Mare Harrington returns a serve during a game of pickleball at Corbeil Park. Photo by Bob Roche
By Adam Swift
PEABODY — It’s Friday morning at Corbeil Park, and the competitive juices are flowing.
Gary Penfield twirls his racket, getting ready for mixed-doubles action with his partner, Kathy Pierce. Peter Sullivan, one of the foremost ambassadors of the game on the North Shore, rules one of the far courts. Sue Trainoff, only a year into the game, wipes the sweat from her brow. And Rob Eisenhauer sends his regrets, taking his place on the disabled list after spraining his shoulder going for a ball earlier in the week.
Tennis? Ping pong? Racquetball?
While many of the athletes come from those racket sport backgrounds, what brings them to the West Peabody courts up to three times per week is pickleball, considered one of the fastest growing sports in the country. If you doubt its growing popularity, all you have to do is try to find a parking spot on Hoover Terrace after the games begin.
“It’s a very popular sport down in the Southeast, in Florida and the Carolinas,” said Eisenhauer, who got interested in the sport when he visited one of his friends in South Carolina. “The community had four brand-new pickleball courts.”
Down south, Eisenhauer said there’s a greater concentration of permanent pickleball courts, with official dimensions of 20’ by 44’ and what looks to be a half-sized tennis net.
The game plays like a scaled down version of more well-known racket sports (or a scaled-up version if your racket sport of choice is ping pong). Competitors use an oversized paddle and volley a wiffle ball over the net. Matches are typically the best two out three games to 11, with points being scored on the serving side.
Although the sport has great popularity in the South, particularly among athletes who may be a little along in years and have lost a step or two, the North Shore has recently become a hotspot for the game.
“Peabody is probably the first place to have great outside courts,” said Sullivan. While a core of Peabody players, including Hank McLauglin, Kevin Stankiewicz and Chuck LeBlanc set the seeds for the game in the Tanner City, many of the players at Corbeil Park now come from miles away.
Sullivan’s story of how he came to play and love pickleball is typical of many in the game.
“I was approaching retirement and I had a lot of time on my hand,” said Sullivan, who was a champion ping pong player in college. “I wanted to find something where I would still be active and I fell in love with the game.”
Four years ago, there were about a half-dozen players in Peabody. Now, Sullivan said there are as many as 100 people of varying racket and other sport backgrounds who make their way to Corbeil Park on a fairly regular basis.
“I can tell their backgrounds from the way they swing the paddle, ping pong, badminton, tennis – there are a lot of tennis players, and racketball players,” said Sullivan. “The racketball players don’t like the net. I’ve seen people who thought their athletic careers were over get restarted.”
For Penfield, who has a prosthetic leg, pickleball has proved to be the perfect sport to keep the competitive fires burning.
“About two years ago, I saw something about the game when I looked online,” said Penfield. “The first place I went to was the Y in Beverly, and when I got on the court with my prosthetic leg, I realized I could cover the court.”
He said he used to play a lot of tennis, and now he plays pickleball up to five times a week. And though he takes the sport as seriously as he did tennis, Penfield and other players said there is one major difference between pickleball and other racket sports.
“It’s much more social out on the court,” said Penfield. Unlike tennis, where most players are locked into teams or opponents, pickleball is typically more open-ended, with players getting grouped together a little more randomly.
“We’ve all made friends,” said Sullivan. “We play golf together, go out to eat together, get drinks together.”
Danvers resident Trainoff has been playing for about a year, and is one of the rare pickleballers who does not come from a racket sport background.
“I’ve done Zumba,” Trainoff said. “Everyone assumes I played tennis, but I haven’t done that for 30 years.”
Even though it has been decades since she played tennis, Trainoff said she sees some major differences as well as similarities with pickleball.
“Pickleball does not require a lot of power shots,” she said. “There’s a lot of finesse and strategic shots. It’s a sport for all ages.”
That all ages aspect could be the next area of growth for pickleball. While many of the players on Friday morning were in the retirement bracket, Penfield said the median age of players has started to go down.
“There are a lot of players who are 60-plus, but you’re starting to see more players in their 50s and younger,” he said.
Trainoff said she’s even introduced the game to her nephews, who are college-aged, and they are now hooked on pickleball.
In addition to the West Peabody courts, Sullivan said there are regular pickleball events in Lynn, Danvers, Beverly, Hamilton, Reading, Malden, and Boston.
Anyone who wants to find out more about pickleball both nationally and on the local level should check out usapa.org and bostonpickleball.blogspot.com, Sullivan said.
Adam Swift can be reached at [email protected].