First National Pickleball Tournament at Sun City Festival
by Clay Latimer
It has been 14 years, but Jim Werner can still picture himself on that hectic November morning in 2009, checking and updating his lengthy to-do list before the inaugural USA Pickleball National Championships. Have referees and line judges received their final briefings? Are 700 goodie bags ready to go? Will back up golf courts be available in a pinch to shuttle players across the grounds? As Werner plowed through last-minute details, a final wave of players was heading west down Bell Road and onto Sun Valley Parkway, making their way past the closest neighboring subdivision and the sign that read, "No services next 38 miles,” until they found themselves in the middle of a barren stretch of the Sonoran Desert - home of Sun City Festival (SCF) and, for a week, America’s best pickleball players.
That’s right. The USA Pickleball National Championships - the world’s largest pickleball tournament and the sport's premier American event - debuted at Sun City Festival. As unlikely as the scene seems now, it made sense then. Pickleball was still an obscure game in 2009, the sport of grandparents and graying RVers. SCF was largely unknown too, a remote Del Webb community built for the first wave of retiring baby boomers. Together, they produced a smash hit on their first try. Over the next week, nearly 400 players from 26 states and Canada competed in 1,800 matches on Sage’s eight courts and the adjacent tennis facility, including half a dozen future Hall of Famers who would spark the national pickleball explosion in the coming decade. Making it all possible were 120 SCF volunteers, led by Werner, President Ken Anderson, and other pickleball club officers, working dawn to dusk to ensure that the first national tournament wouldn’t be the last. The result? A breakthrough moment in the evolution of a young sport and a new retirement community. It didn’t end there. USA Pickleball chose SCF to host its next five national championships, confirming the success of the community’s 2009 coming-out party. “This tournament exceeded expectations,” said Fran Myer, an original USAPA board member and Pickleball Hall of Fame member. “It was fun, joyful, exciting, happy. Pickleball hadn’t reached a stage of explosive growth until after the first national tournament. People came in and went, ‘Wow, this is a thing. And then it grew from there. That was the legacy of this first tournament.”
Of course, pickleball today bears little resemblance to the 2009 version. Dueling professional tours are crisscrossing the country. CBS, ESPN and Fox Sports have brokered TV deals. Major retailers are pouring in tons of money. Two billionaire tycoons are battling for control of the game's future. On the ground level, participation surged 85.7 percent in 2022 and 158.6 percent over three years, making it the nation’s fastest-growing sport in that span, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. “This sport is a rocket ship taking off,” said Dee Davison, ex-president of the SCF Pickleball Club and a national pickleball consultant. SCF, meanwhile, remains a small retirement community in the middle of the desert, still awaiting the arrival of its first supermarket nearly 20 years after the first house went up. Memories of the first tournament grow dimmer by the year. Newer residents know little or nothing about it. This is why the SCF Pickleball Club hopes to install a commemorative plaque at the Sage Courts, a memento not only to the inaugural national tournament but also to a group of hardworking residents who made it happen. “It was all about the volunteers. They made it all happen, “said Werner, a three-time SCF Pickleball Club president. “They eagerly stepped up to the plate year after year. We put up sign-up sheets, and they took over from there. SCF has great reason to be proud of our part of pickleball history and we would like a historical plague on site to commemorate this fact. It was an amazing show of community loyalty and support. “
Pickleball was developed in 1965 by a Washington congressman and a couple of friends who converted an unused badminton court and through trial and error developed rules and equipment. For thirty years, it remained a local passion, limited to the Pacific Northwest until snowbirds brought the game to the Sun Belt - snowbirds like Earl Hill, who helped turn Surprise into a national pickleball hub through his work at Happy Trails, the RV park on the western edge of Surprise. In 2001 Hill almost single-handedly made pickleball part of the Arizona Senior Games, attracting a field of 100 players to Happy Trails. It was the largest pickleball tournament ever played to that point. Over the next few years, the event grew to nearly 300 players. In 2005 Hill and other Washington snowbirds formed USA Pickleball, a Surprise-based governing body that established a national membership program, rules book, and eventually, the inaugural national tournament at Sun City Festival. “Happy Trails is the real fountainhead of pickleball’s growth. As soon as it got down to Happy Trails, it spread quickly,”’ according to the book, History of Pickleball, co-authored by Jennifer Lucore, a medal winner at the 2009 Sage tournament. That Surprise became a pickleball haven would’ve seemed, well, surprising in 1990, when the small, rural, isolated town counted fewer than 1,300 residents. In the next decade, though, a population boom transformed Surprise into a landscape of subdivisions, box stores, and thoroughfares. In 1998 alone, Surprise’s population grew by 32%, then climbed to 30,848 in 2000, a staggering 333% growth rate in the decade. (It stood at 150,000 in 2020). But the boom came to a sudden stop on the western edge of town, where Bell Road merged into Sun Valley Parkway, the four-lane divided highway that stretched for nearly 30 miles around the northern and western flanks of the White Tank Mountains. Investors spent $82 million in 1987 to build the highway, hoping to create a 48,000-acre community of 300,000 residents. Instead, a real estate crash crushed their plans, and critics mockingly renamed Sun Valley Parkway “The Road to Nowhere.” For nearly two decades, the land remained a barren desert, devoid of homes, businesses, and people. The only noise came from the rustling of the wind or the roar of fighter jets on training flights from Luke Air Force Base. Occasionally a car appeared on the horizon before being swallowed up by endless sky, scrub, and rock.
Change was coming, however. With 18 brightly colored hot-air balloons as a backdrop, Sun City Festival held a grand opening party for prospective buyers in 2006. Al Gastellu couldn’t make it that day. He and his wife bought a house in SCF unseen, then packed their bags and left L.A. for a new life. What they found rattled them. “When the wife and I hit Sun Valley Parkway we looked from side to side and saw nothing but desert and said, ‘Oh my God!’ “Then we looked at each other and said, ‘What the hell did we get into.’ “There were only about 100 homes. Everything else was dirt. There was no rec center. There was no restaurant. There were no pickleball courts. There was nothing but dirt. That was the beginning of Sun City Festival in 2006.” Gastellu soon discovered that when you move to SCF, you don't just move into a house. You move into a community. To his delight, he found that neighbors looked out for one another, chatted in the street, waved to one another on their walks - and then came together on the pickleball courts. “The people I met in pickleball became like family. It was more a family than a sport,” he said.
Walt Minnick, a longtime resident, knows the feeling. “We weren’t an established community like Sun City Grand or Sun City West, where people had lived for years,” he said. “Everyone was new here. The majority of us came from all parts of the country and knew nothing about each other. There were no cliques. So pickleball brought people together. I got to know people because of it - in fact, it was the foundation of the friends I have here. Then before I knew it, people were heading over to the Sage Center after we had finished playing to have coffee. That became a ritual. And that became more important to me than playing pickleball.”
Dee Davison’s passion for pickleball also started on Sage’s courts, the source of memories she refuses to let fade. “We had so much fun in those early days,” she said. “Later, we started what we called ‘nostalgia days.’ Everybody would meet up at the courts and we’d put our paddles up like everybody used to do. Then we’d just circulate with whoever on those eight courts, laughing and having a great time. Like the old days.” So, it wasn’t surprising that Gastellu, Minnick, Davison, and other SCF pickleball pioneers eagerly volunteered for the National Championships. It certainly didn’t surprise Werner, ex-head of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau, who picked SCF as a retirement home because of its rural, small-town setting. It reminded him of a farming community and, sure enough, he says, SCF came together for the national tournament with enthusiasm and vigor reminiscent of a pioneer barn-raising. But it almost didn’t happen. The original plan was to stage the tournament on Surprise’s proposed new courts, which were supposed to open by 2009. However, the Great Recession delayed the project, forcing USA Pickleball to find another site. It didn’t take long, “Sun City Festival had enough courts. It was that simple,” Myer said. “We sat down with Del Webb officials and said: "You’ll get 400 eyes on this community. People who may be interested in buying one of your properties, because of an amenity like pickleball." And then we told them, "The courts are across from the sales office. It'll be a slam dunk.”
So, it was settled. SCF would host the 2009 national championships. That’s when the real work started. Crews cleaned the light standards and cut and shaped bushes adjoining the courts. They installed entry gates and sidewalks on both sides of the court to facilitate foot traffic. They arranged housing for RV owners unable to park their vehicles at SCF because of space limitations. No detail was too small to consider. Volunteers were assigned to track daily temperatures to know how many bags of ice would be needed, stock 8-ounce cups at water fountains, and reserve a parking spot for fire department vehicles. “You could depend on every person,” Werner said. “Everybody felt part of it. Even those who didn’t participate in pickleball.” When the big day finally arrived, nearly 800 players - men, women, and some teens - streamed into SCF. “There was a mini-invasion of cars,” Werner said. Following the American and Canadian national anthems, two 75-and-over doubles teams kicked off the action on Court One. An eager group of SCF players jumped in soon afterward. “We wanted to kick ass,” Gastellu said. “We banged, hit it hard and ran to the nets,” Werner said. So did players from The Villages in Florida. But Happy Trails players threw everybody a curve with a new odd-looking tactic: the dink. There were a lot of four-letter words coming from the Villages players,” Myer said. “They had a lot of hotshot players that came and thought they were going to win everything. “I saw one of the guys from the Villages standing over on the side, literally taking notes. He realized the soft game was key to winning. He promised he would come back better.”
By today’s standards, the tournament was a bare-bones affair, lacking the fans, corporate sponsors, certified independent referees, and slick sheen now. Yet the future was falling into place at the Sage courts. One entrant went on to create pickleball’s first retail website, another designed the first initial lightweight composite and graphite paddles, and another authored a book on the history of the game. A fourth participant devised the software now used in most events. But the tedious work of day-to-day operations was left to volunteers, many of whom worked long, odd hours. “Your setup starts at about 6:30 in the morning, and your tear-down begins about an hour after play gets done. And the play doesn't get done until late,” Davison said. There were some predictable snafus, of course. The parking lots at Sage were overrun, forcing many players to use the golf course lot, which didn’t sit well with golfers. Tennis players were also upset their courts had been confiscated. Worse, a rainstorm wiped out temporary boundary markings on the tennis courts, making them unplayable. “We had to work hard to put that back in,” Werner said. But those were minor glitches on the way to the championship matches, the marquee moment in the first national tournament. On the final day, hundreds of fans lined the fences in lawn chairs to watch the action. As it turned out, SCF and Arizona Traditions/Happy Trails players walked away with a bagful of medals, reflecting Arizona’s new-found prominence.
Today the game is no longer dependent on retirement communities, Sunbelt cities, or the Pacific Northwest - for that matter. It’s gone national, a major sport for pros and amateurs of all ages alike. Perhaps no organized sport since baseball, football, and basketball match pickleball's seduction of so wide a swath of the population so quickly. So, it’s hard to believe pickleball didn’t even exist until a summer day in 1965 when Barney MaCallum and two friends on Bainbridge Island created a game to entertain their bored children. MacCallum witnessed this evolution firsthand when he attended the 2014 National Championships. Sitting courtside at the Sage courts, the 91-year-old retired handyman oohed and aahed with other onlookers. “He was giddy with excitement. It was overpowering. He was so pleased to see where pickleball had gone since the 1960s. “He said that it was one of the best days of his life,” according to the book, History of Pickleball. It was a remarkable moment - a moment worth preserving, like many from those years, which is why many at SCF would like to see a commemorative plaque installed here. “We should have a plaque here,” Davison said. “I’d also like to have a plaque at the Pickleball Hall of Fame." Pickleball was in its infancy then, so this was important.
That’s right. The USA Pickleball National Championships - the world’s largest pickleball tournament and the sport's premier American event - debuted at Sun City Festival. As unlikely as the scene seems now, it made sense then. Pickleball was still an obscure game in 2009, the sport of grandparents and graying RVers. SCF was largely unknown too, a remote Del Webb community built for the first wave of retiring baby boomers. Together, they produced a smash hit on their first try. Over the next week, nearly 400 players from 26 states and Canada competed in 1,800 matches on Sage’s eight courts and the adjacent tennis facility, including half a dozen future Hall of Famers who would spark the national pickleball explosion in the coming decade. Making it all possible were 120 SCF volunteers, led by Werner, President Ken Anderson, and other pickleball club officers, working dawn to dusk to ensure that the first national tournament wouldn’t be the last. The result? A breakthrough moment in the evolution of a young sport and a new retirement community. It didn’t end there. USA Pickleball chose SCF to host its next five national championships, confirming the success of the community’s 2009 coming-out party. “This tournament exceeded expectations,” said Fran Myer, an original USAPA board member and Pickleball Hall of Fame member. “It was fun, joyful, exciting, happy. Pickleball hadn’t reached a stage of explosive growth until after the first national tournament. People came in and went, ‘Wow, this is a thing. And then it grew from there. That was the legacy of this first tournament.”
Of course, pickleball today bears little resemblance to the 2009 version. Dueling professional tours are crisscrossing the country. CBS, ESPN and Fox Sports have brokered TV deals. Major retailers are pouring in tons of money. Two billionaire tycoons are battling for control of the game's future. On the ground level, participation surged 85.7 percent in 2022 and 158.6 percent over three years, making it the nation’s fastest-growing sport in that span, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. “This sport is a rocket ship taking off,” said Dee Davison, ex-president of the SCF Pickleball Club and a national pickleball consultant. SCF, meanwhile, remains a small retirement community in the middle of the desert, still awaiting the arrival of its first supermarket nearly 20 years after the first house went up. Memories of the first tournament grow dimmer by the year. Newer residents know little or nothing about it. This is why the SCF Pickleball Club hopes to install a commemorative plaque at the Sage Courts, a memento not only to the inaugural national tournament but also to a group of hardworking residents who made it happen. “It was all about the volunteers. They made it all happen, “said Werner, a three-time SCF Pickleball Club president. “They eagerly stepped up to the plate year after year. We put up sign-up sheets, and they took over from there. SCF has great reason to be proud of our part of pickleball history and we would like a historical plague on site to commemorate this fact. It was an amazing show of community loyalty and support. “
Pickleball was developed in 1965 by a Washington congressman and a couple of friends who converted an unused badminton court and through trial and error developed rules and equipment. For thirty years, it remained a local passion, limited to the Pacific Northwest until snowbirds brought the game to the Sun Belt - snowbirds like Earl Hill, who helped turn Surprise into a national pickleball hub through his work at Happy Trails, the RV park on the western edge of Surprise. In 2001 Hill almost single-handedly made pickleball part of the Arizona Senior Games, attracting a field of 100 players to Happy Trails. It was the largest pickleball tournament ever played to that point. Over the next few years, the event grew to nearly 300 players. In 2005 Hill and other Washington snowbirds formed USA Pickleball, a Surprise-based governing body that established a national membership program, rules book, and eventually, the inaugural national tournament at Sun City Festival. “Happy Trails is the real fountainhead of pickleball’s growth. As soon as it got down to Happy Trails, it spread quickly,”’ according to the book, History of Pickleball, co-authored by Jennifer Lucore, a medal winner at the 2009 Sage tournament. That Surprise became a pickleball haven would’ve seemed, well, surprising in 1990, when the small, rural, isolated town counted fewer than 1,300 residents. In the next decade, though, a population boom transformed Surprise into a landscape of subdivisions, box stores, and thoroughfares. In 1998 alone, Surprise’s population grew by 32%, then climbed to 30,848 in 2000, a staggering 333% growth rate in the decade. (It stood at 150,000 in 2020). But the boom came to a sudden stop on the western edge of town, where Bell Road merged into Sun Valley Parkway, the four-lane divided highway that stretched for nearly 30 miles around the northern and western flanks of the White Tank Mountains. Investors spent $82 million in 1987 to build the highway, hoping to create a 48,000-acre community of 300,000 residents. Instead, a real estate crash crushed their plans, and critics mockingly renamed Sun Valley Parkway “The Road to Nowhere.” For nearly two decades, the land remained a barren desert, devoid of homes, businesses, and people. The only noise came from the rustling of the wind or the roar of fighter jets on training flights from Luke Air Force Base. Occasionally a car appeared on the horizon before being swallowed up by endless sky, scrub, and rock.
Change was coming, however. With 18 brightly colored hot-air balloons as a backdrop, Sun City Festival held a grand opening party for prospective buyers in 2006. Al Gastellu couldn’t make it that day. He and his wife bought a house in SCF unseen, then packed their bags and left L.A. for a new life. What they found rattled them. “When the wife and I hit Sun Valley Parkway we looked from side to side and saw nothing but desert and said, ‘Oh my God!’ “Then we looked at each other and said, ‘What the hell did we get into.’ “There were only about 100 homes. Everything else was dirt. There was no rec center. There was no restaurant. There were no pickleball courts. There was nothing but dirt. That was the beginning of Sun City Festival in 2006.” Gastellu soon discovered that when you move to SCF, you don't just move into a house. You move into a community. To his delight, he found that neighbors looked out for one another, chatted in the street, waved to one another on their walks - and then came together on the pickleball courts. “The people I met in pickleball became like family. It was more a family than a sport,” he said.
Walt Minnick, a longtime resident, knows the feeling. “We weren’t an established community like Sun City Grand or Sun City West, where people had lived for years,” he said. “Everyone was new here. The majority of us came from all parts of the country and knew nothing about each other. There were no cliques. So pickleball brought people together. I got to know people because of it - in fact, it was the foundation of the friends I have here. Then before I knew it, people were heading over to the Sage Center after we had finished playing to have coffee. That became a ritual. And that became more important to me than playing pickleball.”
Dee Davison’s passion for pickleball also started on Sage’s courts, the source of memories she refuses to let fade. “We had so much fun in those early days,” she said. “Later, we started what we called ‘nostalgia days.’ Everybody would meet up at the courts and we’d put our paddles up like everybody used to do. Then we’d just circulate with whoever on those eight courts, laughing and having a great time. Like the old days.” So, it wasn’t surprising that Gastellu, Minnick, Davison, and other SCF pickleball pioneers eagerly volunteered for the National Championships. It certainly didn’t surprise Werner, ex-head of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau, who picked SCF as a retirement home because of its rural, small-town setting. It reminded him of a farming community and, sure enough, he says, SCF came together for the national tournament with enthusiasm and vigor reminiscent of a pioneer barn-raising. But it almost didn’t happen. The original plan was to stage the tournament on Surprise’s proposed new courts, which were supposed to open by 2009. However, the Great Recession delayed the project, forcing USA Pickleball to find another site. It didn’t take long, “Sun City Festival had enough courts. It was that simple,” Myer said. “We sat down with Del Webb officials and said: "You’ll get 400 eyes on this community. People who may be interested in buying one of your properties, because of an amenity like pickleball." And then we told them, "The courts are across from the sales office. It'll be a slam dunk.”
So, it was settled. SCF would host the 2009 national championships. That’s when the real work started. Crews cleaned the light standards and cut and shaped bushes adjoining the courts. They installed entry gates and sidewalks on both sides of the court to facilitate foot traffic. They arranged housing for RV owners unable to park their vehicles at SCF because of space limitations. No detail was too small to consider. Volunteers were assigned to track daily temperatures to know how many bags of ice would be needed, stock 8-ounce cups at water fountains, and reserve a parking spot for fire department vehicles. “You could depend on every person,” Werner said. “Everybody felt part of it. Even those who didn’t participate in pickleball.” When the big day finally arrived, nearly 800 players - men, women, and some teens - streamed into SCF. “There was a mini-invasion of cars,” Werner said. Following the American and Canadian national anthems, two 75-and-over doubles teams kicked off the action on Court One. An eager group of SCF players jumped in soon afterward. “We wanted to kick ass,” Gastellu said. “We banged, hit it hard and ran to the nets,” Werner said. So did players from The Villages in Florida. But Happy Trails players threw everybody a curve with a new odd-looking tactic: the dink. There were a lot of four-letter words coming from the Villages players,” Myer said. “They had a lot of hotshot players that came and thought they were going to win everything. “I saw one of the guys from the Villages standing over on the side, literally taking notes. He realized the soft game was key to winning. He promised he would come back better.”
By today’s standards, the tournament was a bare-bones affair, lacking the fans, corporate sponsors, certified independent referees, and slick sheen now. Yet the future was falling into place at the Sage courts. One entrant went on to create pickleball’s first retail website, another designed the first initial lightweight composite and graphite paddles, and another authored a book on the history of the game. A fourth participant devised the software now used in most events. But the tedious work of day-to-day operations was left to volunteers, many of whom worked long, odd hours. “Your setup starts at about 6:30 in the morning, and your tear-down begins about an hour after play gets done. And the play doesn't get done until late,” Davison said. There were some predictable snafus, of course. The parking lots at Sage were overrun, forcing many players to use the golf course lot, which didn’t sit well with golfers. Tennis players were also upset their courts had been confiscated. Worse, a rainstorm wiped out temporary boundary markings on the tennis courts, making them unplayable. “We had to work hard to put that back in,” Werner said. But those were minor glitches on the way to the championship matches, the marquee moment in the first national tournament. On the final day, hundreds of fans lined the fences in lawn chairs to watch the action. As it turned out, SCF and Arizona Traditions/Happy Trails players walked away with a bagful of medals, reflecting Arizona’s new-found prominence.
Today the game is no longer dependent on retirement communities, Sunbelt cities, or the Pacific Northwest - for that matter. It’s gone national, a major sport for pros and amateurs of all ages alike. Perhaps no organized sport since baseball, football, and basketball match pickleball's seduction of so wide a swath of the population so quickly. So, it’s hard to believe pickleball didn’t even exist until a summer day in 1965 when Barney MaCallum and two friends on Bainbridge Island created a game to entertain their bored children. MacCallum witnessed this evolution firsthand when he attended the 2014 National Championships. Sitting courtside at the Sage courts, the 91-year-old retired handyman oohed and aahed with other onlookers. “He was giddy with excitement. It was overpowering. He was so pleased to see where pickleball had gone since the 1960s. “He said that it was one of the best days of his life,” according to the book, History of Pickleball. It was a remarkable moment - a moment worth preserving, like many from those years, which is why many at SCF would like to see a commemorative plaque installed here. “We should have a plaque here,” Davison said. “I’d also like to have a plaque at the Pickleball Hall of Fame." Pickleball was in its infancy then, so this was important.