Why Is It Called Pickleball?
Because of a boat, not a dog. In the summer of 1965, on a backyard badminton court on Bainbridge Island, Joan Pritchard watched her husband Joel and his friends hit a perforated plastic ball with ping-pong paddles over a lowered net and said it reminded her of a pickle boat: in rowing, the crew filled with whoever is left over after the real boats are set. The name stuck. The family dog, Pickles, showed up a couple of years later and was named after the game.
That is the account from the family that named it. The dog version is the one most people tell, and it has been told by people who were there too. Here is what each side says, what the timeline supports, and where you can go stand on a court on the island where all of this happened. The rest of the sport, courts, camera, club, and a weekend plan, is on pickleball on Bainbridge Island.
How did pickleball get its name?
Start with what the game was: leftovers. Joel Pritchard and Bill Bell came back from golf to the Pritchard place on Pleasant Beach and found their families sitting around. The property had an old badminton court but not a full set of rackets. They played with ping-pong paddles and a plastic ball with holes in it, first over a net at badminton height, then, when the ball turned out to bounce fine on asphalt, over a net dropped to 36 inches. The next weekend a neighbor, Barney McCallum, joined, and the three men wrote rules that borrowed heavily from badminton.
Joan Pritchard reached for a rowing term. In rowing, when a club fills its boats for a race, the rowers who do not make a set lineup get put together in one more shell. That is the pickle boat. It is a mix of whoever is left, and it is not expected to win. A game built from badminton, table tennis, and a wiffle ball, played by whoever was standing around, looked like that to her. She started calling it pickle ball, and by her account the name had settled before the dog ever arrived.
The name is a rowing joke from a Bainbridge backyard. Nothing in it is about pickles you eat.
The dog named Pickles
The other story goes like this: the Pritchards had a dog named Pickles who chased the ball and ran off with it, so the game became Pickles’ ball, then pickleball. Barney McCallum told that version for years, and it has been printed everywhere from paddle boxes to airline magazines. It is a better story to tell at the net, which is most of why it won.
The problem is the calendar. The game dates to the summer of 1965. By the family’s account the dog came home in 1967 or so, after the kids had already been playing pickle ball for two summers, and he was named for the game. Both stories have people who were there behind them. Only one of them fits the timeline, and it is the one told by the person who did the naming.
If you want to be generous: the dog is real, the dog did chase balls, and the dog’s name kept the game’s name alive in a way a rowing term never would have. He earned his place in the story. He just did not start it.
Pickle ball, two words
For its first years the game was written as two words, pickle ball, or hyphenated. When the founders formed a company in 1972 to protect the sport and sell equipment, they called it Pickle-Ball, Inc. The first permanent court had gone in five years earlier, in 1967, in the backyard of Pritchard’s friend and neighbor Bob O’Brian. The first tournament anyone recorded was in 1976 at a club in Tukwila, south of Seattle, and a national association with a printed rulebook followed in 1984. Somewhere in there the space disappeared and one word became standard.
Our own older article on this site still carries the hyphen in its title: How Did Pickle-Ball Get Started? That page is the origin story. This one is the name.
Where this happened
The backyard is on Pleasant Beach, on the south end of Bainbridge Island, and it is still a private home. There is no plaque you can walk up to and nobody to let you in. Please do not go looking for it.
The place to stand is Battle Point Park, about twelve minutes west of the ferry by car, where the Founders Courts opened in 2020: six dedicated public courts named for Pritchard, Bell, and McCallum, free to anyone, with open play on weekday mornings and a live camera so you can see who is there before you drive. In 2022 the Legislature made pickleball Washington’s official state sport and named this island in the bill.
Words you will hear at the courts
If you come to open play, these will save you a confused minute:
- Kitchen. The no-volley zone, seven feet on each side of the net. You cannot hit the ball out of the air while standing in it. Everyone will tell you this. Believe them.
- Dink. A soft shot that drops into the other side’s kitchen. Most of a good game happens here.
- Zero, zero, two. The score call to start a game: serving team’s points, receiving team’s points, and which server. Only the serving side scores.
- Paddles up. How you get on a court. Some mornings it is a paddle rack. Others it is a whiteboard for a group of four. The by-day version is on the camera page.
- Open play. Weekday mornings run by the club. You can show up without a membership. Monday and Wednesday, May through September, are the mornings that do not list a skill rating. Details on the hub.
FAQ
Was pickleball named after a dog?
Not according to the family that invented it. Joan Pritchard said she named the game for the pickle boat in crew. The Pritchards’ dog Pickles arrived after the game already had its name and was named for it, not the other way around. The dog version spread because it is a better story to tell at a net.
What is a pickle boat?
In rowing, the pickle boat is the crew made up of the leftover rowers from the other boats, whoever did not make a set lineup. It fit a game built from badminton, ping-pong paddles, and a perforated plastic ball.
Who named pickleball?
Joan Pritchard, Joel Pritchard’s wife, in the summer of 1965 on Bainbridge Island. The three men who worked out the rules were Joel Pritchard, Bill Bell, and Barney McCallum.
Was it always spelled as one word?
No. Early on it was “pickle ball,” two words, and the company the founders formed in 1972 was Pickle-Ball, Inc. One word became standard as the sport spread.
Can I play where the name was invented?
No. The original court is a private backyard on Pleasant Beach. Do not go looking for it. The public courts are the Founders Courts at Battle Point Park, free, with a live camera so you can see if a game is on.