Utah Punches Above Its Weight on the Pickleball Court

(Originally published December 20, 2023)

Utah Tops Multiple Sites' Rankings

As part of their 2023 Annual Pickleball Report, coaching website Teach Me.To ranked U.S. cities by number of registered pickleball coaches. Coming in first and second place were San Diego, CA and New York City – no surprises considering their populations in the many-millions. But in third place, with only five fewer pickleball coaches than New York despite having 1/80th the number of people, was Orem, UT. Keep reading, and you’ll see plenty of cities with populations in the millions, but nothing close to Orem’s size until the seventh-place inclusion – none other than Orem’s next-door neighbor Provo.

The most surprising entry? That would be tiny Mapleton, UT, a town of 12,000 with more pickleball instructors (seven) than Houston (six), a city of 2.3 million.

This is no coincidence. Utah consistently punches above its weight when it comes to pickleball. With 3.3 million residents, the state accounts for almost exactly 1% of the U.S. population; yet Utah is home to 6% of pickleball coaches in the country with 85, and nearly 2% of the country’s pickleball courts with 754. 

Don’t want to take Teach Me.To’s word for it? Apple's Heart and Movement Study analyzed data from 200,000 Apple Watches, finding that Utah had the most pickleball players per capita of any state. Meanwhile, pickleball publication The Dink ranked Utah as the top state for the popular sport based on Google search data and the competition wasn’t close – Utahns searched for pickleball nearly twice as much as any other state.

Pickleball has Deep Roots in Utah

Utah was a hotbed for pickleball long before those rankings were published. For starters, the PPA Tour is based in Salt Lake City. The top of the PPA Tour standings are littered with Utahns as well. Callie Smith, who hails from Orem, is the No. 4 ranked player in women's doubles. Two spots behind her, Allyce Jones lives in Pleasant Grove, UT. And No. 8-ranked Meghan Dizon lives in Salt Lake City. Just outside the top ten, Etta Wright lives in American Fork, UT.

On the men's side, Utahns aren't quite as over-represented, although top pros Tyler Loong and Spencer Smith call the state home.

Last year, the state hosted two PPA Tour events – the Red Rock Open in St. George, and most importantly, the Utah Tournament of Champions in Brigham City. PPA also hosted its Mountain Futures event, for aspiring pros, in West Jordan, UT.

In collegiate pickleball, meanwhile, three of the top seven teams in the country hail from Utah – Utah Tech University, Utah Valley University and Utah State University – according to DUPR's GAMMA rankings.

So why is the Beehive State so much more conducive to pickleball than any other state? There are a few reasons.

Statewide Sports Culture Translates to the Pickleball Court

For starters, Utah is sports-obsessed. The state has seven colleges competing in the NCAA's Division I. Salt Lake City sustains two professional sports teams – the NBA's Utah Jazz and MLS's Real Salt Lake – despite its relatively small size as the 122nd most populous city in the U.S.

In an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune, Kristy Wolford, manager of PPA's Utah Tournament of Champions, said that the state is as sports-centric as any in the country.

“Utah is very sports-minded, we are grassroots growers innately,” Wolford told the Tribune. “I don’t know that you can point to any other state that has the depth of development that we have in Utah.”

As an amateur-friendly, up-and-coming sport, pickleball lends itself to that grassroots mindset.

Pickleball is Easy for Big Families to Play

Additionally, the state tends to be family-oriented, and pickleball is the rare sport that’s accessible across age ranges, allowing family members of all ages to play pickleball together.

On average, Utah has the highest number of kids-per-family of any state, with 2.32, making pickleball especially well-suited for the state.

Katy Luxem, who opened Big Dill Pickleball in Sandy, UT, said that Utahns’ tendency to have large families played a huge role in the sport’s rise, in an interview with based KSL News in Salt Lake City.

"There’s a lot of different ages here — people have a lot of kids,” Luxem, said. “They'll take their kids out, but then there's multigenerational grandparents here. It's something you can do as a big group or a big family.”

Family bonding is why Callie Smith first decided to take the pickleball court. In an interview with the Deseret News, the professional pickleball player said that she first found the sport when her grandfather-in-law asked her to join him for a game.

“My grandfather-in-law actually asked me to play a pickleball tournament with him and I didn’t want to play, but I can’t turn that down, so I played with him,” Smith said in 2020.

But Wait, There's More

There are a few other factors, of course. The state was well-ahead of the curve, according to Wolford, in building pickleball courts – although this may be an effect as much as a cause. Because of this, it already has countless well-established clubs and tournaments, and several of the state's public parks feature pickleball courts. The relatively dry, not-too-hot, not-too-cold weather in much of the state certainly doesn’t hurt either.

So on your next trip to Zion National Park or Bryce Canyon, in addition to camping and hiking, be sure to build in some time to hit the pickleball courts.