennis, there are three crucial differences that make it a more dynamic sport that is also easier to learn and takes less time to master. Rookies have been known to get involved in exciting rallies within a half hour of picking up a paddle for the first time.
The first difference is that the ball is a perforated, hollow plastic ball that moves slower and produces less bounce than a tennis ball. That makes it easier to volley – meaning hit it in the air before it bounces – and to smash, because a ball hit high in the air is so light-weight it seems to hang forever.
The second difference is that on each side of the net is a 7-foot area known as the
non-volley zone. A player standing in there – the slang term is “the kitchen,” as in stay out of the kitchen — may not strike the ball before it has bounced. Thus, players wait just behind the kitchen line to hit their volleys and smashes. If their foot touches any part of the kitchen when striking the ball before it bounces the point goes to the other team.
The third major difference is that the serve must be struck underhanded, eliminating the kind of overwhelmingly powerful serve that has come to dominate modern tennis as racquets and exotic strings have become more and more powerful. Plus, you’re only allowed one serve, not two as in tennis. Serve the ball out just once and you’re immediately done serving until the other three players have taken their turn.
These crucial differences have achieved several objectives at once: speed up the game, eliminate the dominance of the serve and simultaneously cut back on the long, grinding baseline rallies that can make tennis boring and repetitive. Pickleball, when played properly, is a race to the net where two diametrically different shots – the drop shot, called a dink, and the smash — will usually end the point.
Pickleball snobs
Because 99% of recreational pickleball games are doubles rather than singles, there is an intense focus on who is the weaker player in any pair. Once that player is identified, two things typically happen. First, the opposing team directs most of its shots at the weaker player. Second, the stronger player has to be patient and supportive if they are to have any chance at winning or at least having fun.
But that is not always what happens, especially if the new partners don’t know each other and have been thrown together by the random draw of the Paddle Saddle.
Indeed, some Pickleball courts should post a public warning: Caution – Players who may be better than you can make you feel unwelcome and try to drive you away.
“There are some pickleball snobs at my racquet club,” Julie Pool says. “I remember one day when these girls didn’t want to play with me because they play in a league and thought they were on a higher level than me.”
Although Pool hasn’t personally experienced the snob treatment at MB Heights, there was a notable incident there last month.
A big, burly man who shall go nameless is notorious for his “body shots” — direct hits on an opposing player, usually with a savage smash, and usually on a female. In this particular game he was berating his female partner – as he had often done in the past with other female players – saying things like “You’re not good enough to play here” and “Go back to the beginners court.”
Finally the woman, who is a very good upper intermediate player, had had enough of his abuse. When the game ended, she informed him in a loud voice that he had ruined the game for her and that everybody there disliked him and was sick of his condescending attitude and disrespectful behavior. As she spoke, you could almost hear the people watching from the sidelines silently cheering her on. No one likes a bully, and after he slinked off the court that day he has not returned to MB Heights.
The ambassador speaks
The snob treatment, however, is usually more subtle than that.
Mary Chieffe, the MB Pickleball Ambassador designated by USA Pickleball, has seen it all in more than a decade of promoting the sport and urging MB officials to expand the pickleball program.
“Oftentimes the higher-level players want to dominate,” she says. “They like to tag people with the ball, chase them away.”
But 95 percent of the players at Heights are not like that. The women especially are more often helpful and encouraging to rookies just learning the sport.
Watching and observing how new players are treated has inspired Chieffe to draw up the perfect pickleball player.
“He recognizes the four different levels of the players on the court, and he plays the game so everyone can have non-intimidating fun,” she says. “He keeps the ball in play and levels the playing field so that everyone can participate.”
Fortunately, there are several elite players at Heights who fit her profile. The most well known of them is Jimmy “Pags” Pagnini, a spec builder who can turn a paddle into a magic wand. Noted for his colorful outfits – huge sun glasses, pink socks with pink sneakers, and flashy Hawaiian shirts — he not only plays pickleball at a high level but builds pickleball courts and is a licensed and insured instructor who teaches the sport at a private school.
Everybody clamors to play with “Pags” because he makes the game fun for everyone – not just the winners — and at the same time passes along hard-won wisdom about strokes, tactics, and strategy. And it’s always practical tips – hold the paddle at 11 o’clock, stay back after you serve – rather than the esoteric, too-advanced mumbo-jumbo some instructors spout about paddle radius and top spin vs. under spin.
“Pags” says his philosophy is simple no matter whom he is playing with.
“You have to read the room, make it competitive and fun for everyone,” he says. “Always get the weakest player on the court involved, so they will come back and help grow the sport.”
He preaches learning the fundamentals so you can build a strong foundation in the sport.
“Hit a deep serve, hit a deep return, learn how to dink, and then the drive comes last,” he says.
Many rookie players take the opposite route – trying to drive every shot and then smash the ball when it gets popped up – but while it may work against weaker players, that approach will fail against better players unless they learn the dink game to keep the other team from attacking every single ball.
“It’s the soft game that everyone has trouble with,” he says
He admits he has a problem with pickleball snobs who want to dominate every game and intimidate people with body shots.
“I try to remind them that no one’s getting paid out there,” he says. “No one is counting how many games you’ve won or lost on a given day.”
He says pickleball’s future is unlimited now that it has caught on with the general public.
“Schools are starting to incorporate pickleball into their athletic programs because the kids just love it,” he says. “Eventually it’s going to be offered in most schools.”
Pickleball can heal the sick, raise the dead
Pickleball is good medicine for whatever ails you.
Phil Monahan, the player who resisted pickleball for years because he thought the name was so silly, volunteered that he has been taking medicine for attention deficit disorder since he was a child.
He says since he started playing pickleball three years ago his condition has improved organically.
“Anyone who has ADD should try pickleball,” he says. “It really helps by calming my mind when I’m out there with nothing to focus on but hitting that little green ball. My mind shuts down and everything just flows.”
He is grateful to have pickleball in his life.
“It was hard for me when I was a kid. Taking medicine for my illness was a problem,” he says. “Pickleball is the best medicine I’ve ever had.”
Or consider the case of Tony Gonzalez, currently taking pickleball lessons from Coach Teri Carter through the MB Parks and Rec. program.
The 68-year-old retired architect had a stroke in September 2022 but survived and has been making a steady comeback since then.
“The stroke was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” he said. “I was always active and very athletic, so the stroke came as a real shock to me.”
He was introduced to pickleball by friends last year, and the life-long athlete immediately took to it like a fish to water.
The more he played, the better he got, the more he decided he wanted to get really good at it. So he signed up for lessons with Coach Teri. But when he started attending classes, he found that the lingering effects from the stroke – mainly balance issues on his left side – were holding him back.
“I found I was not moving as quickly as I used to,” he said. “I needed to work on my balance and quickness.”
Because he loves pickleball so much – he watches the pickleball channel 6 hours a day — he hired a personal trainer to help him with the physical problems that were holding him back.
“Pickleball has become an obsession with me,” he said. “Already I’m better at getting my feet in the proper position to hit shots. The extra physical therapy is paying off in terms of my game.”
It appears there’s only one disease pickleball can’t fix: the never-ending quest for one more game.
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com. ER
