Watch out, baseball: the country's legion of baby boomers seems to have a new favorite pastime.
As 9news.com, an NBC affiliate based out of Colorado, is reporting, the fastest-growing sport in the country is called pickleball, which is essentially a tennis-badminton-table-tennis hybrid. Furthermore, the game seems to have a niche audience among adults over age 50.
Jerry Steger, an ambassador for the U.S.A. Pickleball Association, says the game's accessible nature makes it particularly popular among the boomer crowd. "This is a sport that anybody can play," he said. "You don't have to be a great athlete to play pickleball."
Pickleball was invented in the summer of 1965 by Joel Pritchard, a future Washington state congressman from Washington state,
who named the game after his dog Pickles, The Washington Post reported in June. In 1976, Tennis Magazine called pickleball “America’s newest racket sport,” and the national association -- which now estimates that there are roughly 100,000 pickleball players in the U.S. soon followed in 1984.
Whether or not pickleball will catch on among younger players remains to be seen, but in recent months, there has been a greater push to introduce the sport into schools so a new generation can catch on.
Watch the pickleball report below: