Putting pickleball on the plate Putting pickleball on the plate Putting pickleball on the plate

Say the word “pickleball” and you’ll attract a swarm of individuals, mild-mannered and otherwise, who have become rabid competitors in the sport whose inventors include former UW student Barney McCallum. The sport was started in 1965 by Joel Pritchard and Bill Bell on a backyard driveway on Bainbridge Island, and the late, great McCallum helped form the rules.

A whiz at marketing, McCallum joined with Pritchard and Bell to create Pickle Ball, Inc., the first company to manufacture pickleball paddles. In true Seattle startup fashion, the first paddles were made of plywood in McCallum’s home wood shop.

Pickleball has become one of the fastest-growing sports in the country with participation in 2025 reaching 24.3 million Americans, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. So it should not come as a surprise that the state of Washington now offers a specialty license plate honoring pickleball. (Then-Gov. Jay Inslee, ’73, declared pickleball the official sport of the Evergreen State in 2022 at the Bainbridge Island home where the sport was born.)

As the official state sport of Washington, it was only a matter of time before pickleball got its own vanity license plate.

Kate Van Gent, vice president of the Seattle Metro Pickleball Association, joined fellow pickleball aficionados in 2023 to ignite a movement to have their favorite sport featured on Washington license plates. (The Legislature must pass a law for a specialty license plate, pickleball or not.) While those efforts sputtered in 2023 and 2024, in 2025, the Legislature gave the green light, and pickleball became one of 13 new specialty plates authorized to take their place on automobiles in the Evergreen State.

These new specialty plates cost $157.25—roughly the cost of a decent pickleball paddle—but you can personalize your plates for a few dollars more.

The creation of pickleball license plates is just another feather in the cap of McCallum, who was born in Davenport, Washington, graduated from Davenport High School and then came west to study political science and business at the UW, according to the Pickleball Hall of Fame. (It says he “was just several credits shy of his degree” when he left school to go into business.) His page on the Pickleball Hall of Fame website describes McCallum as “the man behind the business … a successful inventor and entrepreneur in the envelope industry who applied his marketing prowess to pickleball. After starting to manufacture pickleball paddles in his home wood shop, he later employed workers at the Pacific Northwest Center, who taught and helped people with disabilities to learn trades. They made the first mass-produced Diller plywood paddles, the first paddles that were available for stores.”

Take a moment and raise your pickleball paddle in honor of Barney McCallum. Although he died Nov. 18, 2019, at the age of 93, his role in creating the monster that is pickleball still tickles us—especially everyone who is driving a car with a pickleball license plate.