Meet the Canadian champion who knew pickleball was cool before Tom Brady and LeBron James

Catherine Parenteau, 28, is among the most decorated players in the short history of pickleball. She has 13 career titles and finished last year ranked No. 1 in singles.Saul Martinez/The Globe and Mail

There’s a look people get when they see somebody famous, a hero or a sports legend. The woman who approached had it – eyes wide, smile stuck on high, an equal mix of awe and excitement.

“Could I – is it okay – can I ask, a photo,” the woman stammered shyly.

The object of her reverence was smiling equally widely, dressed in a white tennis skirt and blue tank top that perfectly matched the cotton-ball clouds and azure Miami Beach sky, as well as the courts below foot.

“Of course,” said a young woman who may just be the best female pickleball player in the world.

It might seem odd to those who don’t follow the sport that there are actually pro pickleball players. And that they now are bona fide celebrities. But Catherine Parenteau gets this kind of attention a lot nowadays. She’d never heard of pickleball when, at 16, she left Montreal for Arkansas on a tennis scholarship.

The game of pickleball is relatively new, improvised by three Seattle-area men in Washington state in 1965, from a badminton court and ping-pong paddles. Though historically a hit with retirees, pickleball has risen in popularity more recently with younger people.

Now, Parenteau, 28, is among the most decorated players in the short history of the sport. She has 13 career titles and finished last year ranked No. 1 in singles. She’s travelling almost weekly to pickleball tournaments, juggling endorsement deals and figuring out a fundamental question she never thought she’d have to answer: How do you suddenly become a celebrity?

A few minutes after the fan approached Parenteau, the athlete took a position on the court’s middle line, just in back of a rectangle of space called “the kitchen” in pickleball, for some reason. It was midmorning on a Sunday under a sun as hot as an open-door oven, and Parenteau had agreed to offer a lesson to a first-time player.

Parenteau teaches pickleball often nowadays – it’s partly how she makes a full-time living out of the sport. But to someone who’s never played before? “No, that’s not typical,” she says with a laugh.

As I lined up across from her, Parenteau had me begin with small little hits, called dinks, that ideally drop just beyond the net. Then we moved to using the paddle to volley the ball back and forth without a bounce. The ball is like the one used in wiffleball, perforated, hard and hollow, and it makes a plastic-on-plastic sound when it strikes the paddles.

“Nice,” she says. It’s clear right off she’s a good teacher, patient and full of tips and encouragement. “Once you feel a little more comfortable, hit it harder, a little faster.” The goal, she explains, is to just barely clear the net, so that your opponent has no chance of unloading on a return.

Right away, my first time playing the game, we volley back and forth maybe 20 times before I flub the ball into the net. I start to wonder if I’m a pickleball phenom. But then I recall what Carla Anderson, the executive director of Pickleball Canada, told me by phone beforehand: “Pickleball is easy to learn, difficult to master.”

Move over, tennis players: Pickleball people are taking over the courts

The fact that it’s so easy to pick up is a big reason the sport has grown so much in recent years. Pickleball courts are a quarter the size of ones for tennis, and since players have to move far less than many sports, the game caught on among retirees. Snowbirds began taking it back to Canada, Anderson says, but it didn’t catch on big until the pandemic lockdown in 2020.

Often played in mixed doubles on outside courts, pickleball offered a combination of exercise and a social outing during a time when we were all otherwise stuck indoors. A survey commissioned by Pickleball Canada in January, 2020, estimated 350,000 people played the sport across Canada. When the organization conducted the same survey two years later, that number had nearly tripled, hitting a million. While once seen as a sport mostly for retirees, pickleball is now seeing the biggest growth in players 18 to 34 years old.

A former figure skater who served as the director of games for the Canadian Olympic Committee, Anderson, 58, hadn’t even heard of the sport until a friend told her how it had “saved her” by giving her and her husband something social and competitive to do during the lockdown. “In Canada,” Anderson says, “our goal is for pickleball to become a true national sport.”

Parenteau teaches pickleball often – it’s partly how she makes a full-time living out of the sport.Saul Martinez/The Globe and Mail

At the Canada National Championship tournament in Kingston in August, a thousand players showed up. In September the sport landed on national TV for the first time. Now it just needs more courts in Canada to meet the high demand and also better recognition, maybe some day as an Olympic sport.

Cara Arding’s father started a small online store in 2012 to sell paddles and other pickleball equipment. She admits she didn’t think much of it at the time. “None of us thought this was going to be a big thing until what he started doing in the first year with this super basic website,” she says.

Arding, 43, says it was the only place to buy pickleball equipment in the country, and soon “it exploded.” With experience in retail already, Arding joined her father in 2014, and as a first step, asked a lawyer to register the company name, Pickleball Depot. She got the paperwork back and it read: “Tickleball Depot.” She says, “Even my lawyer didn’t know what it was.”

“These past two years have been nuts for us in this sport,” Arding says. “There were a lot of years when I would get asked what I do, and I would get into a very drawn-out conversation about what the sport was. Now everybody knows what it is.”

It was nothing like that when Parenteau first started playing seven years ago. Like a lot of us, her first thought when someone proposed trying it was: What’s pickleball?

Growing up in the Montreal suburb of Repentigny, Parenteau had an obsession with sports. “It didn’t matter if it was winter or summer, I was always outdoors,” she says.

She started playing tennis at four or five years old. Her father, an accountant, encouraged her to tackle the sport the way he played hockey back in the day – every shot is a chance to power past an opponent. “I just really wanted to hit the ball as hard as I could every time, and I would be my worst enemy on courts because I would hit it long and into the net, just because I wanted to hit it harder,” Parenteau recalls.

All that power turned into a benefit when, at about 14 years old, Parenteau also began to develop a real skill at the sport. At 16, she headed to university in the United States on a tennis scholarship. At Michigan State, she met Athena Trouillot, who started off as her tennis partner but then also became her life partner, too. Parenteau played a game dominated by power shots, while Trouillot mastered lobs and drop shots. They live their lives that way too – Parenteau more of a risk-taker and Trouillot more careful and calculated.

In 2015, one of the coaches on her university team asked Parenteau if she wanted to play pickleball. She said: “I’ve never heard of the name pickleball. There’s no way I’m trying that. What is that?” But she did, and with her tennis background, she was good right away. Six months later, Parenteau competed in her first major tournament, the U.S. Open in 2016, where Parenteau won mixed doubles in the 5.0 bracket, just shy of the top tier. After college, Parenteau ended up in south Florida, teaching pickleball and tennis. When the Professional Pickleball Association started a pro tour in February, 2019, Parenteau signed on. Her contract with PPA forbids Parenteau and other players to compete in other leagues, such as Major League Pickleball, which recently earned headlines when NBA stars LeBron James, Kevin Love, and Draymond Green bought a team. This year, Parenteau has planned to compete in 22 tournaments and has multiple sponsors. The PPA says Parenteau has collected $179,577 in winnings as of September. Parenteau also supplements her winnings with clinics, where up to 24 players pay $200 each.

One of Parenteau’s former students is Isabelle Gauthier, a 68-year-old retired respiratory therapist in Montreal. Gauthier saw a picture of Parenteau in the newspaper one day with the Quebec Federation president and asked her pickleball club if they could invite her to coach them. Parenteau stopped by one morning and gave a lesson to 32 members of the Club de pickleball Rosemont. “We are very proud here in Quebec that Catherine is one of the best players in the world,” Gauthier says. After discovering there was no pickleball rulebook in French, Gauthier, who now works tirelessly as a referee, translated it. “So I’m pretty involved with officiating pickleball now,” she says.

After showing me how to correctly hit a dink shot and a cross-court shot, Parenteau moved on to the serve. We stood at opposite corners of the court, and Parenteau encouraged harder hits with more follow-through. “Use your shoulder,” she said. Trying some flattery, she added: “You know that big muscle up on top of your arm? Get that into your swing.”

Afterward we met by the net, and the fan, Elise Ivy, who had come by earlier in awe of Parenteau, asked if she could get a photo. Hearing that it was my first time playing, Ivy said, “Whoa, it’s like you’ve never played basketball and you’re playing against Michael Jordan.”

It’s true. Pro pickleball has been around for just seven years now, and Parenteau has become one of its top stars, typically ranked either first or in the top three in singles, doubles and mixed doubles. She’s one of only four players to have won a pickleball triple crown, meaning she won titles in singles, doubles and mixed doubles at the same tournament, doing so most recently at the 2022 North Carolina Invisalign Open.

After posing with Ivy, and then a group of players who appeared from somewhere to get into the picture, Parenteau said, yeah, she gets approached pretty often now on the pickleball courts. “It happens,” she said modestly, with a smile.