Dale Diamond doesn’t need pickleball to stay busy. At 84, he still works five days a week as a parts and service driver at Isringhausen Imports and remains an accomplished bowler. Weekends, however, are reserved for the game he fell in love with several years ago.
“Most of my contemporaries play pickleball every morning, but I’m at work,” said Diamond, an Iowa native who owned and operated the last Shakey’s Pizza franchise in Springfield. “I’m a weekend warrior now, but I’ll probably play more at some point. I love it.”
Diamond is one of 600-plus dues-paying members of the Springfield Pickleball Club, which was founded in 2012 by Jack Handy, 73.
“When I started the club, we had 28 members,” Handy said. “It’s just grown so much.”
There are an estimated 5 million Americans who play pickleball, a sport that combines the aesthetics of tennis on a much smaller court, with a lightweight ball that requires a paddle to swat, not a fully strung racquet.
Pickleball dates to 1965, when three Washington state fathers improvised a game for their bored children that combined ping-pong paddles, a lowered badminton net and some used whiffleballs.
The sport barely gained any notice, however, until the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s when more pent-up people – especially older people who needed the exercise – discovered pickleball as a safe activity that got them out of the house. You didn’t need to be Serena Williams or Roger Federer to get good at the game, and it wasn’t as exhaustive as tennis. Thus, the pickleball boom was born.
“That’s when I really started playing, during COVID,” Diamond said. “I’d heard about it from a friend I played racquetball with for a long time. He kept telling me how much fun it was, but I thought it was an old man’s game. I wasn’t so old yet, but then COVID happened and my knees got a little worse and then I gave it a try. And the first thing I remember thinking was how much good exercise I was getting. I didn’t think you moved around as much as you really do.”
The stereotype that pickleball is a sport for old, retired people is shattered on a daily basis, Handy says. He regularly teaches the game to kids under 18, and more people in their 20s and 30s are active in the league.
In Chatham, there are now 16 outside courts for pickleball players. At Iles Park in Springfield, a similar number of courts are available, and more are in the works, Handy said. Sherman Village Park has eight outdoor courts under construction.
“It’s not rocket science, it’s just a fun game that older people can play and more and more younger people are coming to realize is a game that doesn’t require all the rigors of tennis,” Handy said. “Anybody who plays a game of pickleball, despite any preconceived notions they might have had, comes away feeling that it was a fun experience. That’s been my experience, anyway.”
So says Jan Gardner, the secretary of the SPL. At 83, she plays most every day and says she spends a good portion of her days signing up new players.
“Come out and play,” she tells a reporter. “It’s good exercise and you’ll make some new friends.”
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This article appears in August 20-26, 2026.
