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How to Play Pickleball in Denver
From what gear you need to where to find courts to which leagues to join, we put together a beginner’s guide to playing the rapidly growing sport of pickleball in Denver.Jessica LaRusso •
May 14, 2021
If you’ve recently seen two or four people batting around what looks like a whiffle ball on what looks like a miniature tennis court using what look like beach paddles, what you’ve actually witnessed is the fastest-growing sport in America: pickleball. Participation shot up 21.3 percent from 2019 to 2020, and Denver is no exception to that trend.
Pickleball was on the rise before COVID-19, says Rachel Heise, the general manager of 32-year-old Game-Set-Match—a local racquet and paddle sports outfitter with four stores in the metro area—but as an outdoor, inherently distanced, low-barrier-to-entry sport, its popularity exploded during the pandemic. When tennis-centric Game-Set-Match surveyed its customers in January, more than a quarter of the nearly 600 respondents said they played the badminton/tennis/ping-pong hybrid, which was invented near Seattle in 1965 by a few dads trying to entertain their kids. “For a while, it seemed very recreational; I categorized it as a beer sport,” Heise says. “That’s not true anymore. There’s a U.S. Open for pickleball, and it’s actually getting quite serious.”