Pickleball: The Marietta Connection | News, Sports, Jobs

Pickleball has a Marietta connection that most people don’t know about. Pickleball is a popular game with elements of tennis, ping pong (table tennis) and badminton. It was invented in Bainbridge Island, Wash., in the mid-1960s.

The Marietta Connection: The three guys credited with inventing the pickle ball were Joel Pritchard, Bill Bell and Barney McCallum. Pritchard’s wife, Marietta native Joan Sutton Pritchard, named the game. The Pritchards met while studying at Marietta College in the late 1940s. They married in 1948 and moved to Seattle, Wash. Pickleball was invented in 1965… or 1966 or 1963, depending on who’s telling the story. The most cited version “Creation Story” is that the Pritchards’ children were bored to death at the family’s weekend getaway on Bainbridge Island. Joel and friend Bill Bell were returning from golf one day. 13 year old Frank Pritchard whined, “There’s nothing to do here” repeating the sentence uttered by the children everywhere at once. His father Joel replied contemptuously, “When we were kids, we made up games.” Frank challenged his father, “OK, then you can come up with a game for us.” Joel Pritchard and the guys went to work. They used an existing badminton court, found a plastic ball with holes in it, and used ping-pong paddles to hit the ball back and forth. Fortunately, the children had a good time. But so were the adults, who soon found the game addictive. Barney McCallum says he couldn’t wait to get out on the field and play the game himself. He fashioned bigger paddles out of plywood. Over the next few weeks, some ground rules emerged. Pickleball was born. What was a niche sport for decades is now a craze. Millions play a game that now resembles tennis, played on a smaller court with ping-pong paddles and a plastic ball. It is less intense and not as strenuous as tennis.

Now about the game’s unusual name, Pickleball. Joan Pritchard was an avid Marietta College crew (competitive rowing) fan. The improvised paddle game reminded him of improvised crews a “cucumber boat” consisted of a group of rowers who had not rowed in other competitions. So he called the game pickleball. The name somehow stuck. There is another, more endearing explanation for the name Pickleball. The Pritchard family’s dog named Pickles often chased errant balls and ran off with them. So they became Pickle’s balls. That amusing name explanation became popular for decades.

Joan Pritchard debunked the dog story in a Parkersburg News and Sentinel column in 2008. She explained that the family didn’t have the dog until a few years after the game began. The dog is named after the pickle ball, not the other way around. Joel Pritchard, in an oral history recording, agreed that the dog came after the origin of the game. Both versions of the origin of the name still circulate in pickle literature.

Joan Pritchard moved to Marietta in the 1970s after she and Joel divorced. He was a columnist for the Parkersburg News and Sentinel and The Marietta Times. Joan Pritchard died in 2012, but the game named after her lives on.

This is an adaptation of an article from David Baker’s local history blog, earlymarietta.

For more information about the Washington County Historical Society, call 740-373-1788 or visit wchshistory.org.