By Robin Catalano
Photos by Abigail Fenton

I swallowed my giddiness and arranged my face into what I hoped was an easy, sportsmanlike expression. “Good game,” I said, as we tapped paddles with our opponents across the pickleball net. Once the other team was out of earshot, I turned to my doubles partner, Ty, and said, “I’m going to snack on that victory all day. Yum!”

“All day?” he shot back. “Try all week.”

We had just vanquished a troublesome opponent—a player several rungs up the skill ladder, who also happened to be my husband. I’d introduced him to the sport a year and a half prior, and he had, thanks to practice and a seemingly bottomless bag of tennis tricks, quickly outpaced me. It’s a common story in pickleball circles in the Berkshires, where the sport’s boom echoes national trends.

According to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, pickleball has been America’s fastest-growing sport for four years and counting. Pockets of paddle slingers have existed in our region for at least a decade. They began coalescing into organized groups in 2018, when Mike Gilardi founded Berkshire Mountain Pickleball (BMP) to promote the sport’s growth and development. Three years later, Bousquet Sport in Pittsfield added its first indoor courts.

BMP started off with 10 members. Today, it counts 400. At Bousquet Sport, the membership count is just under 1,400 with approximately 40% of those members spending their time on the pickleball courts.

Tyler Besse, Bousquet racket sport manager, says the momentum isn’t slowing, primarily because of the sport’s quicker learning curve. “In the first five, 10 minutes, you can get the ball over the net, hit the ball around. You’re laughing, having a great time,” he tells me, with the enthusiasm of a person who plays at the 4.5+ level—near-professional—according to the Dynamic Universal Pickleball Rating (DUPR) system.

“A big reason it feels addicting is that you can see yourself getting better, and it’s not super frustrating starting off,” Besse says.

That part, at least, is true. Joe Riello of Pittsfield stumbled across pickleball in 2018 in Naples, Florida, the world’s current pickleball capital. He learned to play with BMP, and got his first true taste of the competitive rush in Naples, where the courts are separated by level.

“I played on all of them, for hours. That’s where I fell in love with the style of play at the 4.0 level,” Riello shares of the classic “soft game,” which favors accuracy of placement over smacking the yippee-ki-yay out of the ball. (The latter is common among intermediate players not so affectionately dubbed “bangers.”)

Riello practices daily, and spends an estimated $2,000 per year playing at local clubs. Since attaining his coveted 4.0 DUPR rating, he began imparting his knowledge to the few, the overly proud, and the brave enough to take an errant ball in the face—aka, intermediate and advanced-intermediate players like me, who typically stall out around 3.5.

“There’s a self-satisfaction when I see improvement in a player I’ve been working with,” Riello says. “I can’t put a price on that. It’s thrilling.”

Williamstown-based Ossie Scipio, a natural athlete and an avid basketball player, became a paddle junkie about 18 months ago, after spying Riello practicing at Berkshire Community College’s Paterson Field House. It was love at first dink. Pickleball is now Scipio’s sole sport.

A busy work and family schedule mean Scipio can hit the court only three days a week. He jokes that his “best friend” is the garage wall, where he has taped lines to simulate net height. Vigilant practice, and the electrifying feeling of tournament play, have rocketed him up the local circuit like a champagne cork at a divorce party.

More than anyone I’ve played with, Scipio has the glorious, goldfish-like ability to forget a backhand drive that fizzles into the net or a lob that overshoots the baseline. “It’s a mental sport, and I realized that the more you get in your head, it’ll mess you up for the following shot,” he explains. “So I realized, ‘Deep breath. Relax. Reset,’ and you’re good.”

I’ve yet to truly absorb that advice, even though it’s been dispensed numerous times, including by Kelly Maginnis, an instructor and BMP steering committee member. A lifelong multisport athlete, Maginnis made her foray into pickleball four years ago, under Gilardi’s tutelage.

The real appeal of pickleball, according to Maginnis, is that you can have a ripping adventure at any skill stage. “You can go and have drinks between points and play with your friends and have a great time,” she says. “Or you can up the ante and play more competitively. There are so many different levels you can take it to.”

Maginnis alternates between tournament and league play, plus practices, social games, and lessons on her home court, which she built in her Pittsfield backyard. Last year, word of mouth about her vast well of pickle patience exploded, and by September, Maginnis was teaching 15 lessons per week. “I took two weeks off at the end of the summer because I wasn’t even having a summer,” she recalls. “I love pickleball, but my kid came home from college and I felt like I didn’t even have a day off.”

Kanokwan De Sanctis, who lives in Canaan, New York, was introduced to pickleball by a friend of her husband. After a few months of just-for-fun ball thwacking, she confronted the sobering realization most players encounter early in their dinking-and-driving journey: “If I’m not getting better, no one wants to play with me. I had to level up,” she recalls.

De Sanctis, who plays three to four times a week and has limited her sporting expenses to a few hundred dollars, is now part of the legion of advanced-intermediate players, albeit one with a wicked underspin punch. She is gratified by the mastery of new shots. But because De Sanctis is a more highly evolved life form than I, whether she wins or loses is immaterial.

“I started to have friends, good friends, when I played pickleball. These are not my husband’s friends or family or colleagues,” De Sanctis says of the sport that broke her out of the isolation of the home office. “I love playing with everyone. It’s relaxing, and when I’m stressed it helps me a lot. It’s kind of my therapy.”

Whether or not you’re vying to become the next dink master or kitchen queen, pickleball “gives everyone the opportunity to feel like they’re part of something,” Scipio says.

He offers a final piece of advice: “But you have to stay for one more game.”