Pickleball Age
When I talk to women friends of a certain age – and by that I mean, my age of pushing or exceeding 60 – I will joke that I am can’t sleep past 6:30 am age, pee a little when I sneeze age. I tell them that I am pickleball age.
Pickleball is now the fastest growing sport in the US, or so I’ve been told by my husband. Normally a guy who stays in bed as long as possible, every Sunday morning he bounces up at 7am and begins the morning routine of doing last night’s dishes, feeding the cats, waking, walking and feeding the dog without even the slightest prompting. Because every Sunday morning at 8am, our local health club has a free one hour pickleball lesson.
“Hey honey, I played two pickup games after the lesson,” he cheerfully chirped on the phone last weekend while I was somewhere on the New York/Pennsylvania border visiting my friend Meg. “That’s nice,” I said back, filled with dread that I would also be expected to stay for pickup games the following Sunday. I have a nice backhand when it actually connects with the ball, but my serve is in no condition for public consumption!
It all started when we were at a charity dinner in 2024, and walking through the auction area with our stubby little pencils looking for something to bid on. A basket of local upstate New York wine – meh. Two tickets to a children’s production of the Nutcracker at the Foothills Theater – pass. And then there was a free pickleball lesson, with balls and rackets included. 58 years old at the time, I hovered my pencil. Was it time? Had I reached pickleball age?
“Bid on it!” my friend Melinda said to me enthusiastically. Melinda is in her late 60’s or early 70’s, small, blonde and fit, about as big as a Pekingese. She belongs to the local country club where she sails and plays tennis and, as it turns out, is on the pickleball league.
“I don’t know,” I said hesitantly. Was I really ready to concede my youth in such a public way? My cousin, Linda, 12 years my senior, is an avid pickleball player. She once fell going for a long shot, broke her wrist and just kept playing. “Are you out of your mind?” I asked her, incredulous. “We were in a tournament,” she explained. “Besides, it wasn’t my dominant hand.” I wondered in that moment if pickleball might actually be a cult.
“Please bid on it,” Melinda implored me. “I donated it.” “Of course,” I said with what I hoped mapped as a smile and not a grimace, and wrote my name down with a price $5 over the previous bidder. And just as I lifted my pencil to reconsider the basket of wine, the evenings emcee announced that the auction was over. It was official, I was going to become a pickleballer, but at least I wasn’t going down alone. My husband, who is 10 years older than me so that for the rest of our days together, I can always be the hot, young wife, for whatever reason does not share my inability to sleep in. Nor, given his plumbing, does he experience the joys of sneeze-related incontinence. But pickleball, well that was an aging-related indignity that we could share.
A few days after the auction, Melinda texted me the phone number of the instructor, Mark. Two weeks later, she texted me again. “Have you scheduled your lesson yet?” At this point, having been in several, I was certain that pickleball was in fact a cult.
“Are we free Saturday morning?” I asked my husband, knowing full well that we were because in our marriage, I am the keeper of time, space and schedules. But I still held out hope that maybe he had planned an excursion to a rock quarry or perhaps a baptism we could attend.
On the way to the lesson, we laughed at how dumb this was going to be. “Pickleball, “ we both kept saying, in the same tone we’d say “blueberry wine”. On the way home from the lesson, we laughed at how much fun we’d had. “Pickleball!” we both kept saying, in the same tone we’d say “vacation!”
We played a few more times that summer and then I tried to forget all about pickleball but it kept popping up. I was at a work conference at a large conference center in New Orleans where there was also a pickleball conference. Every day, I had to walk past the pickleballers to get to the political activists at my conference. The pickleballers looked like they were having a lot more fun!
A few months ago, my husband joined the local gym so he could play volleyball. “Guess what,” he told me, “there’s a free pickleball lesson every Sunday morning!” We were delighted to find out the lesson instructor was Mark.
“Do you play pickleball?” I find myself asking strangers who look to be of the right age. “You really should,” I’ll tell them. “It’s so much fun!” This morning, two friends we recruited joined us for the lesson. I could not be more pleased!
