Life & Style | wellness •
By Karen Greco
In a Pickle Ocean State Pickleball brings America’s fastest growing sport to South County I’m not a team sports sort of person. With a career spent mostly as a freelancer, it’s no surprise I like to go it alone. But for some reason, pickleball called to me. (Maybe it was the name – I love pickles.) Pickleball is a mashup of tennis, badminton, and ping pong. Played on a badminton-size court, the game uses a large, flat paddle to send a wiffle ball, roughly the size of a baseball, back and forth over a net. Kinder to the body than its more aggressive cousin tennis, pickleball is America’s fastest growing sport. Even Dumb and Dumber actor Jeff Daniels (also a prolific playwright) wrote a comedy about the game, which
is premiering at his Michigan theater next month. USA Pickleball, the sport’s official governing body, is 50,000 members strong. The US Open Pickleball Championship (yes, there is one) airs on CBS Sports in April. Retirees are credited for its rapid rise, which may explain why its US Open is held in Naples, Florida. Even though I am creeping ever closer to social security age, Kara Biller, founder of Ocean State Pickleball, assures me that there are plenty of GenXers and Millennials taking to the courts. Indeed, according to the 2022 Pickleball Report from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, only 17 percent of
pickleballers are aged 65 and up; under-25s make up a third of the players. Biller, a former college tennis athlete, founded Ocean State Pickleball during COVID, after her pandemic-induced job loss as an occupational therapist. Introduced to the sport by a friend, she “poo-pooed it,” given her tennis background. However, after she picked up a paddle and played for the first time, she recalls, “I thought, this is occupational therapy.” Pickleball, she explains, ticks off the three boxes of OT. “The game uses your brain a lot, which is good for memory. It’s good exercise, and there’s a great social component to the activity. That’s huge.”
Photo courtesy of Ocean State Pickleball
Ocean State Pickleball founder Kara Biller instructs a player on using pickleball’s broad, flat paddle
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SORhodeIsland.com • August 2022
