Fun and easy to play - sport of pickleball a smashing hit in Malaysia

But with new courts opening 'almost every week', some flag risk of a bubble forming.

- Hazlin Hassan

It is a Sunday morning, and I step onto the pickleball court for the first time. The racket feels a tad heavier than that for badminton, but lighter than a tennis racket - enough to feel like a solid weight in my hand.

The perforated ball is light and bounces with a satisfying spring when it hits the ground. The court is smaller than a tennis court, so I am not sprinting all over the place to stay in the game.

Pickleball, as I quickly discovered, is fun and surprisingly addictive. It is a mix of tennis, badminton and table tennis.

After awkwardly playing for a few weeks, I decided to get serious and sign up for lessons - not bad for a self-proclaimed couch potato. Turns out there is a technique to swinging the racket and hitting the ball, but the basics are easy to grasp, and the learning curve is not too daunting.

"It's fast enough to be exciting but easy to pick up and play," former professional tennis player-turned-pickleball coach Alina Rashad told me. "You get to move, have fun and connect with others without it feeling like hard exercise."

This might explain why the sport, which was invented in 1965 in the United States, has exploded in popularity across the globe, including in Asian countries such as Malaysia and Singapore.

According to a March 2023 report by the Association of Pickleball Professionals (which has changed its name to the Association of Pickleball Players) in the US, 48.3 million adult Americans - or nearly 19 per cent of the adult population at the time - played pickleball at least once in the past 12 months.

In Malaysia, the number of pickleball courts has grown from just two in 2019, when the sport was introduced, to nearly 500 across the country, according to Malaysia Pickleball Association founder and president Farrell Choo.