By Gregg Voss – Red Line Editorial
For most of his life, Alexander Jeffery didn’t think about pickleball all that much.
So how did he end up making “The Power of Pickleball,” a documentary about the history of the sport?
The birth of the film happened in Cabo, Mexico, on a family vacation a few years ago.
Jeffery was having breakfast with his mom and his aunt near some pickleball courts. His aunt floated the idea of making a documentary about the sport and apparently made a compelling case, because he thought about it for a few months.
As it turned out, he was a true believer in the sport — he just didn’t know it yet.
“I had a sense before I made the documentary that pickleball was a little silly,” he recalled. “I was a tennis player in high school, and then this curiosity took over, and I started thinking about what this documentary would be. I hadn’t seen anything done in this space.
“You have a chance to do something that tells you something about this cool sport that started in the U.S. The pickleball community was so open and accepting of outsiders.”
Jeffery said the key to the film is how the sport evolved into a community, and how people’s lives had been changed. Among the 10 to 12 hours of footage and 60 interviews from coast to coast was a trip to Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound, Washington, to the original court where pickleball was founded.
“It was surreal to be there,” he said. “We were on the court, hitting around. It was a special experience.”
Jennifer Lucore — who co-authored “History of Pickleball: More Than 50 Years of Fun!” with her mother — knew Barney McCallum, one of the sport’s three founders on Bainbridge Island in 1965.
McCallum died in 2019 at the ripe old age of 93, but his legacy of the sport he helped found marches on thanks to “The Power of Pickleball,” which features Lucore and many of its current luminaries.
“Alexander contacted me and heard my mom and I wrote the book,” Lucore said. “We had documented the history. I just kind of told him the story and the different pioneers I had interviewed over the years.”
Jeffery himself is now a big fan of pickleball, but it’s more than an interesting subject for him.
“I think the thing I enjoy most about playing the sport is that it tricks me into getting exercise,” he said. “Put me on a treadmill, and I’m miserable. It’s fun, a good workout and a good conversation sport. With my producer, we have some of our best conversations when we play pickleball.”
While Jeffery got to spend plenty of time having fun on pickleball courts making this documentary, it wasn’t an easy endeavor. There’s a lot of travel involved, not only to Bainbridge Island but Florida, New York City, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Diego and Arizona. He also had a team shooting in Chicago.
The most challenging part was the logistics and timing of being on site when a pickleball event was happening. But that was only part of it.
“The hardest thing about the documentary is you don’t know what movie you’re making until you make it,” he said. “With a narrative film, you have a script. The nature of the documentary is a surprise.
“We shot this in spurts. We planned a shoot for up to three to four days in a location. A tournament in Dallas or Naples, Florida, lots of all-day filming, some people coming to the Airbnb for interviews. Then we’d have weeks or months of figuring out the next shoot.”
All told, Jeffery and his team shot the documentary between April 2023 and April 2025 before its debut last summer. Roughly 400 people involved in the film came to the Fox Studio Lot in Los Angeles for the premiere.
The film includes everyone from pro players to tournament directors to several Pickleball Hall of Fame members, including Lucore, who has her take on why the sport has grown so substantially in recent years.
“It had momentum before COVID, but COVID brought it back to the roots,” she said. “In COVID, all the manufacturers sold out of portable nets and recreational paddles. People were looking for something to do. You had the professional athletes and movie stars who were like, ‘Hey, what’s this pickleball?’ And then it just quadrupled.”
Jeffery pointed to the generational aspect, which is brought out in the film.
“It started as a pretty young sport, and as the early adopters got older, they introduced it to the younger generation. That helped it spread as well.”
Now fully ingrained into the sport, Jeffery has contemplated making another pickleball film.
“Is there a narrative story that’s scripted?” he mused. “Also, is there a follow-up to ‘The Power of Pickleball’ surrounding the Olympics?
“Will it become an Olympic sport? I think it will happen.”
“The Power of Pickleball” is available to rent and purchase on Apple TV and Amazon and for free on Documentary+.
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Gregg Voss is a journalist based in the Chicago suburbs who has been writing sports for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. He is a freelance contributor to USA Pickleball on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.
