PHOTO BY TED KLINKENBERG .
PickleballCANADA
BAINBRIDGE ISLAND EXPEDITIONS
A voyage to pickleball ’ s holy land — and what we bring back from it .
In the quiet hours before dawn , a group set out from Vancouver , British Columbia , Canada , on an unusual pilgrimage . They were in search of the origins of pickleball . They were in search of holy ground and living legends . Like all picklenauts , they were also in search of fellow travelers . And like every picklenaut , they were inventing their own mythology too .
It was a Saturday morning . The moon was still full , the air thick with wildfire smoke . By 8 a . m ., the group ’ s first members had reached Shoreline Park , nine miles north of Seattle . At 5:50 p . m . that evening , Riley Newman would throw out the first pitch at the Seattle Mariners game in front of more than 45,000 people . Earlier that spring , Washington ’ s governor declared pickleball the state sport , and now the Mariners had decreed an official “ Pickleball Night .” The game ’ s origin story grew larger by the month .
As word spread through the Seattle Metro pickleball community that a group of Canadians had traveled down for Pickleball Night , invitations arose . That Saturday morning at Shoreline , the group played games with the intelligentsia of Seattle pickleball . Pickleball Hall of Famer Fran Myer showed up to play with and against the Canadians . Gordon Sata and Theresa Haynie and Mitsu Clark told vivid stories about playing with game founder Joel Pritchard and players like Wes Gabrielsen and Tim Nelson ( a . k . a . “ the puppet master ”). They would help arrange an elusive invitation to Court 1 the next morning — and matches later with Bainbridge Island players on the Founders Courts .
Sata had done some research the night before and was likewise fascinated by the unusual origin story of his Canadian visitors . They referred to themselves as The Jericho Hill Pickleball School ( JHPS ). In Vancouver , there were tales of backyard courts that existed in the late 1960s . There are old photos of pickleball played on the rooftops of office towers , mountains in the background . The JHPS had effectively invented a background story , which linked their school to the rise and fall of those mysterious Canadian players from the 1960s :
By Chris Koentges
“ They practiced pickleball not on traditional courts , but on surface parking lots and forgotten alleyways ; atop the roofs of downtown office towers ; in the rust and weeds of neglected neighborhoods . At the same moment Guy Debord ’ s Situationist International movement had come to define unitary urbanism before the Paris riots , pickleball came to represent a radical expression of Pacific Northwest psychogeography .”
We can debate whether baseball is still America ’ s pastime . And we can debate the functional relevance of Washington adopting pickleball as its state sport this past spring . But the resonance of the weekend was undeniable . A Washington kid-turned-national-pickleballsuperstar took center stage before a Major League Baseball game . You can ’ t help but wonder , “ When will the state sport of Washington next become ‘ Cascadia ’ s Pastime ?’” And ultimately the new North American pastime ?
On Court 1 on Bainbridge Island , the lines are faded . Douglas fir roots grow up through asphalt . Clay Roberts , who is USA Pickleball ’ s ambassador to Bainbridge Island , refers to the site as “ mecca .” When we travel — really travel — we try to connect the dots . To viscerally understand other people and places . Where a culture has come from and where it ’ s headed . And to make new friends too . As the Bainbridge Island players waved goodbye to the JHPS , they hastily formed a WhatsApp group , planning out a reverse voyage next summer to trace the origins of the JHPS . •
Chris Koentges has written about true underdogs and sports subculture for The Atlantic , ESPN The Magazine , and Bleacher Report . Recently , he helped revive the fabled Jericho Hill Pickleball School (
jerichohillpickleball . com ).