How Did Pickleball Get Its Name? The Pickle Boat, the Dog and the Evidence
By José Cabrera · September 25, 2026 · 7 min read
Pickleball was named by Joan Pritchard in 1965, after the "pickle boat" in rowing: the crew thrown together from leftover rowers. The game was a mix of leftover pieces from other sports, so the name fit. The popular story about the family dog, Pickles, is backwards: the dog was born around 1968 and was named after the game.
Pickleball has the least serious name in sports, and the story behind it is more interesting than the name suggests. It involves a congressman, a rowing term, a family dog who arrived three years too late to take credit, and a newspaper interview that was apparently a joke.
Here is the short version, then the evidence, then the other words in the game that people ask about just as often.
Who invented pickleball?
Pickleball was invented in the summer of 1965 on Bainbridge Island, Washington, a ferry ride from Seattle.
The three men credited with it are Joel Pritchard, who was then a state legislator and later became a U.S. congressman and lieutenant governor of Washington, Bill Bell, a local businessman, and Barney McCallum, who would go on to build the first dedicated paddles and help write the early rules.
The origin is famously improvised. Pritchard and Bell came home from golf to find their families bored. There was an old badminton court on the property but no complete set of rackets, so they grabbed ping-pong paddles and a perforated plastic ball, lowered the net, and started making rules up as they went. McCallum joined within days, and the three of them turned it into an actual game with actual rules over that summer.
So where does the name come from?
Within days of the first games, Joan Pritchard, Joel's wife, called it "pickle ball."
Her explanation, repeated consistently by the Pritchard family for decades, came from rowing. In crew races, the pickle boat is the boat filled with leftover rowers: the oarsmen who were not picked for the other crews and got thrown together at the end. It was a term Joan knew from rowing, and the new game reminded her of exactly that. It was assembled from leftover pieces of other sports: a badminton court, ping-pong paddles, a wiffle-style ball and a net at tennis-ish height.
A game made of spare parts, named after a boat made of spare parts. It is a better origin than the name gets credit for.
What about the dog named Pickles?
This is the story most people have heard, and it is the one that is wrong.
The version goes like this: the Pritchards had a cocker spaniel named Pickles who kept chasing the ball and running off with it, so the game was named after the dog.
It is a charming story, and it spread because it is easier to remember than a rowing term. It also has a problem with the calendar.
The evidence that settles it
The dog came later. According to the Pritchard family, Pickles was born around 1968, roughly three years after the game had been named. The dog was named after the game, not the game after the dog. If the dog did not exist in 1965, it could not have been chasing balls on that badminton court.
The dog story came from an interview joke. According to the family, Joel Pritchard later explained that the dog version started in a newspaper interview where it was simply a funnier answer than a rowing term. The family has held to the pickle boat account ever since.
Not everyone from the early days agreed. Barney McCallum, one of the three co-inventors, remembered it differently and told the dog version in later years, and a few neighbors backed him. That disagreement is the whole reason the question still gets asked.
The official history sides with the boat. USA Pickleball, the sport's governing body in the United States, tells the pickle boat story as the origin, and notes the dog came along afterward.
The fair summary: the name came from the pickle boat, the dog got its name from the game, and one co-inventor's memory is the reason the other story never fully went away.
Why the silly name stuck
Early on, the name was a bit of a joke that nobody expected to matter. The game was a backyard thing on one island.
Then it spread through the Pacific Northwest, then to retirement communities in warmer states, and by the time anyone might have wanted a more serious name, "pickleball" was on court signs, club names and tournament brackets. By 2022, Washington State had made it the official state sport.
The name is also part of why the sport grew. It is hard to be intimidated by something called pickleball. It sounds like something you can try on a Saturday without embarrassing yourself, which is more or less exactly what it is.
How did the kitchen get its name?
This is the second most common naming question, and the honest answer is that nobody wrote it down.
The official term is the non-volley zone: the 7-foot area on each side of the net where you are not allowed to volley. "Kitchen" is the nickname everybody actually uses.
The most common explanation borrows from shuffleboard, where the scoring area you want to avoid, the one that costs you points, is also called the kitchen. Another version points to the old saying about staying out of the kitchen if you cannot take the heat. Neither one has a documented source from the early days of the game, so treat both as plausible rather than proven.
What matters more than the name is what the zone does, and that is covered properly in what the kitchen is and why it decides most games.
Where does "dink" come from?
A dink is a soft shot that drops into the opponent's kitchen, hit so it cannot be attacked. The word existed long before pickleball as slang for a small, soft or unimportant hit, and it was already used for soft, placed shots in other net sports before pickleball players adopted it.
In pickleball it became the defining shot of the whole game, which is a nice promotion for a word that used to mean "not much." We explain what "dink responsibly" means separately, since it turned into the sport's unofficial motto.
Other pickleball names that get asked about
Pickleball is one word. Early references split it as "pickle ball," but the governing bodies and virtually every club now write it as one word.
A "pickle" is also a score. Winning a game 11-0 is called "pickling" the other team in a lot of rec groups. It is slang, not a rule.
"Erne" is named after a person. The jump shot around the kitchen corner is named after Erne Perry, the player known for using it. It is one of the few shots in any sport named after a rec-level innovator.
For the rest of the vocabulary you will hear in your first month, the rules guide in plain English covers the words that actually decide points.
The short version
Joan Pritchard named pickleball in 1965 after the rowing pickle boat, because the game was made of leftover parts from other sports. The dog, Pickles, arrived around 1968 and was named after the game. The dog story spread because it is funnier, and one co-inventor told it, but the timeline does not support it.
If anyone at the courts insists it was the dog, you now have the dates. Whether you use them is between you and your doubles partner.
And if you are the kind of player who now knows the origin story of the sport's name, you are probably also the kind who reorganized the week around court time. That collection has the shirts for it, including a few t-shirts about exactly this sort of trivia.
Common questions
- Who named pickleball?
- Joan Pritchard, wife of co-inventor Joel Pritchard, named the game in 1965, within days of it being invented on Bainbridge Island, Washington.
- Was pickleball named after a dog?
- No. The Pritchard family dog, Pickles, arrived around 1968, three years after the game was named. The dog was named after the game, not the other way around.
- What is a pickle boat?
- In rowing, the pickle boat is the crew made up of leftover rowers who were not picked for the other boats. Joan Pritchard said the game reminded her of it because it was assembled from pieces of other sports.
- Who invented pickleball?
- Joel Pritchard, Bill Bell and Barney McCallum invented pickleball in the summer of 1965 on Bainbridge Island, Washington, using ping-pong paddles, a perforated plastic ball and a badminton court.
- Why is the kitchen called the kitchen in pickleball?
- Nobody documented it, but the most common explanation borrows from shuffleboard, where the scoring zone you want to avoid is called the kitchen. The official name is the non-volley zone.
The Obsessed
Six paddles is a normal number of paddles.
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