Merriam-Webster spotlights pickleball's ping-pong roots in invention story
Merriam-Webster’s pickleball post pushed the sport’s ping-pong DNA back into the spotlight, and the table tennis tie is too central to ignore.
Merriam-Webster put pickleball’s origin story back in the feed, and the detail that mattered most was not the backyard charm. It was the equipment: a badminton court, ping-pong paddles and a perforated plastic ball, the same table tennis tools that helped launch the fastest-growing paddle sport in America.
That matters because the mainstream pickleball tale can flatten table tennis into a cute footnote. The sport did not emerge from nowhere on Bainbridge Island, Washington. In the summer of 1965, Joel Pritchard and Bill Bell improvised a game after finding their families bored at Pritchard’s home, then played on an old badminton court with the net set at badminton height. Merriam-Webster says the name came from Joan Pritchard, while official history also credits Barney McCallum as one of the three inventors.
The ping-pong link is not incidental. USA Pickleball describes pickleball as a paddle sport blending tennis, badminton and table tennis, and that blend is baked into the way the game was first cobbled together. The early story is less about a clean-sheet invention than about borrowing the familiar feel of table tennis, then stretching it across a bigger court with a different net and a plastic ball that could live outdoors.
That legacy has only grown more visible as the sport exploded. USA Pickleball cites 2025 growth data showing 82,613 known courts in the Pickleheads database and 18,258 court locations nationwide, while Sports & Fitness Industry Association-based reporting put U.S. participation at 19.8 million in 2024, up from 8.9 million in 2022. Washington made pickleball its official state sport on March 28, 2022, a nod to the game’s roots near Seattle and its rise far beyond them.
The timeline still points back to the same place. HistoryLink says the first dedicated pickleball court went up in 1967, and Pickle Ball Inc. was incorporated on February 13, 1968, as the founders worked to push the sport forward. The invention story now carries two truths at once: pickleball has become its own national phenomenon, but the table tennis pieces that helped build it are still sitting right at the center of the origin.
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