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Wild Dunes pickleball director Josh Smith (right) instructs Hastings Hensel in a beginner’s lesson.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Writer Hastings Hensel, shown taking a pickleball lesson from Josh Smith, suspected his tennis and pingpong experiences would translate to pickleball skill. Turns out, he picked up the sport easily.
Photo by Mic Smith
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The pickleball courts at Wild Dunes Tennis Center on Isle of Palms are filled with players enjoying the fastest-growing sport in the U.S.
Photo by Mic Smith
I won’t lie. When I arrive at Wild Dunes Tennis Center on Isle of Palms for my first foray into the booming sports phenomenon of pickleball, I believe the game will come naturally to me.
After all, I’d grown up playing intense pingpong every summer at Lake Murray in my family’s July Fourth tournaments. And I’d played in my fair share of Junior Tennis League tournaments, until the day I got so angry at an errant shot that I mimicked John McEnroe and smashed my racket, thus ending my tennis career.
Perhaps it would make for a better story if my first private lesson in pickleball did prove humbling. If, that is, I had my ego checked and was forced to practice more, to overcome the challenges and thus enjoy the sport.
But that’s not how pickleball works. Its soaring popularity—it is the fastest-growing sport in the U.S.—comes from its accessibility. Almost anyone can pick it up, and almost anyone can play and have fun, almost immediately.
“The barrier to entry is much lower than tennis,” says my coach, Josh Smith, the club’s pickleball director and a tennis player himself. “I can typically get people going and playing pickleball within an hour. And from there, it’s much easier to become, I would say, an intermediate player than it is with tennis.”
Smith and I begin on either side of a repurposed tennis court, just outside the no-volley zone near the net called “the kitchen.” We warm up by hitting forehand “dinks”—short shots off-the-bounce. As someone who holds a pen more than a racket these days, I’m getting caught up in the lingo of this newfound sport, but Smith tells me to concentrate. To show him the logo on my paddle. To swing from my knees to my waist. To finish my swing nice and flat, what he calls a “tabletop finish.”
“I can see your tennis background there,” he says, trying to erase my old habits and help me establish new, repeatable motions. “It’s not that big of a backswing.”
Like many pickleball pros, Smith also came to the sport by way of tennis and was initially skeptical. After playing club tennis at Penn State, he started teaching at a tennis academy on Hilton Head Island, where a friend encouraged him to give pickleball a try.
“I had a good time with it,” he says, “but nothing too serious.”
Eventually, though, he couldn’t ignore it. Pickleball may have been the new kid on the block, but it was here to stay. He got certified as an instructor and started the pickleball program at Wild Dunes, a resort famed for its tennis.
“There’s a lot of demand for this now,” he says, chalking up the sport’s boom to a post-pandemic desire to be outside with people. “Tennis is super social, but there’s something about pickleball where, since the court is smaller, you’re closer to people and the games don’t take as long, so it’s easier to get a group of people together, rotate around and play.”
After working on forehand and backhand dinks, we move onto the volley, those back-and-forth shots that don’t let the ball bounce and, in pickleball, must be played outside the kitchen. He coaches me to keep the paddle close to my center, in the “ready position,” so I don’t stretch too wide. A pickleball gets returned quickly, so you need a compact swing that’s more of a “push.”
In a beginner’s lesson, Smith typically focuses on volleys and dinks, but we have time to work on serves and returns, too. Thus, we cover, as he says, “everything you need to know so you can just go play.”
Smith coaches me in a way that assumes I’ll play the game competitively in the future, and I know I will. In the weeks that follow, I buy my own pickleball racket and discover that new pickleball courts have been built minutes from my house. And so, I join the estimated 30 million-plus pickleball players worldwide, and I find the sport to be just as everyone tells me it is—what you might call the Goldilocks of racket sports, somewhere between tennis and pingpong, just right.