Pickleballers in Bergen County want your respect, and your tennis courts

This has been a winter of discontent for pickleball players in Bergen County.

Spring is coming, and the people who love the sport with the funny name fear they won't have a place to play outdoors when the weather turns warm. And that's not funny.

"It's the fastest-growing sport in the country," said Iris Borman, the leader of a loose-knit group of pickleball players who reside in Bergen County. "Yet Bergen County is one of only five counties in the state that has no pickleball facilities. And that's not fair."

Last week, Borman led a group of pickleballers who went to the Bergen County Freeholder Board to beg the county Parks Department to permanently dedicate three or four tennis courts in Overpeck Park in Leonia to their sport. The pickleballers say that unless they have their own courts to play on, a showdown with tennis players over courts is almost inevitable.

"There were fights last year, and we don't want that again," said Borman, whose group met with Bergen County parks director James Koth last year and came away with a hybrid plan that she said proved to be unworkable.

As one element of the plan, the county allowed the pickleball nets to be stored in a shed at Overpeck, but Borman said that failed because only a few people had the keys.

Still, Bergen County said it plans to stick to the hybrid plan, by adding pickleball striping to five courts in Overpeck and three in Van Saun Park in Paramus.

Bergen County spokeswoman Alicia D'Allesandro said the Parks Department plans to resurface more courts this spring, and "additional hybrid facilities may be designated." Striping is weather-dependent, but the county expects the first set of hybrid courts to be available by May, she said.

Pickleball was invented in 1965 by Joel Pritchard, a congressman who represented a district in Bainbridge Island, outside Seattle, Washington. Pritchard, who is now deceased, took paddles and a Wiffle ball onto the badminton court in his backyard.

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It's not clear how the sport derived its strange name; some say Pritchard's wife named it after "pickle boat," a crew term in which rowers from different boats are mixed together. Another version has it that the game was named for the family dog, Pickles, who used to chase after the ball.

Either way, the backyard game has evolved into a full-blown sport, with amateur and professional players and its own U.S. Open in Naples, Florida. There has been a growth spurt in recent years; since 2010, the number of pickleball surfaces has doubled nationwide to around 4,000, according to the United States Pickleball Association.

"Running around the court is much easier in pickleball, because the court is much smaller," said George J. Cheah of Ridgewood, a tennis-player-turned-paddler who heads the 500-member New Jersey Pickleball Association. "There's less stress on the legs and on the rotator cuff."

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But most of these playing surfaces are in private clubs, which charge a fee, and there is a shortage of public courts. That's the issue in Bergen County, where pickleballers and tennis players have been sharing space at Overpeck Park.

"We had a major problem last year," said Esther Pearl of Teaneck, a tennis player who organizes matches at the Leonia courts in Overpeck. "The pickleball people would come before us and set up. They would play more hours than we did."

The two sides agree that things occasionally got heated.

"At one point I had to call security," Pearl said. "Nobody wanted the confrontation, but unfortunately, it did happen. The people who run pickleball are very strong-willed people."

The impasse between tennis and pickleball is unlikely to be resolved between the two groups of athletes.

"Tennis players can dig in their heels all they want, but we're not imposing on them," Borman said. "We're taxpayers, too."

Some of the 18 courts in Overpeck Park are in disrepair, and use is allotted on a first-come, first-served basis. So competition between pickleballers and tennis players at peak hours can be intense.

Add to this an underlying social tension: Tennis players tend to resent the pickleballers — many of whom are ex-tennis players — when they arrive with their much smaller nets and plastic strips, looking to reduce the court to badminton-size dimensions.

"Unfortunately, these tennis people are not very welcoming," said Barbara Norton, a Ridgewood resident and onetime tennis player who discovered pickleball about five years ago. "They don't like to share space. They say the pickleball lines are distracting."

Norton came to the freeholder meeting bandying statistics she gathered from private indoor clubs that showed over 1,000 people played pickleball in Bergen County in recent months. She said as baby boomers age out of tennis, they're turning to pickleball.

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"This is not a game. This is a sport," Norton said. "Just because it has a funny name doesn't mean that it isn't a sport."

The workout, she said, can be intense, with quick volleys back and forth, albeit on a much shorter court. On a recent frigid Friday, she gathered with about two dozen pickleballers for the regular Friday game at the Fair Lawn Racquet Club.

"I play for two hours and and I've gotten in my 10,000 steps for the day," she said, glancing at her Garmin watch, which kept the data. "I'd rather play a game and get my 10,000 steps in than do it all on a treadmill. That's boring."