About the Curator

Some people don't understand.

They see pickleball as theft—a patchwork sport assembled from nobler games, unworthy of serious attention, certainly unworthy of an institution. They tolerate this ballsy position with the barely-concealed disdain of an aristocrat forced to work in trade.

I say this with 25.67 years of racquet sports expertise behind me: Balderdash.

I spent twenty-four years teaching tennis. I hold a Professional Tennis Management degree. I understand the beauty of a perfectly struck one-handed backhand, the geometry of serve placement, the poetry of a rally extended to its breaking point. Pun intended. Tennis is magnificent, and Picklesworth's devotion to it is not misplaced.

But eleven years ago, I discovered something else.

Pickleball didn't steal from tennis, badminton, and table tennis. It synthesized them. It took the strategic depth of tennis, the soft-game finesse of badminton, the hand-speed demands of table tennis, and created something gloriously accessible. Something that lets a seventy-year-old grandmother and her twelve-year-old grandson compete on the same court with genuine stakes. Something that builds community faster than any sport I've witnessed in something and a half decades of instruction.

This is not a lesser game. This is evolution.

And evolution deserves documentation.

Hall of Pickleball exists because I believe recreational sports culture matters. Not ironically. Not as a joke. The designs in our galleries—the Dinkosaurs with their prehistoric absurdity, the Bump Ugly PB collection's cyberpunk rebellion, the Ridinkulous Exhibition's committed nonsense, the Heritage Wing's acknowledgment of the sports that made this possible—these are cultural documents. They capture a moment when millions of people discovered that competition doesn't require suffering, that community can form around a plastic ball with holes in it, that joy is a legitimate athletic outcome.

Yes, I apply museum-quality curation standards to t-shirts featuring sentient pickles. Yes, I write institutional prose about perforated spheres. Yes, I treat this ridiculous sport with a level of seriousness it arguably hasn't earned.

That's the point.

If Andy Warhol could make soup cans matter, if Marcel Duchamp could place a urinal in a gallery and call it art, if the Museum of Ice Cream can exist as an institution worthy of ticket sales and cultural coverage—then pickleball deserves someone taking it exactly as seriously as it deserves.

I operate from Delray Beach, Florida. These are my people. They show up in the morning heat and the afternoon humidity. They argue about scoring rules. They celebrate dinks. They chest-bump after winning rallies and immediately apologize with a sincere "sorry not sorry."

They are why this institution exists.

Picklesworth will never understand. He sees the derivative and misses the innovation. He hears the plastic ball and misses the laughter. He notices the smaller court and misses the larger community.

But you're here. You clicked past his disdain. You wanted to know why someone would build a cultural institution around a paddle sport invented in 1965 on Bainbridge Island by people who couldn't find a shuttlecock.

Now you know.

The galleries await your inspection. The gift shop operates without shame. The cultural documents are prepared for acquisition.

Welcome to the Hall.

I'm delighted you've arrived.

—The Curator
Richard Hall
Founder, Hall of Pickleball
Years of Racquet Sports Instruction
Zero Regrets