Pickleball in Yorkshire: From Penistone to Tadcaster the growth of a recreational racquet sports phenomenon

Geoff is one of a handful of like-minded individuals who played the sport or saw it played abroad and tried to introduce it in Yorkshire.

Less than a year after starting the Picklers - “I didn’t want to just call us a pickleball club, I wanted to give it a catchy name,” he smiles - his twice-weekly sessions have grown from three players to nearly 50 paying members.

Up in North Yorkshire, Keith Grainge has had a similar impact in spreading the gospel. He played sporadically at Tadcaster Leisure Centre until Covid shut down the whole of sport.

When society re-opened, the fact pickleball can be played indoors or outdoors meant people could return to it quickly, but did so outdoors in nearby Cawood.

“It left two 80-year-old ladies in Tadcaster with no game,” says Keith, himself a sprightly 80-year-old.

“So I put a notice in the supermarket and we got one extra player and that was the start of everything. At Tadcaster now we have 40 and 50 who come and play.

“I moved to Copmanthorpe a couple of years ago and thought I’d better introduce it here as well. That was May last year and we’ve got 100 players now, if you can believe that.”

So what is pickleball? Why is it proving so popular? And do you have to be 80 to play it? More of the latter, later.

First of all, pickleball is a racquet sport. Its origins are in North America sometime in the mid 1960s. Americans are said to claim it was they who discovered the game, Canadians argue otherwise.

Either way it is a big recreational sport across the pond with a growing professional element.

Stripped bare the game is like most other racquet sports: hit the ball over a net to your opponent to try and win a point.

Pickleball is played on a court the same dimensions as a badminton rectangle, 42-foot by 20-foot.

The ball for an indoor court, a little bigger than a tennis ball, is plastic and has 27 holes in it; 40 holes for an outside court, “to combat the elements,” says Geoff in Penistone.

A pickleball paddle is twice the size of a table tennis bat and can cost £15 for a plywood one at the bottom end of the scale, up to £250 for a carbon fibre one.

Points can only be scored on serve, but that’s the North America way.

“I’m a bit of a rebel,” laughs Keith in Tadcaster. “I specialise in it being fun, so people aren’t sitting waiting for a long time.

“I do it rally scoring, whoever wins the rally that side wins the point. And we only play to 11 points.”

Geoff does similar with the Picklers. There are so many people now wanting to play in his twice-weekly sessions in the sports hall at Penistone Grammar School that he wants to keep people active.

“You get a lot of old tennis players coming,” says Geoff. “All they want to do is stand at the back and smash it as hard as they can. Gradually they realise that’s not the way the game is played.

“It’s about skill, it’s a lot less aggressive. The reason the pickleball serve is underhand is because the Pickleball Association of America realised the serve is dominating the game of tennis, whereas in pickleball the idea is that the serve starts the game, gets a rally going.”

Geoff and Keith’s paths could have actually crossed before.

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When he first learned of the game from friends on holiday in Croatia nearly a decade ago, Geoff searched for pickleball clubs in England and found only two. One of those was in Tadcaster where Keith had just started playing because his daughter wanted to get him more active.

Which brings us onto the why the surge in popularity.

“It’s very attractive to an older person because it’s softer on the joints,” says Geoff in the south of the county.

“It’s been fantastic for my mobility,” adds Keith in the north. “I’m coming up to 83 - I’m a new man because of pickleball.”

So is it just a game then for older people, a slower version of more intense racquet sports?

At both Tadcaster and Penistone the youngest players are in their late forties but both pioneers believe the sport is getting younger.

At the John Charles Centre for Sport in Leeds, not only are there younger players but there are disabled members as well. Take Nick Smith, for example, a former wheelchair sprinter and training partner of the great Hannah Cockroft who works at the tennis centre at John Charles and has been playing pickleball for two years.

“It’s the most inclusive sport there is, the fact I’m in a wheelchair doesn’t deter from the game at all,” says Smith, who can play as an equal alongside able-bodied opponents and team-mates.

Their club is called Game Set Match and is run by Michal Civcak whose daughter is 11 and plays and whose son Michal Jnr is a national junior champion.

“I’ve been running pickleball sessions in Leeds the past two years,” says Civcak senior, a registered coach.

“I’ve been working with schools to promote pickleball, we run lots of free taster sessions in primary schools and high schools and stage fun days for special educational needs kids.”

The Leeds club play in a North East league against a team from Doncaster and as far north as Durham.

“We’re taking it seriously,” adds Smith.

“The growth of pickleball is ridiculous. I think it’s the ease of the sport to get into. It’s so easy to get to pick up and play straight away.”

Over to Geoff in Penistone for the final word. “As the sport grows what’s noticeable is that the age of player is coming down,” he says. “In America there are a lot of good teenage players. In England the sport is still in its infancy, but it’s growing...fast.”

And with that he dashes onto the court to start another rally.

How to get involved in Pickleball

Tick the boxes for North, South, West and the East Riding of Yorkshire into the club locator on the Pickleball England website and 22 clubs come up.

When Geoff Rhodes of Penistone went looking a decade ago there was just one.

Now there are clubs from Easingwold in the north to Doncaster in the south, Hull in the east and Bradford in the west and a massive cluster in Leeds in between.

The number of places catering for pickleball is growing rapidly and the opportunities for people of all ages to get involved, exponentially.

So where does this growth take the sport?

“To the Olympics in 20 years,” believes Geoff of the Picklers. “Or maybe even sooner.”

On a more local level, what about a Yorkshire league?

Game Set Match and Doncaster are two clubs already involved in a North East league but would there be enough interest in this great county to host its own structure?

“Without a doubt there’ll be a Yorkshire league before long,” says Geoff.

“People at this club have asked me to arrange games against other clubs.”

The sport faces challenges, though, a potential restriction to its limits.

“Court hire is getting increasingly difficult,” explains Keith Grainge who set up the clubs in Tadcaster, Copmanthorpe and at Burnholme Leisure Centre in York.

“Badminton and table tennis have all the best slots and they’re not going to give them up, so as we grow we’re starting to struggle to get the requisite court time we need to satisfy our numbers.”

Nationally there is a Premier Pickleball League and the governing body Pickleball England holds an annual Open every year to determine the best players in the country, all in different age groups and across men’s and women’s and mixed gender classifications.

To get involved visit pickleballengland.org