The sport of pickleball, which mixes elements from several other racquet sports, is gaining popularity across the United States. It’s played head to head in either a singles game with two players or in a doubles game with teams of two facing off against each other, much like tennis. Pickleball players use smooth paddles that are larger than ping pong paddles to hit a ball resembling a wiffle ball across a net. The court is close in size to a badminton court.
What’s unique to pickleball is the area closest to the net on each side, called the kitchen; players must stay out of it while they volley the ball back and forth. The ball can cross the net without bouncing or can bounce once. If anything falls into the kitchen during play—such as an errant ball, or even sunglasses or a hat—it’s a point for the other team. The game ends when one side’s point count reaches 11.
According to statistics collected by the 2022 Sports & Fitness Industry Association Single Sport Report on Pickleball and presented by USA Pickleball, 4.8 million people were playing the sport in 2021; there has been an 11.5% increase each year for the past five years.
The people playing include otolaryngologists Bronson C. Wessinger, MD, Todd Lindquist, MD, and Shane White, MD. All three gravitated to pickleball after focusing on other sports, and all say the game has taught them valuable lessons.
“I played tennis my whole life, and my longtime tennis coach got me into pickleball at the beginning of the pandemic,” said Dr. Wessinger, a second-year otolaryngology resident at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. “I was at home in Mobile, Ala., from medical school at Vanderbilt because all classes were remote.” A tennis standout, Dr. Wessinger began playing at age 9, rose up through the United States Tennis Association junior circuit, and ranked as a top player in his state and region—“I believe I peaked at No. 1 or 2 in Alabama and in the 50s in the Southeast,” he said. His school’s varsity tennis team at UMS-Wright in Mobile, was state champion five out of the six years he played with the team.
“While it would be a sin for me to say I didn’t like tennis, I get less frustrated with pickleball,” he said. “Tennis frustrates me because I’ve been playing it for so long. I have much lower expectations for myself on pickleball compared to tennis. There’s no history of the money and time invested like there was for tennis, so I’m OK with having an off day or losing a pickleball match.”
Learning on the Court
Dr. Lindquist grew up in Omaha, Neb., and began playing tennis seriously at age 12; he and his brother Tim won a state doubles title at Westside High School in Omaha. But when Dr. Lindquist and his family moved from Minneapolis to Naples, Fla., for a job change in 2016, he couldn’t find a game. “No one in my circle of friends played tennis, so I started playing pickleball,” he said. “I was annoyed at first because the ball was so different. But now I see it as a fun and social game because so many people play it here.”
Today, he plays whenever he can in his community, which is home to the Marbella Isles Pickleball Club. He appreciates the social aspect of the game; doubles games are common, and people tend to chat with each other between plays.
Pickleball is a family affair for Dr. Lindquist, who also plays with his wife Kirstin and his five children: Mari, Gus (and his wife Maddie), Jake, Annika, and Elsa, who range in age from 29 to 13. He believes that playing doubles helps to develop and maintain patience. “The teamwork part of pickleball, especially when playing doubles, is similar to working as a team in a hospital or operating room,” he said. “In both situations, it’s important to have a strategy and a plan.”
Dr. Lindquist, who is currently an otolaryngologist at Millennium Physician Group in Naples, Fla., also cites the game’s pace as an asset. “With pickleball, you just need to be patient and not try to rush things,” he said. “It can help you to know how to set a good tempo for the day when seeing patients,” he said.
“Pickleball is a nice way to mingle with people outside the hospital for sure,” said Dr. Lindquist. “I haven’t played with any of my patients and that’s probably okay. No one wants to watch me play—I’m not that good.”
Pickleball for All
Dr. Wessinger, a second-year otolaryngology resident at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, said he organized games and taught pickleball to the three other otolaryngology residents during orientation when they all first arrived on campus in fall 2021. One of them was Dr. White, who still plays singles games against Dr. Wessinger every other week. “I tried to think of something fun we could all do, and you can pick up pickleball much faster than tennis,” Dr. Wessinger said, “I taught Shane how to play and now he can beat me.”
Dr. White, who grew up playing basketball at Bemidji State University in Minnesota, a National Collegiate Athletic Association Division II school, and played baseball all throughout high school at Rhinelander High School in Rhinelander, Wis., said that this is an exaggeration. “He probably wins 75 percent of the games. My advantage is that I’m bigger; I’m 6-foot 7 inches, and he’s 5-foot 10 inches, so I have a bit of an advantage with height. I can crowd the net on him.
At the Medical College of Wisconsin, Dr. White had first considered orthopedics as a specialty but ultimately preferred otolaryngology. “I went into otolaryngology because I enjoyed that focus—there’s a lack of cookie-cutter procedures in the specialty as opposed to, say, orthopedics, where there are direct steps for each procedure. With otolaryngology, you find a landmark, and then find this thing that you should not cut. It’s more artistic and free flowing.”
Pickleball has a special appeal for Dr. White as a physician. “Playing pickle has helped me to be a better doctor through knowing when to move on when I make a mistake,” Dr. White added. “You have to move on to the next shot because there isn’t much time to dwell on mistakes in either field. Pretty much every surgery we do, there’s a nerve or a structure that you must be delicate around.
A Restorative Game
Dr. Wessinger, who grew up with chronic sinus issues and was in and out of otolaryngology offices, chose the specialty because it was a field defined by anatomic regions rather than a particular system. “We get to operate on bone, soft tissue, nerves, and vasculature—really any pathology in the head or the neck aside from the brain or the eye,” he said.
Playing pickleball has helped me to be a better doctor through knowing when to move on when I make a mistake. You have to move on to the next shot because there isn’t much time to dwell on mistakes in either field. —Shane White, MD
Pickleball has also helped Dr. Wessinger with the practice of medicine. “In the surgical field, you can feel good about a strength that you have,” he said. “Maybe you’re very good at a certain surgery, like a tonsillectomy, but you see someone do it very differently, or a variation of what you are doing. Then, you can pick and choose what you liked from the other surgeon’s technique and how you’ll do the surgery next. That can also happen with seeing someone else hit a serve differently than I do,” he said.
The game also helps him to de-stress and spend time outside the hospital. “Pickleball is my way to forget about a lot of the day,” he said. “It’s a good distraction. Luckily, Lexington has a big pickleball scene with lots of courts, and it’s easy to get into a pickup game. We’re often operating for a long time so on the days that I’m off from work, I feel that I have plenty of time to play. After a game of pickleball, I’m a little fresher when I go home and study be cause I’ve been out in the sun.”
Cheryl Alkon is a freelance medical writer based in Massachusetts