Rota said now is the right time to make pickleball a high school sport for several reasons.
He said pickleball is becoming more popular with teenagers in the same way he saw golf grow during his 30 years as a high school coach in that sport. He said golf got bigger with high school students after research — and the 2015 film “Concussion” starring Will Smith — was released showing the negative effects that multiple concussions can have on football players.
“You’re seeing a lot of these younger kids turning to pickleball knowing, OK, the probability of a concussion is a lot lower than what you’re going to see with soccer and football,” Rota said.
Colleges are starting pickleball teams, meaning there could be more opportunities for students to continue playing at the next level. At the same time, teenagers in Massachusetts were attracted to the possibility of competing in a co-ed sport like pickleball, with male and female players sharing the same court.
“It’s huge in pickleball when you look at just the mixed doubles matches, and then you have the boys and the girls all on the same team playing doubles,” Rota said. “And we got really good feedback from the coaches that played it. (They) said it was actually a big draw, where a lot of the kids are like, ‘Oh, this will be a lot of fun’ because it was a co-ed sport.”
Rota said he started teaching pickleball to his students in 1998 as a PE teacher at Westborough High School in Westborough, Massachusetts. Twenty-five years later, the first state champion in high school pickleball was crowned following a five-team state tournament in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, in the middle of the state.
“We’re getting a lot of tennis players, so these are the kids who are used to just swinging away at a ball. And now they’re slowly learning some of the other aspects of the game with dinking and drop shots and things like that,” Rota said. “It’s been pretty cool, and the big thing we’re seeing now is the courts are being taken over by the young kids.”