A Pickled Story

I remember as a child playing with wiffle balls. I would play out on the lawn on summer nights chipping golf wiffle balls to different “holes”. A turn consisted of chipping the ball until you hit the designated item, sometimes a tree, a rock, or even a scruffy patch of grass. The winner got to choose the next hole.

My childhood was full of outdoor activities, street hockey, kick the can, backyard football, airsoft wars, and baseball. When we played baseball, we would use the Big Orange Bat that seemed to invade the childhood homes of just about every kid on the block. The home plate would usually be on the Crystals driveway, first and third were in the road, with second and outfield on my yard across the street. The tennis ball was a less damaging ball when the occasional home run would hit the window or fence. On days when the road was too busy we would switch to a wiffle ball and make the diamond contained in a single yard.

I guess wiffle balls just always seemed like a part of my childhood. Every time I saw one it reminded me of the warm summers filled with those endless activities. That’s the thing though, they were something directly correlated with my childhood, which may be the reason I was initially hesitant when I first heard about the new sport, Pickleball.

It was a sort of Tennis Ping Pong hybrid, in which two to four players play on a miniaturized tennis court with hard wooden, ping pong like paddles only bigger. The players are separated by a line down the middle and then a line perpendicular to that up closer to the net, about 5–7 feet away. The space between the net and the line is called the Kitchen. You can’t hit a volley shot from the Kitchen.

The game attracts an older crowd. Lots of middle aged people and even some elderly people comprise the typical group you would spot playing, yet another reason to deter me from participating. Either it’s a kid game or it’s for old people. Well one day my family traveled to St. George, Utah and someone suggested playing this new game. After some encouragement I decided to participate, expecting to be quite uninterested.

The yellow wiffle ball hovered through the air landing right in front of me. I stumbled over myself trying to reach it in time. This was not tennis, this was not ping pong, what was this? The served another and I swung with what I thought was a strong swing, but it didn’t even clear the net.

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