Pickleball Scores Big on Milton's Courts

Callum Hegarty ‘25 and Nam Nguyen ‘25

It’s a late scorching hot summer day on Milton Academy’s North Courts, and the familiar pops, bounces, and volleys of tennis balls have been replaced by boings, dinks, and donks of toy-like pickleballs.

You may have heard about the new sport on the block, but we’re here to quickly break it down. Think about a wombo combo between ping pong and tennis enjoyed by bright P.E. students, curious and decreasingly athletic adults, and seniors who want to spend their golden years out in the sun taking their shrinking muscles out for a spin. The sport has been particularly popular with older individuals, since it requires less movement and has a lower risk of injury than most other athletic options, but its newfound stardom has proved controversial. Despite the varying demographics of its players, pickleball still promises fun and healthy exercise to all who play.

Pickleball has enjoyed a meteoric rise to popularity in America and beyond—even as far as Vietnam, for example, where many tennis and badminton courts have been renovated into pickleball areas due to popular demand.

Many critics, unenlightened by the art of pickleball, claim that it doesn’t even count as a sport. This argument draws on an age-old debate that, quite frankly, doesn’t really matter. In our view, pickleball involves enough physical movement, strategy, and skill to constitute itself as a sport, but, whether or not you agree, why not just let the players have fun?

However, some tennis players, who feel that pickleball players are robbing their court space all for a pointless activity, have not been so peaceful. In one instance in April of last year, a physical scuffle broke out between tennis players and pickleballers at a Needham park that had recently added pickleball lines to its courts. Paul Pasquarosa, an onlooking pickleball player, described it to WCVB as “an actual push, and then it was physical…there was a lot of yelling and screaming, it wasn’t pretty.”

Some players returned to the court the next day to a shocking sight: the Needham High School JV Girls’ Tennis coach had sliced the pickleball nets with scissors and thrown them into a heap in protest. Luckily, no such donnybrooks have broken out on Milton Academy’s North Courts and the peace treaty between pickleball and tennis remains. “I am fine with [pickleball] as long as it doesn’t impede on tennis,” shared Varsity Boys’ Tennis captain Max Donovan ’25.

This fall, pickleball has been made an intramural sports option by math teacher Michael Kassatly (Ksat), meeting for three 45-minute sessions per week on the North courts. The activity allows students to socialize and compete in a low-risk, low-pressure environment while fulfilling one of their mandatory athletics credits. Royce Bleakie ‘25 admits that “[He] didn’t even know it was an option.” Despite pickleball flying under the radar at the very beginning of the school year, the fall sport is now completely filled up, with courts 5 and 6 overflowing with pickleballers Tuesday through Thursday.

Although the sign up sheet is filled to the brim, some pickleball players have expressed their complaints about Milton’s lack of attention to their treasured activity. For one, Intramural Pickleball has been using mostly Middle School equipment. Also, Pickleball courts have different dimensions than tennis courts, and the nets are much shorter, but Milton’s players must choose between using either the pickleball nets rolled out haphazardly across the tennis courts or the tennis courts with the wrong lines and a taller net. Can you imagine if our football team went out to play a game on a field with no lines? In the end, though, we do recognize that Pickleball probably doesn’t require the same treatment as our flagship sports like football, soccer, or field hockey—we’re not exactly going to be filling up the stands come Nobles Day this fall. In a couple of years, though, we might be seeing a real Milton Academy Pickleball Team, and it might even have the right lines on its courts.