Why is it called pickleball?

Who named pickleball, and when

The game was invented in the summer of 1965 at Joel Pritchard’s summer home on Bainbridge Island, Washington. Pritchard, who later served in Congress and as Washington’s lieutenant governor, had come back from golf with his friend Bill Bell to find the family bored. His 13-year-old son Frank complained that there was nothing to do, and told his father to go make up a game.

So he did. The two men went out to the old badminton court behind the house, which Joel’s parents had paved years earlier because of the Seattle rain. They found a perforated plastic ball from a bat-and-ball set, picked up a pair of table tennis paddles, and played over the badminton net. When the table tennis paddles kept breaking, they brought in Barney McCallum, a neighbor six doors down who could build sturdier ones. Those three men are credited with the game and its first rules.

The name came a few days later, and it came from someone else. Sitting around with their houseguests, the families decided the game needed a name. Joel’s wife Joan (her name is pronounced Jo-Ann) offered “Pickle Ball,” and explained the reference. She had followed crew racing since her student days at Marietta College in Ohio. She kept following it in Seattle, at the University of Washington regattas. There the rowers left out of the main boats were put together into a pickle boat and raced for fun.

Joan Pritchard put it in her own words years later, in a column she wrote for the News and Sentinel in Parkersburg, West Virginia. The name came to her, she wrote, because the game “reminded me of the pickle boat in crew where oarsmen were chosen from the leftovers of other boats.” A game assembled from three other sports had been given the name for a boat assembled from three other crews.

What is a pickle boat?

In rowing, a pickle boat is a crew put together from whoever is left after the serious boats are set, sometimes picked at random. It races for fun. A 2021 Press-Telegram column on the term collected the definitions from rowers directly: one coach described the pickle boat as the last boat boated, the lineup the coach fills with the leftovers.

The same two words mean something different one dock over. In sailing, the pickle boat is the last boat across the finish line. That sense traces back to English yachting, where the final boat was called the fisher, because boats would stop to fish for herring and pickle them on the way home.

The distinction matters here, because the two senses point at different stories. Read as sailing, pickleball would be a joke about coming last. Read as rowing, it is a joke about being built from spare parts, which is exactly what the game was. Joan Pritchard’s account names the rowing sense.

The naming, year by year

Was pickleball named after a dog?

This is the question almost everyone actually arrives with, and it has a real answer. The Pritchards did have a dog named Pickles, a cockapoo. She came home in the summer of 1968, when the Pritchards’ 10-year-old daughter Jeannie and a family friend, Paul Brown, walked to a nearby litter and carried back two puppies. The Browns named theirs Lulu. The Pritchards named theirs Pickles.

That was three years after the first game. USA Pickleball publishes the sport’s official magazine, and in 2020 it set out to settle the question. Staff looked for dog records, dug up photographs, and interviewed people who had been on the property between 1965 and 1970. The conclusion: the dog was born in 1968, after the game already had its name.

Two of Joel and Joan’s children have said the same thing on the record. Peggy Pritchard-Olson put it bluntly in 2005: the dog was named after the game, not the other way around. Joan Pritchard’s own column says Pickles “wasn’t on the scene for two more years.”

The dog story is not baseless, though, and that is worth being honest about. Dick Brown, who was there, described in a filmed interview a night in the Pritchard cabin where the dog kept grabbing the ball and Joan suggested naming the game after her. Barney McCallum, one of the three founders, held to the dog version until his death. Those are firsthand accounts, not internet noise.

Where the dog story came from

The most useful part of the record is not which story is true. It is that we can watch the false one being made.

Sometime between 1969 and the early 1970s, a reporter came to interview Joel Pritchard about the growing game. The reporter asked where the name came from. Pritchard told the true version first, the one about his wife and the pickle boat. Then he offered the dog instead, as a better story. The reporter agreed. It was cuter, easier to remember, and it saved having to explain crew racing to readers.

Local players who knew better were annoyed with him. According to his son Frank, Pritchard waved it off: “It’s just a funny story. It will never stick.” More than fifty years later, it is still the version most people know.

Joel Pritchard admitted in later interviews that the game had not been named for the dog. Barney McCallum never did.

The third claim almost nobody mentions

There is a third version, and it comes from the one founder who is rarely quoted on the subject. Jennifer Lucore and Beverly Youngren wrote a book-length history of the sport in 2018. They found that Bill Bell claimed he had named the game himself, because he liked hitting the ball in a way that put his opponent in a pickle.

Their book matters for a second reason. The two authors worked through the same material and would not say for certain which came first, the dog or the game. USA Pickleball reached a firm conclusion two years later. The independent historians did not. Both facts belong on this page. The dates are strong evidence, and the people closest to the story still disagreed.

Why it is spelled as one word

It was two words for years. Joan Pritchard named it “Pickle Ball,” the family wrote it that way, and Frank Pritchard has said he never heard the game called anything else in those first summers. The spelling closed up to one word as the sport spread beyond Bainbridge Island, and “pickleball” is now standard everywhere, including in the official rulebook.

Where this comes from

Every claim on this page comes from a named source, checked on August 25, 2026. No rule numbers apply: this is history, not a rules question.

• The 1965 invention, the 1968 dog records investigation, the reporter episode, and the family interviews: USA Pickleball’s “How Pickleball Got Its Name”, published in the sport’s official magazine on October 1, 2020, and written by Jennifer Rogers. It is the single most detailed account in the record, and it is testimonial.
• Joan Pritchard’s own explanation of the name: a column she wrote for the News and Sentinel of Parkersburg, West Virginia, quoted in full by later reporting. It is the only first-person written statement from the person who chose the name.
• The third claim from Bill Bell, and pukaball: Jennifer Lucore and Beverly Youngren, History of Pickleball: More than 50 Years of Fun! (2018), pages 65 and 41. The same authors are the reason this page does not claim the matter is closed.
• The rowing and sailing meanings of “pickle boat”: the Press-Telegram column “In A Pickle Explaining Pickle Boats”, April 2, 2021, which collected definitions from rowing coaches and from a Mackinac race history.
• The dog version, on the record: Dick Brown’s filmed recollection for Pickleball Channel’s “Pickleball 411,” and Barney McCallum’s position as reported by the Pritchard family.

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