Petaluma loves pickleball

For Patrick Crabtree, getting the pickleball courts in Lucchesi Park cleaned up is one of the priorities for him and his fellow pickleball players, a group of local athletes dedicated to an obscure but growing racket sport.

“We’re trying to get some cracks patched, and the fencing fixed up so balls don’t run under the fence,” says Crabtree. “So we’re working on it. It’s a slow process but it’s coming along.”

Pickleball was started in 1965 in Washington when Joel Pritchard, a state representative, and his friends and family became bored one day and decided to try to play badminton. As luck would have it, all they could find were paddles and a Wiffle ball, so they made do with what they had.

The name is actually derived from the name “pickle boat,” which is in reference to the last boat that returns to the dock with its catch. The game is played on a modified tennis court and usually involves two to four players. The game is played similar to ping pong, with short stroked and quick reactions. On the return of the ball, it has to bounce once before it is returned. After that, the ball can be hit out of the air. This is called a “double bounce” rule and is one of the rules that sets the game apart from tennis.

Crabtree’s love for Pickleball began two years prior to starting the first pickleball league in Petaluma.

“I’d gone down and found out about the game from my brother in Arizona,” Crabtree said. “He said, ‘Hey you gotta try this game out.’ So we went and played pickleball.”

Crabtree started the Petaluma group two years later, after Arlene Knudsen, the pickleball ambassador of Sonoma County decided to hold a clinic in Petaluma. They went to McNear Park and placed tape across the two tennis courts to form pickleball courts and started playing.

While they were playing, Don Streeper, the director of the Petaluma Senior Center, happened to be watching. He had been looking for a new game for seniors who did not want to play shuffleboard. After Crabtree followed up with him, they got estimates and Streeper put up the money to get the four courts in Lucchesi Park lined for pickleball.

As pickleball gains in popularity, largely with seniors, new leagues have sprung up in Sonoma and Marin counties. Pickleball is even an official sport in Sonoma County’s Wine Country Games.

The Carousel Fund, the Petaluma nonprofit, has even expressed interest in holding a fundraiser picnic with pickleball as part of it.

The group on the Sonoma County pickleball email list is now over 100 people and growing, with courts in Santa Rosa, Windsor and Rohnert Park as well.

“I get calls from all over,” Crabtree said. “People coming into the area, visiting relatives or their children, saying, ‘Hey, I heard you play pickleball in Petaluma.’ We now play about four times a week.”

Crabtree has been working with the city’s Parks and Recreation Department and going to the Recreation, Music and Parks Commission meetings to try and get the courts fixed up. Crabtree is hopeful that the courts will be fixed up so they can hold events like those at Santa Rosa’s Finley Center.

“They’re pretty bad. The cracks are bad. They put kind of some patching on it but they didn’t repaint the surface so they don’t look that great,” he said. “The fencing is still in rough shape from soccer players coming in there and utilizing those courts when they shouldn’t be.”

(Contact Jarrett Andrew at argus@ar guscourier.com.)