PickleballCANADA
CANADIAN GRINDHOUSE
The winter season is pickleball — but something else too .
In Vancouver , when the temperature drops below 4 ° Celsius , even the highest quality outdoor balls can shatter . Some local players have made a ball for these precise conditions . It plays like a Dura Fast 40 and holds up to 1 ° C . There ’ s a subtle rhythm to the way experienced players rotate dry , warm balls from their pocket to the server before each point , and how artfully they build each rally — so as not to waste a warm ball .
Below these temperatures , thin layers of ice form in the court ’ s shadier corners . On especially cool days , snow piles up . They play in mittens and trail runners . They ’ ll play a few points , and shovel off the icy rivulets . Rehydrate with hot tea and coffee . It ’ s pickleball . But it ’ s a game unto itself , too .
In British Columbia ’ s Okanagan they play in more extreme conditions , on much thicker patches of ice — wearing skates and helmets instead of shoes and toques . This too is a game unto itself .
The snowbirds begin to leave after Canadian Thanksgiving . They spend parts of their winter playing pickleball in paradise . For others , though , winter pickleball is paradise . Every moment of it . By November , most of the country ’ s pickleball community has gone indoors . Badminton nets will be strung across the entire width of an old community center gymnasium — across four or five , sometimes six courts — and lowered jaggedly between 33 and 37 inches . As the game becomes more popular , players burrow deeper into the cracks of the city , taping spaces in churches and covered parking lots , taping lines in warehouses and on carpets in motel conference rooms . Eastern European cultural halls . YMCAs .
The indoor season turns players into flaneurs . Winter pickleball is a ticket to get into the places you wouldn ’ t otherwise see . To play on every manner of experimental sports surface that didn ’ t catch on over the years . Some with so many lines from so many sports over the years , it ’ s like inhabiting a Kandinsky painting .
Each one of these “ courts ” has its own terroir . Some players learn every dead spot in certain gyms —
By Chris Koentges
they attack and protect those spots . Some know exactly where the center of the net is higher in the middle than the outside . Some have mastered a lob that goes over the basketball rim without hitting a low ceiling .
Experienced indoor players like to use what the savvy manufacturers now refer to as the “ hybrid ball ,” which skids on the wood floors . There are players who complain about this spin . About being served into the gymnastics equipment . Or the fact that the ball is indistinguishable from the surrounding walls . And then there are players who jump off a church pew to hit an Erne .
In Montreal , they play squickleball . In a little gym at Douglas Park , which is two feet too short for two pickleball courts , they play a game called octopus . Four vs . four between the badminton lines . There ’ s a two-foot strip between courts , which they call the Dixon Line . The two-bounce rule , NVZ ... everything else is the same . But the Dixon Line is “ out .” Some teams will designate a blocker to prowl the Dixon Line , looking for Ernes from two directions .
All these incarnations resemble pickleball , but they are likewise games unto themselves . There is a unique intimacy to these sessions , shared by the players slashing their way through the winter together , cramming in points before they ’ re kicked out of the gym by the step aerobics instructor , and the cherry blossoms come out . •
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 ).