Since only a few years after pickleball was invented, there have been two different stories about why pickleball is called pickleball. In a recent interview with TikTok channel @pickleballbrian, the son of one of the inventors of the sport, Frank Pritchard, finally cleared up how pickleball got its name.
“My mother came up with the name because it was a crew term: the pickle boat,” Pritchard said. “The pickle boat evidently was just all the leftover rowers, from the A boat and the B boat. She thought: ‘Well this game is a bunch of different games thrown together. Let's call it pickleball.’ We didn't get the dog for another three years.”
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The two stories of how pickleball got its name are 1. The pickle boat theory, and 2. That the Pritchards’ dog was named Pickles. The second story came from a magazine article where Joel Pritchard said that they named pickleball after their dog — but he later admitted he only said that because he didn’t think the original story was interesting enough.
USA Pickleball also did an in-depth investigation about the controversy, and found that Pickles the dog was in fact born three years after the invention of pickleball in 1965.