By Matthew Schwartz April 23, 2024   The company for which I write this weekly blog has never asked me to promote its products. Hudef Sport gives me complete autonomy. Its staff doesn’t know what my pieces are about when I send them in to be posted.  As someone who spent 40 years as a television news reporter (the last 20 years as an investigative reporter), I can tell you this type of independence and trust are rare. When Hudef offered me this job out of nowhere in late 2023, I didn’t want to work even part-time. I turned 70 last October and was happy playing pickleball and enjoyin ..read more

Rally Scoring or Traditional? By Matthew Schwartz April 16, 2024 (Bill Wolfe) Bill Wolfe is addicted to playing pickleball. The 70-year-old Asheville, North Carolina resident plays five or six days a week. He’ll happily play in 20-degree weather at eight o’clock in the morning. When necessary he’ll arrive early and use a blower to remove leaves on the court or use his homemade squeegee to push water off. I have seen this myself. Wolfe has been playing for over two years and is a 3.5 player. He is traditional in many ways but doesn’t favor traditional scoring. “Rally scoring speeds up the ..read more

By Matthew Schwartz. April 9, 2024                                                                              (John Kew Williams) Watching John Kew’s pickleball paddle reviews, you could get the feeling that the guy could go on Jeopardy and kick some serious butt. He regularly uses terms such  as “peel-ply technology,” “delamination,” and “medial stability.” He comes across as much professorial ..read more

By Matthew Schwartz April 1, 2024 Braydon Unsicker and his wife Malia had two kids and a third on the way. Unsicker had a good job as the global marketing manager for an insurance company, pulling down $125,000 a year plus benefits. While his wife was pregnant, the couple made a decision that even obsessed pickleballers might find crazier than a lob against an agile opponent on a windy day. Unsicker quit his job. His new fulltime gig? Reviewing pickleball paddles. “We'd been talking about it for a long time and it was a very calculated decision, so she was on board,” Unsicker, 31, told me via ..read more

By Matthew Schwartz March 12, 2024 The pain hits sometime after you get home from the pickleball courts. It’s usually a throbbing but sometimes searing pain you hoped would be cured by playing a little less, using a lighter paddle, applying ice, heat, creams, numbing sprays and popping Advil. But the pain in your elbow, forearm, wrist or hand just won’t go away for very long. One expert says the pain is preventable and the reason is simple: You are holding the paddle the wrong way. “Holding the pickleball handle correctly is done with tightly curled fingers that are opposing a tightly curled t ..read more

By Matthew Schwartz March 5, 2024 Maybe you can relate to my pickleball journey. I started playing in the fall of 2021 by taking three group lessons at a community center near Tucson, AZ. There were two dozen players in each hour-long lesson. I loved everything about the sport immediately: the strategy, working with a doubles partner, the sound the ball made when hitting the paddle, laughing after bad shots, net crawlers or lucky hits and celebrating well-played points. By the time my first lesson was over, I was hooked. When I got home I went online and bought a paddle, court shoes and ..read more

By Matthew Schwartz February 26, 2024 He speaks in a Tennessee twang. He’s part country, part hippie, part paddle nerd. More than anything, he’s unique. In the constantly expanding business of pickleball paddle reviewers, there is no one like Ronald Lynn Hopkins. If his legal name doesn’t ring a cowbell, his YouTube name might: Farmer Lanky. Hopkins does some reviews for Farmer Lanky Pickleball outside, surrounded by cows and chickens. This while sitting on his 266 acre beef cattle farm in eastern Tennessee near Morristown, at the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. Occasionally one of the ..read more

By Matthew Schwartz February 20, 2024 If you’re like me, you’re consumed by pickleball. When you’re not playing, you’re thinking about it. You talk about it so much that you drive your significant other crazy, especially if he or she doesn’t play or isn’t as obsessed as you are (I speak from experience on this one). Your phone contacts has so many pickleball friends that when you go to that great pickleball court in the sky, if a non-player down here sees your contacts list they’ll think most of your friends had the same strange last name: “Pickleball.” When you’re not playing or talking ..read more

By Matthew Schwartz February 15, 2024 You know the sound, and if you’re like me, you love it. That sound the ball makes when the paddle hits it. It’s a sound that 52-year-old Billy Mauldin has never heard. Mauldin is a hell of a pickleball player. He just happens to be deaf. “We can feel the ball off the paddle and know immediately if we hit the sweet spot or not,” Mauldin said in an email. “Not hearing it isn’t a hindrance at all. It doesn’t matter. I can’t speak for everyone, but you can’t miss something if you never had it your whole life. We can feel it, which is even better. Remember, if ..read more

By Matthew Schwartz February 5, 2024 Chris Olson was on the phone, getting nailed by the verbal equivalent of overhead smashes. On the other end was a paddle company executive, furious about Olson’s criticism of his latest creation. “One company who we’ll leave nameless basically scolded me for 30 minutes on a phone call and told me I was clueless and had no idea what I was talking about,” Olson told me via email. Olson’s fans disagree. He’s their go-to reviewer when deciding which paddle to buy. His YouTube channel, Pickleball Studio, has 20,000 subscribers. His Instagram account has 13,000 f ..read more