Photos by Ralph Freso
Joe Zeman is a strapping young man with spring – cat quick with the pickleball paddle – pop, pop, pop.
“I was in soccer and track and that’s all about your legs, so with pickleball, I can use my hands,” he said, warming up for a match at Grand Canyon University. “I like how you can play slow or fast, depending on the game.”
His two-man GCU Intramural Sports team (with Nolan Peterson) is 6-2, and he claims training by a master athlete.
“My grandma,” Zeman said.
“She was into it a lot back home. We would play when I was super young.”
Once thought the darling of retirees, younger people have taken to the fastest-growing sport in America, with headlines like “The Thrill of the Dill” flooding the web. GCU students so pined for pickleball that they urged student government to get involved in advocating for courts, instead of playing with a traveling net on a basketball court.
And by spring 2024, 10 courts were constructed on campus and quickly crowded – six south of the Canyon Activity Center and four in The Grove – with six more courts expected to be completed near Santa Cruz Apartments by early December.
It also became Intramural’s fastest-growing sport, doubling participants in the last two years to 613 on 266 teams, and now trails only traditional volleyball/football/basketball/soccer among 16 fall intramural sports at GCU.
With neither the grunts of tennis, the naked aggression of old-school racquetball, or the wonkiness of pingpong, pickleball grew most among the younger set after the pandemic because it’s social and assessable.
“I think they enjoy it because it is a unique sport they didn’t grow up playing, so it feels like everybody is at an even playing point,” said Mike Fox, GCU Intramural Sports manager. “It doesn’t have that intimidation factor – you’re not going to play some hard nose that is out to dominate.”
Grandma might even be up for a game.
“I just love how diverse a sport it can be,” Peterson said. “We can go get our buddies who have almost never picked up a paddle and play or we can play some really high-level pickleball with really competitive opponents.
“I really love that. It can be a sport but also a social activity.”
It’s one of the reasons the sport is the fastest growing in the U.S. for the third year in a row, according to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association’s 2024 participation report, growing 223% in three years, with the biggest group ages 25-34 (2.3 million).
“I just play for fun because it’s a good time with buddies, and I’ve always liked pingpong and never been good at tennis,” said student Drew Wendelberger, warming up for an intramural match before rains washed it out earlier this week. “It’s kind of like a bigger pingpong with how light the ball is.”
The court is compact, a little more than half the size of a tennis court, and uses a ball not too different from the Wiffle ball you used to slap around with a bat in the backyard. Its distinctive pop has long been heard for blocks in 55-and-up communities, especially in Arizona and Florida, where the 1970s invention began to grow in the early 2000s before taking off in the last few years among all age groups.
Players can try to dink the ball into the kitchen (the zone near the net) or whack away – with a few rules that keep slam-dunking to a minimum. Teammates and opponents are so close you can trash talk without yelling.
“It’s just something you can go and do,” Wendelberger said. “You can’t really get a football game going, and it’s hard to get a basketball game going, but you only need four people, or two, for pickleball.”
Said Campus Recreation Director Matt Lamb: "I enjoy most seeing the students that are playing on their own with a group of friends where they are not only building community with one another but they’ve chosen something that is a healthy outlet on so many levels for them to participate in."
The university also got ahead of the game in GCU Club Sports with its 16 pickleball courts on campus.
Matthew Hampton, the theology professor who brought club pickleball to GCU 10 years ago, now advises nearly 100 participants on a recreational team and a dozen on a highly competitive travel team that finished in the top five of the Dynamic Universal Pickleball Rating Collegiate National Championship in Georgia last June.
“Tryouts have gotten pretty competitive. Now you have to be good to make the team,” he said. “Utah Tech gives scholarships; it’s starting to get to that point.”
But it all started with the idea that you could just have a paddle, a net and a hard surface and even play on the street, said Hampton, and will continue to grow because there is a lot of laughing in pickleball that transcends age.
"You can have an 8-year-old play against an 80-year-old,” he said.
Grand Canyon University senior writer Mike Kilen can be reached at [email protected]
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