Pickleball, Sport of the Future Injury?

Then there’s the kitchen. Its official name is the non-volley zone, a two-meter strip in front of the net on either side. (An official pickleball field is 44 feet long and 20 feet wide.) Players are not allowed to set foot in the kitchen. So if a ball flies there, a player can lean forward to return a “dink,” a cunning shot that skips the net and lands in the opponent’s kitchen.

Mr. Sariban knows the risks firsthand. A former junior college basketball player, he was competing in a small professional pickleball tournament in January 2018 — a perfect day in Southern California, a $200 gift certificate for the winner — when he found himself on the edge of the kitchen.

“I’m reaching for a routine rolling volley that I’ve hit a million times,” he said. “I hit the ball and I feel my back snap and in my head I’m like, ‘Uh-oh.'” Within minutes he was down on the pitch. “I could barely walk,” he said, adding, “I was in the car and my wife had to swing my legs around” and into the passenger compartment. He had two herniated discs. “I thought I would never play sports again in my life,” he said.

Since then, Mr. Sariban has become conscientious about stretching, and he teaches players at his clinics to do the same, which involves warming up without a paddle before beginning to hit. “It’s amazing to me how nobody’s warming up,” he said. “I’ve taught in many states and it’s the same everywhere. Pickleball players are notorious for not warming up.”

Mr. Sariban and other pickleball experts note that the risk of injury is no higher than in other sports, but that risk perceptions are lower. And don’t let the risks deter you from attending, say die-hards like Debbie Landa, a tech entrepreneur in her early 50s in San Francisco. Like many others, Ms. Landa has taken up pickleball during the pandemic; She now plays five days a week. Among her mentors, she said, was an 82-year-old woman in Palm Springs “who motivated me every day.”

Ms. Landa has had various pickleball ailments — pickleball elbows, sore hips — but these come with the sport, she said. The real pain, she said, is the nasty players getting “too aggressive and angry.”