Retired Waltham detective Tom Bryant is one of the lucky ones. Yes, his rapid-onset pickleball obsession has led to knee problems, and at times an inability to climb stairs without grasping the handrail, and he may have torn his meniscus, and he couldn’t walk for a while because of plantar fasciitis, and he was told by an orthopedic doctor that all that game-related lunging likely brought on patellafemoral syndrome.
But you should see the other players. “My sister-in-law actually shattered her forearm while going after a lob a couple of years ago,” Bryant, 65, began. “I’ve known people who have torn their achilles tendon, pulled their hamstrings and calves, and gotten black eyes. I know a girl who cut her nose pretty good when she swung at a ball and on the follow-through hit herself in the face.”
Wait – is this pickleball, or the NFL?
By this point in pickleball’s meteoric rise the injuries probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. But the game famously got popular in retirement communities, and its reputation for requiring little exertion is hard to shake. So despite ominous headlines — “Just how dangerous is America’s new favorite sport?” one asked — it has managed to retain its “who-could-possibly-hurt themselves-doing-this” image.
“I never expected pickleball would wipe me out,” said Pam Corkery, a 911 dispatcher from Kingston.
Corkery, 53, is a runner and a gym fiend, but less than a year after she started playing pickleball she found herself at a surgical consult for a full-thickness meniscus tear.
An analysis of US emergency room visits published in The Journal of Emergency Medicine in 2019 estimated that there were 19,000 pickleball injuries between 2001 and 2017. The vast majority — 90 percent — occurred in players 50 or older, and the annual number of injuries picked up dramatically as the sport got ever more popular.
In 2017, the last year of the study, there were an estimated 6,072 injuries. In 2022, the injuries hit an estimated 17,545, the study’s author, Mathias B. Forrester.told the Globe.
Perhaps no one is better positioned to see what sends people to the ER than Eric Kevorkian, a freelance pickleball coach in the Boston area who works with a lot of beginners.
Many don’t know where they should be on the court, he said, and that often leads to frantic running backwards to try and get to a ball.
“They’ll either catch their heel on the court, or with the toe of their other shoe, and go right down,” he said. “They reach backwards to try and catch themselves and that’s where the broken wrists happen, and the dislocated shoulders and the busted tailbones.
“The worst one,” he added, “is when they crack their head on the court. Boom!”
The most striking part is almost not the volume of injuries, but the determination of the injured athletes to return to play, never mind the pain.
“That’s how deep the hook of this drug called pickleball gets into you,” said Bryant, the retired detective, who travels with an industrial-size squeegee to clear wet courts, and has changed most of his passwords so they have a pickleball association.
When I asked Elizabeth Matzkin, a sports medicine surgeon at Mass General Brigham, if her pickleball patients were more impatient than other athletes to get back to their sport she said they were similar, but with a significant asterisk.
“What’s interesting is that most of my athletes that are itching to get back are high school and college athletes,” she said.
One of the best things about pickleball is how quickly you can start having fun. The court’s modest size makes the game accessible to people who get tired running for the ball in tennis. But there’s still a lot of lunging, twisting, turning, pivoting, hitting, slicing, and reaching overhead to deliver one of the game’s most aggressive shots, aka the “smash.”
And because people often go from never playing to suddenly building their entire lives around the sport, overuse injuries including rotator cuff tears, tennis/pickleball elbow, and achilles tendonitis are common, said Dr. Sarav Shah, a surgeon at New England Baptist Hospital who specializes in sports medicine.
When the first patient came to him with a pickleball injury, probably around 2018, he said, he wasn’t even sure what the game was. “I thought it was something related to billiards.”
Now? He and the other Baptist surgeons operate on as many as three pickleball warriors a week at the height of the season.
If you find yourself suddenly surrounded by pickleballers — as I did when I went into the 2,000-member strong New England Pickleball Facebook group — and you ask, ‘hey, has anyone gotten hurt?’ brace yourself because you will not be able to keep up with the injury report.
A private chef from Connecticut named James Roth e-mailed to say that a month after he and his wife, who are both in their late 40′s, started playing, she fractured her wrist and the day after that he ruptured his achilles tendon. “We would both end up having surgery back to back,” he wrote.
“We had about 6 incidences where people were taken to the hospital by ambulance due to horrific falls,” Nancy Lally, a pickleball coach in Connecticut reported. (She’s gotten the injuries under control, she added, by insisting on proper footwear and both dynamic and stretch warmups.)
And so on.
No one likes to get hurt, but many pickleballers are so besotted that they see even an injury as a blessing in disguise.
When Erin McHugh, 70, of South Dartmouth, was new to the game she broke her left — playing — hand and was told she’d be in a cast for 10 weeks.
Almost immediately she decided she’d use the time to write a book (”Pickleball is life: The Complete Guide to Feeding Your Obsession”), and a few days after that she decided enough was enough and taught herself to play righty.
“It was fascinating brain-wise,” she said. “I wish everyone could experience it.”
Beth Teitell can be reached at beth.teitell@globe.com. Follow her @bethteitell.