Racquetball Was the Pickleball of 1980. Here’s How It Died.

In 2019, the Sports & Fitness Industry Association counted about 3.3 million Americans playing pickleball. The same report series had racquetball at roughly 3.5 million.

Six years ago, racquetball had more players than pickleball. Racquetball. The sport your uncle played in a sweatband at the Y, before the Y turned the court into a spin studio.

Today pickleball is at 24.3 million and racquetball is a rounding error that lost 9 percent of its core players in a single year. Everyone sees that gap as proof we won. Here’s another reading: racquetball is what a racquet-sport boom looks like forty years later, and it’s the only case study we’ve got for how pickleball ends.

The part that should sound very familiar

Racquetball was invented in 1950 by Joe Sobek at the Greenwich, Connecticut YMCA. A tennis and squash pro who couldn’t find squash partners at his level, he sketched a short strung racquet and started a hybrid game in the handball courts. He called it “paddle rackets” and never made a dime. Fifteen years later, three bored dads on Bainbridge Island did roughly the same thing with ping pong paddles and a wiffle ball.

Then the 1970s happened. Racquetball rode the first American fitness boom, the one with jogging and Nautilus machines. Three million players by 1974. By 1980, 12 million, and racquetball was being billed, in exactly these words, as America’s fastest-growing sport. At the peak there were more than 30,000 courts in the country.

It had a superstar, too. Marty Hogan turned pro in 1975, became the sport’s first millionaire, and from 1978 to 1981 reached the final of 62 consecutive tournaments and won 56 of them. Racquetball had a Ben Johns, and you have never heard of him.

It even had the Olympic flirtation: “developing sport” status from the IOC, a spot in the Pan American Games. You know how that movie ends.

Fastest-growing sport, an unbeatable champion, a facility gold rush, an Olympic campaign. That’s pickleball in 2026, and it’s racquetball in 1980.

Then it lost three-quarters of its players

By the early 1990s the numbers were sliding. By 2017 participation had cratered to about 3.5 million, where it has sat ever since. Courts went from 30,000-plus to about 14,000 and still drop every year, because a racquetball court is 800 square feet of climate-controlled real estate serving two people at a time, and a gym chain can put forty treadmills in that footprint.

Here’s the scary stat. Most recently, racquetball’s casual participation went up 4 percent. Its core participation, the people who play eight or more times a year, dropped almost 9 percent. That’s what a dying sport looks like from the inside: plenty of people willing to try it once, and a shrinking group who love it enough to come back.

Pickleball didn’t kill racquetball. It moved into courts that were already empty. The sport had four structural problems, and pickleball has inherited two of them.

Problem 1: The equipment made the game too fast for normal people

Early racquetball was a game you could pick up in an afternoon. Then the manufacturers got involved. Frames got stiffer, strings got livelier, and in 1997 the governing body legalized 22-inch oversized frames with roughly 50 percent more hitting area than the originals. Rallies got shorter. Serves became unreturnable. A 1-on-1 game in a concrete box got genuinely frightening for beginners, and the sport’s own historians now list “equipment made the game faster” as a leading cause of death. The pros loved it. The 3.0s stopped showing up.

Pickleball has one thing racquetball never had: the kitchen. The non-volley zone is a speed limit written into the court itself, and it forces a soft game to exist no matter how much money the paddle companies spend. But the kitchen only works if the equipment doesn’t overpower it. The moment a Gen-4 foam core lets you attack a knee-high dink with pace from the line, the kitchen stops being a governor and becomes a formality. That’s the fight happening in certification labs right now, and it’s not a nerd fight. It’s about whether this sport is still playable by a 58-year-old in 2036.

Problem 2: The sport lived in somebody else’s building

Racquetball needed four walls and a ceiling, and only private clubs owned those. When aerobics rooms and machine floors started earning more per square foot than a court in the 1980s, the clubs did what businesses do. They tore out the courts. There was no such thing as a public racquetball court, so the sport had nowhere to go.

This is where pickleball is fundamentally, gloriously different, and the reason is paint.

One aerial-imagery study found around 8,000 tennis courts converted to pickleball and more than 26,000 outdoor pickleball courts built in seven years. Those courts belong to parks departments, school districts, and HOAs. They’re outdoors, they’re free, and they cost a few thousand dollars in striping, not a few hundred thousand in construction. No gym chain can decide one Tuesday they’d earn more as a smoothie bar. That’s the moat, and racquetball never had one.

But look at what we’ve been doing for four years. We wrote about the indoor club shakeout last month: 44,000-square-foot warehouses, fifteen-year leases, prepaid memberships evaporating in bankruptcies. That’s pickleball voluntarily rebuilding racquetball’s dependency on private real estate, one dead Bed Bath & Beyond at a time. A sports complex in Nebraska just went all-pickleball and dropped its youth basketball and volleyball programs. It’s the exact “which sport pays more per square foot” logic that killed racquetball, and that logic doesn’t care which sport it currently favors.

The outdoor public court is what makes pickleball racquetball-proof. Everything indoors is borrowed time.

Problem 3: Nobody could watch it (this one we dodged)

Racquetball on TV was a small blue ball moving at 150 miles per hour inside a white box. Networks tried and gave up. Pickleball’s ball is big, yellow, slow, and fits in one camera frame. Our media risk is different, a pro product that’s become a hands-battle blur non-players can’t parse, but at least they can see the ball.

Problem 4: It was a workout, not a place

Racquetball was one-on-one, in a closed room, with a door. You booked a court, played your buddy, showered, left. When the fitness crowd moved on to Jazzercise and StairMasters, the people who were only there to sweat left, and there was nothing underneath.

Open play is the sneakiest advantage pickleball has. Sixteen people on four courts with a paddle rack rotation is not a workout. It’s a social network with exercise attached. Nobody ever drove to the Y to “see who’s at racquetball.” People do that with pickleball every day, and social networks are sticky in a way fitness trends are not. The paddle rack politics you curse every Tuesday are what keep this sport alive after the curve flattens.

And the curve is flattening

SFIA’s 2026 report puts pickleball at 22.8 percent year-over-year growth, down from 45 percent the year before, and uses the word “stabilization.” That’s not a crisis, it’s what the top of every curve looks like. Racquetball looked stable in 1982 too.

The number to watch isn’t total participation. It’s core. Pickleball has 7.5 million core players and that group grew 20 percent last year. The day the core stops growing while casual keeps climbing, we’ve become racquetball, and it’ll take a decade for anybody to admit it.

What you can actually do about it

Racquetball didn’t die at the governing-body level. It died one club at a time, one intimidated beginner at a time.

Stop running off the 3.0s. Racquetball collapsed because the game got too fast and too mean for casual players. Every time your open play quietly sorts itself so the new person never gets a game, you are the 22-inch racquet.

Go to the parks board meeting. Public outdoor courts are the entire moat. The people fighting for 12-court public complexes in Boulder and Boise are doing more for this sport’s lifespan than any pro tour.

Treat your indoor club like a rental car, not a home. Don’t prepay a year, and don’t let it become the only place you play.

Vote with your paddle. If the certified, slightly-less-hot option exists, buy that one. The kitchen line is doing its best. Help it.

Play with the racquetball guy. Every club has one. Great hands, terrible wrist habits, digs balls out of corners you’d given up on. He watched his sport disappear from underneath him. Ask him how it felt. Then go find a beginner who needs a fourth.

One last thing. US Squash’s CEO once put the whole cycle in a sentence: racquetball did to handball exactly what pickleball is doing to racquetball. The sport that replaces pickleball already exists. It was invented in a backyard in Acapulco in 1969, it’s called padel, and it’s coming.

Might as well make ours worth keeping.