On a per capita basis Utah has the most pickleball players, although California, Florida and Texas have the most total players, as would be expected given their populations. According to the Association of Pickleball Professionals, more than 48 million Americans have paddled up; the sport grew by 35 percent in just one year. There are now about 13 million more people in the U.S. playing pickleball than its closest rival, tennis.
But while the numbers are up nationally, pickleball has yet to attract large numbers of African American participants. So it’s particularly heartening to see the way the sport has taken off in my hometown of Atlanta, where Black players have embraced the sport wholeheartedly and diverse teams are more common. Atlanta leads the nation in Black players per capita, according to Des Brown, a certified pickleball instructor and co-founder of the Atlanta-based Black Pickleballers United.
Indeed, if any city is to become a “Black mecca” for pickleball, it will probably be Atlanta because of its Black political power structure, thousands of African American-owned businesses, seven historically Black colleges and its decades of cultivating Black participation in tennis through the Atlanta Lawn Tennis Association, the nation’s largest municipal tennis league.
Public leadership has been an important factor in the growth of pickleball in Atlanta, providing a blueprint for other governments to follow. Mayor Andre Dickens is himself a pickleball enthusiast. In a public-private partnership, Atlanta recently outsourced its five tennis centers, including two historically Black ones, to a private contractor who prominently features pickleball as a component of its programming. The Atlanta Police Athletic League offers pickleball at its facilities located in or near Black neighborhoods. And the city’s Parks and Recreation Department recently brought online eight pickleball courts in predominately Black neighborhoods.
These efforts have spilled out into the surrounding metro area, where there are dozens of free or nominal-cost public pickleball courts. The small city of East Point southwest of Atlanta, for example, has become a hub for Black pickleballers, along with other communities in Fulton County and its surrounding counties. Increasingly, schools, churches and YMCAs are offering pickleball.
None of this would have worked out as well as it has were it not for the intentional public investments in facilities and champions and ambassadors for the sport like Brown, the Black Pickleballers United co-founder. A former Johnson C. Smith University quarterback, Brown moved from Charleston, S.C., to Atlanta about a year ago. He was determined, he told me, to “make Atlanta the Black mecca for pickleball in the U.S.” He and his co-founder Antonio Pullen, who won a $50,000 Black Ambition Prize to start a pickleball business called Dinkin' and Bangin,’ joined forces to start BPU. The goal of Dinkin’ and Bangin’ is to “infuse Black culture into pickleball,” as Pullen put it, by promoting pickleball in underserved communities.
Local government leaders need partners like Brown and Pullen to be successful, but they also need the active support and participation of the grassroots. Brown says he encourages each pickleball community to identify a captain who will help build and promote the sport. Atlanta lawyer Suzy Ockleberry, for example, heads a largely minority group of women called the Atlanta Pickleball Queens. The organization provides opportunities for networking, participation in pickleball clinics and a “safe place for women to play pickleball,” she told me.
In addition to the fun of competitive play and the social aspects of pickleball, Mayor Dickens and others emphasize the health and wellness advantages of the game, a particularly important aspect given the health disparities between communities of color and white Americans. A study conducted by Apple, using Apple Watch data and analyzing more than 250,000 pickleball workouts, found that pickleball players worked out an average of 90 minutes, reaching 70 percent of their maximum heart rate and reducing their risks of chronic diseases such as hypertension and diabetes.
When I ask pickleball advocates and public officials where all of this is going in the next five years, Brown says he wants Atlanta to become “a hub,” a place where students get scholarships to play the sport in college and locals play the sport well into their 70s. Ockleberry wants Atlanta to attract professional pickleball players from across the globe to stimulate the local economy. Mayor Dickens simply wants his city to become the “premier destination” for everyone who loves the game. No one would suggest that pickleball by itself is going to cure many of the ills that confront our society, but if other cities are intentional like Atlanta and make the sport accessible to all residents, it’s a start.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
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