Why Is It Called “Pickleball”?

From its humble origins on Washington state’s Bainbridge Island in 1965, pickleball has become one of the 2020s’ fastest growing sports. The number of participating players around the globe has reportedly increased more than 300 percent in recent years, and almost 20 million people now play regularly in the United States alone. The IOC is even apparently interested in making it a future Olympic event.

There’s a chance you’ve heard of pickleball, or even played a round or two, which may have made you wonder: Where did that weird name come from? 

1. The Invention of Pickleball
2. Dog vs. Boat
3. Off the Pickle Boat
4. Who invented pickleball?
5. Was pickleball named after a dog?
6. What equipment do you need to play pickleball?
7. When is the pickleball season?

The Invention of Pickleball

According to the official story, pickleball was invented by Washington state Representative Joel Pritchard and his neighbors in July 1965. The friends were looking for an outdoor game that they and their families could play together, using the random assortment of kit and other few bits and pieces of sporting paraphernalia that they had at their disposal.

But to hear Frank Pritchard tell it, that’s not quite accurate: Pickleball was created, he says, to keep him from complaining while they were vacationing on Bainbridge Island. “I was whining. I told dad there was nothing to do,” Frank, who was 13 that summer, told Mental Floss in 2021. “He said, ‘When we were kids and we would come over here, we would make games up.’ And I said, ‘Oh really? Why don't you go make a game up!’”

Pritchard and a couple of neighbors decided to do just that. Using an old badminton court as a playing area, the group found a whiffle ball (a kind of perforated plastic baseball) to play with, and a set of ping-pong paddles to hit it with. Then they drew up a makeshift set of the rules, and their new game was officially invented—but it didn’t yet have a name. 

Dog vs. Boat

Another oft-told story about the origin of the name pickleball is that it came from a dog named Pickles that belonged either to the Pritchards or one of their neighbors. But that’s not true: The Pritchards did have a dog named Pickles, but they didn’t get him until a couple of years after the game had been invented (and in fact, he was named after the game).

A Pritchard family member, however, did come up with the moniker: Joel’s wife, Joan. “I said it reminded me of the Pickle Boat in crew where oarsmen were chosen from the leftovers of other boats,” she recalled in 2008.

 “My mom grew up in a small town in Ohio called Marietta, but it's a college and had a big crew program,” Frank explained in 2021. “She liked crew and when my father met her and they moved out to Seattle, UW had a big crew program. They had a term for a pickle boat, which is a boat filled with all the leftover rowers.” Apparently, since the game “was a little bit of this and a little of that,” Frank says, she thought “pickleball would be a good name.” 

Off the Pickle Boat

If that’s the case, where did the original pickle boat get its name? Unfortunately, that’s a somewhat tougher question to answer.

There is, at least, a theory that these pickle boat races date back to mid-19th-century England, where a jar of pickles was supposedly awarded to the team that came in last. Because the pickle boat team had never rowed together before, they rarely fared well in the competition and ultimately came to be named after the prize they so frequently took home. An alternative theory suggests the name comes from the fishing industry, where the last boat to get back to port was made to stay out at sea to pickle the fish in brine.

As ingenious as these ideas are, though, there appears to be little contemporary evidence to back them up. Instead, most of the early recorded references to a pickle boat in English refer not to a vessel for rowing, but to a container for actual pickle (in the same way that a gravy boat is a container for gravy). From there, the term appears to have become used as a jocular name for any poor-quality ship in turn-of-the-last-century slang, and in doing so inspired a longer expression—Chauncy or Willie off the pickle boat—that came to be used of anyone who appeared lost, disheveled, or (allying pickle boat to turnip truck) hopelessly naïve.

From there, it’s easy to see how a byword for a crude boat of unsophisticated people might in turn have become a word for a similarly crude crew of rowers—and, finally, a hastily assembled (but still fun!) game.

Quick Questions About Pickleball, Answered

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