HERSHEY, Pa. — It’s just after 8 a.m. at the University Fitness Center on the Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center campus, and a familiar thock-thock-thock sound is coming from the basketball court.
It’s pickleball time, and already a handful of players have started on the square of hardwood that forms the boundaries of the playing surface.
A pickleball court is smaller than the closest of its three ancestors — tennis. Pickleball also uses paddles that look more like the kind they use in ping-pong instead of tennis rackets. Oh, and the game’s designers have also added Wiffle ball to the mix just for good measure. Players smack around a hard plastic sphere instead of a fuzzy tennis ball.
In the U.S., 4.8 million people play this Frankenstein monster of a game, according to a 2022 report from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association. That’s an increase of more than a million pickleball players in just four years. An article in the July 18 edition of The New Yorker magazine called it “America’s fastest growing sport” and it’s not the first publication to make the claim.
Despite the goofy name and quirks, proponents say pickleball offers the health benefits of other physical activity previously considered out of bounds for older players — sports like tennis. Studies point to possible cognitive gains to be had from pickleball. And Mike Zehner, a clinical exercise physiologist at Penn State Heart and Vascular Institute, says a game like pickleball can make all the difference in a person’s cardiovascular and mental well-being.
Pickle power
Cardiovascular activity like pickleball “works to help dilate your blood vessels, and this effect can last up to two hours after exercise has ended,” Zehner said. “So, it helps with hypertension, strengthens your immune system, supports mental health, helps regulate blood sugar, helps you sleep, and the list goes on. There is also a believed link that exercise can decrease the chance of early onset dementia and Alzheimer’s.”
Central Pennsylvania is not immune to the pickleball bug. Courts are popping up everywhere ― indoors and outdoors, on tennis courts and in driveways. The University Fitness Center offers occasional clinics for people hoping to learn, and there’s no shortage of local venues that consider the sport worth saving space for.
Bored with the bike?
In return, some ardent pickleballers say the sport is saving them. Among the morning crew at the University Fitness Center is a trim, silver-haired man named Chuck Zerbe. Fifteen years ago, a doctor at Penn State Health Medical Group ― Nyes Road told him his left anterior descending artery had occluded by 95%. A Penn State Heart and Vascular Institute physician installed stents, and the same doctor urged him to get to the gym. Zerbe started riding stationary bikes and hoofing it on treadmills, because he assumed he had to. “I got pretty tired of riding that bike,” he said.
His son took up the game and suggested Zerbe give it a try. So one day, he popped his head into one of the morning pickleball matches at the Fitness Center and asked what it was all about. He played three games on a borrowed paddle that day and lost. But he was hooked. Now, Zerbe finds himself in games on outside courts in the summer, inside in the cold, at home or when traveling.
“It’s great exercise,” he said. “It’s a lot more fun than going in there and being on a treadmill or riding a bike.” He credits it with helping him keep his weight down.