Pickleheads tracks pickleball courts and games in a given area. In Athens, pickleball court searches were up 800% in August when compared to spring searches, Brandon Mackie, co-founder of Pickleheads, said.
“We have over 13,000 facilities profiled across the U.S. and Canada,” Mackie said. “We have a really neat platform that allows players to post their own games publicly to our website, invite their friends, or even leave it open for strangers to join their game.”
There are currently two public facilities in Athens that have pickleball courts, according to Pickleheads.
One is the Athens Community Center, located at 701 E. State St., which offers indoor and outdoor courts. The other is the Ohio University Golf and Tennis Facility, located at 106 S. Green Dr., with indoor courts only.
Athens Arts, Parks and Recreation Director Katherine Jordan and Assistant Director Erin Helms have both noticed an increase in pickleball players within the community center.
“I would say that based off my observations, yes, there has been an increase of pickleball players at our indoor courts over the past two years,” Jordan wrote in an email.
Jordan said that she also believes pickleball has grown in popularity due to the many aspects of the game that make it accessible to a greater variety of people and abilities. She noted seeing young children to older adults engaging in the game.
“It does seem like it caters to people that still want to be active, that maybe the mobility of the game of tennis is a little bit too rough on our bodies, so pickleball is just a nice complement to tennis,” Helms said.
Overall, pickleball is the fastest growing sport in America, with over 36.5 million players around the country, and this has been because of two main causes, Mackie said.
“Number one is just how easy the sport is to learn; anybody can pick it up in a single session, even win games the first time out, and you just don't need months and years of training to get to where you can do it,” Mackie said. “Number two is the social aspect of the sport; you play a lot of times in these large open-play formats.”
Pickleball started becoming popular during the COVID-19 pandemic because it could be played outside and abide by social restrictions.
“The pandemic is, from what we can tell, what took pickleball from a slow-growing sport to the fastest-growing sport of all time,” Mackie said.
Pickleheads’ goal is to become the primary platform for assisting pickleball players' needs in finding courts, games or gear.
“We are adding more and more information and more and more tools so that anyone that wants to get involved in the sport can do so easily on our app,” Mackie said.
Helms said the Athens Community Center offers an incentivizing program called Silver Sneakers to encourage the community to use its pickleball courts. The program allows members with certain supplemental insurance to play at the community center for free.
“I believe that since we also offer free access through our outdoor courts as well as free check out of paddles and balls, this helps encourage people to try the sport out,” Jordan wrote in an email.
Through this program, the directors of Athens Arts, Parks and Recreation hope to show their support for local Athens sports.
“We love seeing the pickleball people, and we know it's definitely growing, and we hope that we can continue supporting in the best way we can while also supporting the many other interests that the community has for sports or leisure activities,” Helms said.