Dinking with the ’Cats

Students chat and laugh as they assemble and wheel what appear to be miniature tennis nets onto the courts. The sun has just set, and soon the distinctive “plonk” of perforated balls hitting paddles will fill the warm evening air. Students “dink” the balls back and forth, a soft lob over the net, warming up.

Pickleball: It’s the fastest-growing sport in America for the third year in a row, according to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association. And the University of Arizona campus is following suit.

Started just three years ago, the U of A Pickleball Club already has 260 active members — the most of any club sport on campus. Its open play nights see close to one hundred participants each week. There’s also a competitive team made up of the most dedicated and skilled players, the top 8-12 of whom play in collegiate tournaments at regional and national levels.

So, what accounts for pickleball’s phenomenal growth? The members of U of A Pickleball agree: It’s accessible, easy to learn and unusually social for a sport.

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“You’ll see people that are 90 years old playing, all the way to 5-year-olds. And that’s what’s so cool about [it], that it’s so multigenerational,” club president and founder Michael McDonald, a junior studying mechanical engineering, says. “And it’s a close enough sport where you can still talk to people and joke around.”

Faculty adviser and team coach Allison Hays ’97 ’05 says pickleball’s similarities to badminton, tennis and ping-pong make it easy for people to learn and start playing right away. “We play it at family reunions,” she says.

McDonald, who took up the sport during the pandemic, is a case in point. “I was a basketball player, but then during COVID everything was shut down,” he says. “I started playing pickleball at the neighborhood park with my dad. It was something we could do together, and outside.”

Engineering management major and club vice president Brandon Tong got a similar start. “My dad was part of a neighborhood group and they needed an extra player,” he says. “That’s why I started playing, and it’s been a blast ever since.”

The club currently practices on Campus Recreation tennis courts using mobile pickleball nets, an arrangement that has caused a little friction with the local tennis community. Tong says the sport also gets a bad rap from tennis players because of a perception that it lacks seriousness. 

“Pickleball has kind of a stigma that it’s maybe not very athletic,” says McDonald. “But I would say they’re wrong; it can be very tiring, and it can be very competitive as well.”

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Ultimately, the club hopes to raise funds to get dedicated courts to accommodate the ever-growing number of people looking to play. “If tennis players who don’t like pickleball just come out and try it,” Tong says, “I’m sure they’d have as much fun as we do, if not more.”

Club member Olivia Lubenow is a good example. A sophomore business management major who played tennis in high school, she fell in love with pickleball at the U of A because it offered a way to be social and competitive at the same time.

“You will make so many friends by coming to pickleball,” she says. “I cannot stress it enough. Being able to come out here every Wednesday and blow off steam really helps with my academic career.”

There are lessons in it, too. “I like to drive the ball, and I’m learning to have the patience to just chill and take a step back and get my reset in,” she says. “I can translate that to my day-to-day life: taking a step back instead of rushing into everything; relaxing and figuring it out step by step.”