For years, Kyle Yates hid a secret from his closest friends.
He didn’t want them to know that he was a rising star in a sport best known as the last athletic refuge for graying retirees.
Yates’ pickleball addiction took hold at age 15 when his uncle coaxed him into playing a match together. By then, Yates recognized he lacked the size or raw power to pursue tennis beyond high school. In pickleball, he saw a better showcase for his trademark patience and guile.
There was no one Yates’ age playing pickleball when he first picked up a paddle, nor were there even many young adults. The Florida teenager regularly practiced with a group of men old enough to be his dad or even his grandfather.
When Yates earned his first meaningful victories and broke into the national rankings, he began venturing further from home in search of stronger competition. As a student at the University of Florida, he would often slip away from campus to The Villages, a sprawling Florida retirement community that at the time was home to a handful of the world’s best pickleball players.
“I’d play with those guys on weekends as much as possible, but I wouldn’t tell any of my friends because I thought it was too silly and too dorky,” Yates said. “At the time, pickleball was considered a sport for seniors. It wasn’t a cool thing to do.”
Not even a decade later, pickleball is no longer the sports equivalent of socks with sandals or toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe. Out of nowhere, it’s America’s fastest-growing sport, with a vibrant youth movement, communities racing to satisfy the demand to build new courts, and deep-pocketed investors seeking new ways to monetize the sport’s surging popularity.
As pickleball has leaped out of obscurity and into the mainstream, the sport’s nascent pro circuit has also taken flight. It scarcely resembles what Yates stepped into six-plus years ago when he put his pursuit of a college degree on hold to see if he could support himself playing pickleball.
o longer do tournaments offer hardly enough prize money to cover players’ travel expenses. Now there are bidding wars between rival leagues to secure top pros.
No longer are the sport’s premier events held in RV parks and retirement communities. Newly constructed pickleball complexes and swanky tennis clubs and stadiums have opened their doors to the sport.
No longer can Yates topple the world’s No. 1 ranked player in front of a few dozen observers seated in beach chairs. Professional pickleball is now a big business replete with competing pro tours, feuding billionaires, escalating prize money, the likes of Tom Brady, LeBron James, and Mark Cuban as celebrity investors, and a former Wimbledon semifinalist among its newest players.
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“I think we all feel like we’re on a rocket ship,” said longtime tennis executive Anne Worcester, now a Major League Pickleball board member and strategic adviser. “I’ve never had so many inbound phone calls, texts and emails, and social media messages. Everybody wants to sponsor pickleball, get a job with pickleball, or sell something to pickleball. Honestly, not a day goes by where I don’t get like a dozen people reaching out to me.”
Those pouring money into professional pickleball are wagering that the sport can expand its audience and turn some of its top players into headliners. So far pickleball tournaments have mostly drawn sparse crowds and modest TV ratings.
It raises a question that is difficult to conclusively answer with the sport evolving at lightning speed: Is pickleball just a booming participation sport? Or will people watch it too?