After a Successful Debut, High School Pickleball in Massachusetts is Already Thinking Bigger
Greg Rota, a USA Pickleball Ambassador, has been a driving force behind the effort.
By Joanne C. Gerstner
Red Line Editorial
Greg Rota started campaigning to get pickleball made a high school sport in Massachusetts even before he retired two years ago as a longtime physical education teacher and athletic director.
Rota’s wife jokes that it has become one of his passions. When he’s not competing in pickleball tournaments across the country, he’s spending a good portion of his retirement working to get pickleball sanctioned as a varsity sport in Massachusetts.
Rota, who serves as a USA Pickleball Ambassador, is starting to see the results of all his hard work.
Eleven high schools, mostly in the central and western part of Massachusetts, competed this past fall during the state’s inaugural high school pickleball season. It ran from late August until the state championship tournament wrapped up in mid-October — before the temperature dropped and there was frost on the ground.
“I’ve been really pushing this for about three years now, and it’s taken off,” said Rota, 60, who started playing pickleball in 1987 after one of his professors at the University of New Hampshire introduced him to the sport.
Rota said officials borrowed a template from high school tennis for the first pickleball season. Competitions included five matches between teams — singles and doubles matches for both male and female players as well as a mixed doubles match. The team that won at least three of the five matches won the overall match.
Beverly, Massachusetts, was the only school district from the Boston area that fielded pickleball teams in the fall. That could soon change, though.
“We had 11 teams statewide that jumped in the first year, and we’ve already received somewhere between probably 10 or 11 more emails for (schools) who want in next year,” Rota said. “So, it’s already exploding after the one season.”
Rota said a rule change to make pickleball a high school sport was twice proposed to the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association, which oversees high school athletics in the state. It twice narrowly failed to get enough votes to pass.
Pickleball was run as a club sport during its inaugural season. Rota said approximately two dozen high schools have already expressed interest in co-sponsoring another proposal that will go before the MIAA next summer for pickleball to become a sanctioned sport.
“They told us to do similar to what rugby did,” Rota said, which meant beginning as a club sport before being sanctioned.
“And here’s the funny thing,” he added. “There are only seven teams in rugby statewide, and we’re already like, ‘Oh my God, we’re going to be triple that by the time June rolls around.’”
Rota said now is the right time to make pickleball a high school sport for several reasons.
He said pickleball is becoming more popular with teenagers in the same way he saw golf grow during his 30 years as a high school coach in that sport. He said golf got bigger with high school students after research — and the 2015 film “Concussion” starring Will Smith — was released showing the negative effects that multiple concussions can have on football players.
“You’re seeing a lot of these younger kids turning to pickleball knowing, OK, the probability of a concussion is a lot lower than what you’re going to see with soccer and football,” Rota said.
Colleges are starting pickleball teams, meaning there could be more opportunities for students to continue playing at the next level. At the same time, teenagers in Massachusetts were attracted to the possibility of competing in a co-ed sport like pickleball, with male and female players sharing the same court.
“It’s huge in pickleball when you look at just the mixed doubles matches, and then you have the boys and the girls all on the same team playing doubles,” Rota said. “And we got really good feedback from the coaches that played it. (They) said it was actually a big draw, where a lot of the kids are like, ‘Oh, this will be a lot of fun’ because it was a co-ed sport.”
Rota said he started teaching pickleball to his students in 1998 as a PE teacher at Westborough High School in Westborough, Massachusetts. Twenty-five years later, the first state champion in high school pickleball was crowned following a five-team state tournament in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, in the middle of the state.
“We’re getting a lot of tennis players, so these are the kids who are used to just swinging away at a ball. And now they’re slowly learning some of the other aspects of the game with dinking and drop shots and things like that,” Rota said. “It’s been pretty cool, and the big thing we’re seeing now is the courts are being taken over by the young kids.”
Alex Abrams has written about Olympic and Paralympic sports for more than 15 years, including as a reporter for major newspapers in Florida, Arkansas and Oklahoma. He is a freelance contributor to USA Pickleball on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc. Red Line Editorial, Inc.
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