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Joyce Yip

For more than a year, Ryan Lam Chun-hei, 28, practised pickleball at night on deserted badminton courts under a bridge in Kwai Fong, where it was so dark he could barely see the ball.
“It’s not easy being an athlete in Hong Kong, never mind that of an emerging sport,” says Lam.
And yet, in a sport that many hadn’t heard of until recent years – even recent months – Lam and his teammate, Wong Hong-kit, 26, took gold in the Hong Kong leg of the 2024 World Pickleball Championship series, held late last year at the Discovery Bay Recreation Club.
“I am so happy about our achievements today,” said Lam during the tournament, having won a place at the “global finals” – such as they are, for an emerging sport without any centralised governing body – due to take place this month in Vietnam.
During the pandemic, this niche activity was picked up by Hollywood A-listers such as George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio and Emma Watson, along with athletes like Serena Williams and Michael Phelps, propelling what had been perceived as a bit of a grandma’s game into the global consciousness.

The sport was created in 1965 by Washington state congressman Joel Pritchard and his friends Bill Bell and Barney McCallum. The trio had wanted to play badminton on an old court but couldn’t find any racquets. Instead, they used ping-pong paddles and a perforated plastic ball in the place of a shuttlecock.
In today’s iteration, the paddles have grown in size and the courts have been standardised. The close-up, in-your-face smashes of tennis have also been replaced, with gentle nudges of the ball over the net – known as dinking – making pickleball the perfect sport for seniors eager for a hit of adrenaline and to socialise with little risk of injury.
The name “pickleball” is attributed to Joan Pritchard, Joel’s wife, who reportedly named it after the “pickle boat” in crew races, where leftover rowers who did not make it onto more competitive teams would compete. The first official pickleball tournament took place in 1976 at the South Centre Athletic Club in Tukwila, Washington.
But it wasn’t until the Covid-19 pandemic that the sport really took off, as people sought safe outdoor activities.
The Sports & Fitness Industry Association’s 2024 participation report found pickleball to be the fastest-growing sport in the United States, with 13.6 million players. This is, in part, thanks to swarms of generous sponsors worldwide: last summer, the Pickleball World Rankings – funded by Indian multibillion-dollar media conglomerate The Times Group – announced a global pickleball tour with US$15 million in prize money.

In Asia, the sport has trickled into Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, mainland China and Vietnam, with clubs and competitions expanding from local to regional and national levels. In Hong Kong, momentum behind the sport is building, with the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD) this month increasing the number of facilities that can be booked for pickleball purposes from six venues to more than 15.
Kennedy Lai Kong-ip, who founded the China Hong Kong Newly Emerged Sports Association in 2018, aiming to represent disciplines such as teqball, cornhole and dodgebee, says pickleball’s small courts and easy accessibility are perfect for land-strapped Hong Kong and its time-poor people.
For the past two years, he’s been organising training programmes for the two pickleball courts at Go Park Sai Sha, a 120,000-square-metre sports park designed by Zaha Hadid Architects and located 10 minutes by car from Ma On Shan, though he expects more pickleball venues to spring up in urban areas in the years to come.
Go Park is also where pickleball player Lam now conducts his regular practice, saying that it’s the most affordable and accessible venue.
Lai, meanwhile, isn’t interested in converting other racquet-sport players to pickleball, only to getting the post-Covid public to be more active.
“A cool-looking three-pointer [in basketball] takes time and practice and not everyone has the patience to get there,” he says. “But if it’s something easy to pick up, they’ll keep doing it.”

Lai hopes for more monetary support from the LCSD but is realistic about the sport needing to demonstrate its commercial prospects before it can move public funds. In the meantime, the private sector is the one driving change. Take Stackd Pickleball in Hopewell Mall, a newly opened shopping complex in Wan Chai. Measuring more than 12,000 square feet, Stackd is home to three indoor courts, a pro shop, a social space and a range of equipment to analyse player technique.
It’s also what co-founder Geoffrey Wong Man-tsun defines as a “crazy” effort to fill the demand for courts in Hong Kong. Contrary to other venues, Stackd operates a membership model, where players must fork out a one-time joining fee of HK$500 before committing to a monthly membership fee of between HK$280 and HK$800; although non-members are still able to book courts and join introductory classes.
“A new sport won’t take off if the private sector doesn’t show its dedication to educate the public or participate in the promotion of the game,” says Wong. “We can’t rely on government efforts alone; it’s the same vice versa.”
Pickleball will be the fourth sports offering at Hopewell Holdings’ properties, following bowling, badminton and swimming – and the first emerging sport.
Danny Fan Wing-hung, a senior manager at the company, says he chose pickleball over other tenancy bids of basketball and skateboarding because it complements the mall’s all-age-friendly branding with a “sportainment” twist.
“Every mall wants to bring something different: sure, basketball is widespread and skateboarding enjoys the hype from the Olympic Games, but everyone can play pickleball,” he says, citing the low-impact nature of the sport. “We specifically requested Stackd Pickleball to prolong the sporting experience with something more fun and social – this isn’t something you can get at LCSD venues, where people play and then leave.”

Fan hopes the venue will attract players around the clock: office workers in the mornings and evenings, students and retirees in the afternoons. To spread the word, Hopewell Mall will host pickleball games and coach demonstrations in its 10-metre-high atrium, while its eponymous hotel next door can house international players during tournaments.
Kevin Kam Wai-keung, principal lecturer at the Education University of Hong Kong’s Department of Health and Physical Education, however, is less optimistic. While he applauds all efforts of promotion, he’s dubious about the government’s willingness to pull resources from mainstream sports such as swimming, football and basketball to promote fledgling disciplines, especially given the city’s poor track record in fostering home-grown athletes.
Kam suggests blazing a trail through schools, which are looking for new ways to keep students engaged with team sports. Competitions, whether interschool, regional or beyond, can also put the sport in the spotlight, he says.
Working the school angle is Ken Deng, co-founder of Bay Sports. Its single-court, 2,000-plus sq ft Bay Pickle in Tin Hau, which opened last summer, was the first indoor public pickleball venue in the city. One of its investors is Rocky Chan Man-chun, president of TLP Pickleball Association and organiser of the World Pickleball Championships in Hong Kong, and Steve Kuhn, founder of Major League Pickleball in the US, who is responsible for shepherding the sport’s explosive growth in America and overseas by investing in facilities as well as partnering with international organisations to bring the sport to new markets.
Bay Pickle’s classes for up to four adults start at HK$1,300 an hour, while the court can be rented by the public for an hourly rate of HK$600 from 10am. Devotees can join its membership programme, which starts at HK$1,000 a year to access other time slots and privileges.
Sure, basketball is widespread and skateboarding enjoys the hype from the Olympic Games, but everyone can play pickleball
Danny Fan, Hopewell Holdings
The Tin Hau location has since extended to Central and Tsuen Wan. Despite its success, Bay Pickle is what Deng refers to as his “expensive man caves”. What he really prides himself on are the pickleball courts that he and a group of volunteers have created atop an existing playing field at Pok Oi Hospital 80th Anniversary Tang Ying Hei College, in Tseung Kwan O, where twice a week, Bay Pickle coaches train the school team on campus, while Bay Pickle’s under-16 players join them every Saturday.
Last autumn, the college signed a sister-school agreement with Haidian Foreign Language Academy, a sports-centric school with campuses in Beijing, Wuhan and Hainan, to facilitate exchanges in training and competitions, including the Hong Kong chapter of the 2024 World Pickleball Championships, where the Bay Pickle-sponsored team took home the title for the under-12 category.
“A venue can offer membership programmes, live music, good food, amazing events – everyone’s experience with pickleball can be different, and they’re all great, but the real movement is among school programmes,” says Deng. “We must follow through with meaningful competitions, otherwise all this training is pointless.”
Deng says that government support cannot stop at just building more courts, but must also act as a bridge to mainland China, where pickleball reaches beyond junior school curricula to sleek shopping malls.
An April 2023 player-recruitment campaign on Chinese social-media platform Xiaohongshu garnered more than 4.7 million views. In the same month, prominent shopping centre Chengdu MixC in the Sichuan capital teamed up with a local club in an exhibition featuring competitions, challenges and other pickleball-related activities.

“Hong Kong is too small,” says Deng. “We must look to the mainland to further our sport.”
Though an investor of Bay Pickle, TLP Pickleball Association’s Chan is sceptical about the effect commercial venues have in an emerging sport beyond mere marketing. Expensive court rental and classes are a deterrent, for one.
“These venues are great for those with high spending power who want to play a new sport and have fun with their friends,” he says. “[They] also pay high rent so it makes sense for them to charge players more – I get that. But for the everyday player who is curious or wants regular practice, I wonder whether they’ll be willing to invest so much into court rental alone.”
In comparison, renting LCSD’s badminton courts – which measure the same as those for pickleball – costs less than HK$60 an hour depending on the availability of air conditioning and time period.
Still, Chan says that the growth of the number of commercial pickleball courts has piqued the interest of the LCSD, whose attitude towards the sport has become more welcoming since 2022, when it gave his association the green light to play on a soccer field in an industrial area in Kwai Chung during off-peak hours, provided that he sets up and dismantles the net and court tapes before and after every play.
“We need data of player demographic and wins and sponsorship opportunities to convince the HKSAR,” says Chan. “We’re getting there, slowly but surely. I believe that pickleball will be a mainstream sport in the next few years.”


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This ‘grandma’s game’ is taking Hong Kong – and all ages – by storm

Pickleball players Ryan Lam (left) and
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Ryan Lam and Wong Hong-kit compete at the Hong Kong leg of the 2024 World Pickleball Championships at Discovery Bay Recreation Club late last year. Photo: World Pickleball Championship

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Pickleball players from all ages taking part in a Stackd event in Hong Kong. Photo: Stackd

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Stackd Pickleball in Wan Chai’s newly opened shopping complex, Hopewell Mall, measures more than 12,000 sq ft. Photo: Stackd

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PostMag

Culture

Once a niche sport, pickleball has captivated the city and players of every age – even Taylor Swift and Michael Phelps are fans


Once a niche sport, pickleball has captivated the city and players of every age – even Taylor Swift and Michael Phelps are fans.


This ‘grandma’s game’ is taking Hong Kong – and all ages – by storm

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Once a niche sport, pickleball has captivated the city and players of every age – even Taylor Swift and Michael Phelps are fans

Once a niche sport, pickleball has captivated the city and players of every age – even Taylor Swift and Michael Phelps are fans