Writer / Ryan Kennedy Photographer / Michael Durr
On a Saturday afternoon in 1965, three men and their families decided to play a game of badminton. Unable to find a shuttlecock, they improvised. They lowered the net, poked holes in a plastic ball and crafted paddles out of spare plywood. Pickleball was born.
“As soon as I played it for the first time I was hooked,” he says. “I grew up playing After 55 years, this combination of ping-pong. Me and my brother are super badminton, table tennis and traditional competitive. It reminded me of shrinking tennis is one of the fastest-growing sports in yourself down to a ping-pong table. It’s America. According to the 2019 Pickleball competitive, it’s fun and it’s also social. I Participant Report by the Sports and Fitness just kept playing tournaments and got more Industry Association, 3,300,000 people play addicted.” pickleball in the United States. Marcus Woodhouse, president and cofounder of Indy Pickleball Club (IPC) says he fell in love with the game about five years ago.
It was at these tournaments where Woodhouse says he was inspired to create IPC. “I travel for pickleball tournaments all over,” OCTOBER 2020
he says. “All the tournaments are held by the clubs in all the bigger cities. I noticed the need in our city to get one voice in one place. It seems like more of the small towns are getting pickleball courts and the bigger cities haven’t caught up to the smaller cities. I wanted to get tournaments here. I wanted to do something for the city - to do something for kids and grow the sport in the Indianapolis area.” IPC officially launched in August of 2019, and the club’s stated mission is “to grow the sport of pickleball in central Indiana
