Documentary traces pickleball’s rise from Cabo breakfast to nationwide story

Pickleball has gone from a summer experiment on Bainbridge Island to a sport with more than 24 million U.S. players, 18,258 places to play and 82,613 known courts. That scale is why a documentary about its rise matters now: the game is no longer fighting for recognition, it is trying to define what kind of sport it has become.

The Power of Pickleball follows that shift from fringe curiosity to national habit, tracing a 60-year run that started in the summer of 1965 when Joel Pritchard, Bill Bell and Barney McCallum improvised a new game for bored kids on Bainbridge Island, Washington. USA Pickleball says the sport’s first official rulebook did not arrive until March 1984, which tells the story in miniature: the culture spread long before the paperwork caught up. The film’s arc turns that gap into the point. Pickleball built its identity in parking lots, rec centers and neighborhood courts before it ever had a clean history book.

Director Alexander Jeffery spent two years making the film after his aunt floated the idea over a family breakfast near courts in Cabo. What started as a casual pitch became a cross-country project that took him to Bainbridge Island, Florida, New York City, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Diego and Arizona. The production drew on roughly 10 to 12 hours of footage and about 60 interviews, enough to show that pickleball’s real product is not just the game itself but the social web around it. Jeffery said he began from a skeptical view of pickleball and came away seeing a unique culture and an unusually welcoming community.

That perspective is where the documentary earns its relevance. SFIA says U.S. participation jumped from about 4.2 million players in 2020 to over 24 million in 2025, a growth curve that turns a niche pastime into a mainstream fixture almost overnight. Jennifer Lucore, a 2019 Pickleball Hall of Fame inductee, professional player, historian and co-author of History of Pickleball: More Than 50 Years of Fun!, helped connect Jeffery to the sport’s roots and pioneers, grounding the film in the people who preserved its origin story when the game was still easy to overlook.

The result is a film that plays as both history lesson and legitimacy check. The Power of Pickleball is available to rent or buy on Apple and Amazon, and it streams on Documentary+, which makes the sport’s coming-of-age story easy to watch wherever the next wave of players is already gathering.