In public parks throughout the country, a new sound has been ringing out: the tell-tale thunk of ball hitting paddle. This is the sound of pickleball, America’s fastest growing sport. Although pickleball, which looks like a cross between ping pong and tennis, was invented in 1965, the sport saw a surge in popularity just a few years ago — participation grew by 39.3% between 2019 and 2021, and there are now nearly 5 million pickleball players nationwide.

“‘What is this sport that everyone is going crazy about?’” Nikolas Webster, sport management clinical assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology, says he wondered not long before a colleague reached out to see if he’d be interested in researching the reason for pickleball’s popularity.

Despite being part of the team that conducted the recent study “Understanding the Evolving Motivations in the Expanding World of Pickleball Participation,” Webster admits that he’s actually never played pickleball. Even so, he says, “I think it's actually helped me from an objectivity perspective — not having any sort of bias.”

To, as Webster puts it, “uncover the why behind pickleball participation,” the research team started by finding 10 pickleball players within their personal and professional networks to survey and interview, asking open-ended questions to get at their motivations for picking up the sport.

With the themes that emerged, the team put together a survey and posted a link to it in a pickleball thread on Reddit, from which they received 531 usable responses.

They found that motivations for playing pickleball varied, ranging from physical fitness and competition, to socialization and ease of play, to escape from daily activities and the sport’s similarity to tennis.

Some of the results were surprising, Webster says, specifically pickleball’s reach to tennis players who are past their prime.

The study revealed that many athletes who had previously played tennis turned to pickleball after injury or aging limited their physical abilities, as “a way for them to still be competitive, be engaged, and use a similar skill set but at a much more adaptable pace,” Webster says. (With lighter equipment and underhand serves, pickleball is easier on the body than tennis.)

Webster also highlighted pickleball’s low barrier to entry as a significant reason for its growing popularity.

“If I were to try to learn to play American football,” Webster explains, “there's a lot of complexity. When we talk about learning the game of pickleball, it's not only easy to pick up — it's also cheap. It doesn't cost a lot in terms of equipment. Whereas if I go play football, I have to buy pads, a helmet, etc.”

Webster and his team presented this study at the North American Society for Sport Management (NASSM) conference in a poster session, during which attendees could walk around and examine research — a format Webster says fostered conversation.

“That was where I talked to some former tennis players,” Webster says, “who were like, ‘Yeah, I started playing pickleball because I had three surgeries on my shoulder.’”

These conversations revealed a parallel that Webster was happy to see.

“At least anecdotally, people reflected what we found,” he says.

As a self-identified athlete, Webster understands the desire to find a sport you can play later in life.

“I can’t play basketball as competitively as I used to, I can’t jump as high, I can’t run as fast,” he says. ”But that doesn’t mean it ends here. I still have a drive to be competitive. So what’s an alternative for someone like me?”

Maybe the answer is pickleball.

“A lot of people have teased me for not playing,” Webster says. “I probably should at some point. People love it. So I guess I'm missing out.”