Pickleball: the Bainbridge Island mother who named the game before a dog got the credit

The first pickleball court wasn’t born under arena lights. It began with a summer afternoon, an old badminton court, a plastic ball full of holes, and the familiar sound of children having absolutely nothing to do. Joan Pritchard was at her family’s summer home on Bainbridge Island, where boredom had settled in the way it sometimes does on vacation — heavily, dramatically, and mostly among the kids. Her husband, Joel Pritchard, was a Washington state legislator then, later a U.S. congressman and lieutenant governor, but that day the urgent problem wasn’t politics. It was keeping restless children entertained. Joel and his friend Bill Bell went looking for a solution and found an old badminton court. The trouble: they didn’t have the right gear. So they did what vacationing grown-ups do when the kids are wilting and the afternoon is still long. They made do. Out came table-tennis paddles. A perforated plastic ball appeared. The net was lowered. The whole thing had the cheerful, patched-together look of a game invented by people who were not trying to invent anything at all. There was no sleek logo, no official committee, no rollout. Just a backyard problem, a few available objects, and enough imagination to turn “we don’t have the equipment” into “let’s try this.” Soon, neighbor Barney McCallum joined in. He helped make sturdier plywood paddles and shape the rules as the homemade game began to feel like something worth keeping. You can picture the early version: the satisfying pop of paddle on plastic, the ball skipping low over the net, adults and kids learning together, everyone figuring out the boundaries as they went. Then came the question every new game eventually needs answered. What were they going to call it? This is where Joan Pritchard gave the sport its wonderfully odd little name. She called it “pickle ball,” not because of a dog, and not because someone had misplaced a jar of dills near the court. The name came from rowing. A “pickle boat” was made up of leftover oarsmen, and to Joan, that fit. Their new game was a mix of leftover parts too — a badminton court, a little table tennis, a plastic ball, a lowered net, plywood paddles, and one Saturday’s worth of improvisation. It was a family joke, not a branding campaign. Joan reached for a phrase that made sense in the moment and, better still, made people smile. Later, the Pritchards had a dog named Pickles. He must have been charming, because a legend grew that the dog had named the sport. It’s easy to understand why people liked that version. A dog chasing a ball is a tidier story than a rowing term, and “Pickles invented pickleball” has the bouncy confidence of something you want to be true. But the Pritchard family accounts, along with USA Pickleball, have corrected the story gently: the dog came after the game. Pickles didn’t name pickleball. Joan did. What began as one Saturday’s cure for boredom kept growing. The backyard game became a sport with a national governing body. According to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, 13.6 million people in the United States played it in 2023. That’s a long way from a summer home on Bainbridge Island and a few grown-ups scrounging for paddles. Still, every time someone says that wonderfully silly, very serious word at a rec center, Joan Pritchard’s little rowing joke gets one more laugh. Not bad for a game made from leftovers.