Tennis icon John McEnroe (left) and former NFL star Drew Brees (right) are some of pickleball's growing celebrity playerbase. Photo / Getty Images
Bat, ball, played on a court and you hit over a net - that is where the similarities begin and end between the sports of padel and pickleball.
The game of padel was invented by a Mexican businessman, Enrique Corcuera, in the 1960s who didn’t have enough space in
the grounds of his holiday home in Acapulco for a tennis court, so he squashed one in a space that had walls at both ends.
After playing golf one summer, Joel Pritchard, congressman from Washington State and Bill Bell, successful businessman, returned to Pritchard’s home to find their families sitting around with nothing to do. The property had an old badminton court so they looked for some equipment and could not find a full set of rackets. They improvised and started playing with ping-pong paddles and a perforated plastic ball. As they introduced Barney McCallum, the players found that the ball bounced well on the asphalt surface and soon the men created rules, relying heavily on badminton, birthing the sport of pickleball.
The name padel is self-explanatory, although it becomes a little more confusing when you learn the padel is actually called a racket. Pickleball’s name is believed to have been inspired by the name of the Pritchard family dog, although historians disagree on this sometimes contentious topic. Pickleball rackets are called paddles, just to deepen the confusion between the two further.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, the two sports are at varying stages of development. Pickleball’s introduction came in 2015 at Rotorua Badminton Club by US players and frequent visitors, Claire Spackman and David McNamara. On the other hand, the first padel court in the country was completed in November of last year. This speaks more to the specifics and cost around fully-functioning padel courts rather than the sport’s popularity.
