History
Paddleball is actually two different sports, one-wall and four-wall, with two different origins.
Four-wall paddleball was invented by Earl Riskey at the University of Michigan in 1930. The school's tennis players often practiced their strokes on squash or handball courts when the weather was bad. They sometimes used the wooden paddles of paddle tennis instead of tennis rackets.
It occurred to Riskey, the university's director of intramural sports, that a game played with paddles on a handball court might be a good addition to the intramural program.
He adapted the rules of handball for the new sport, which he originally called "paddle tennis on the court." Within a short time, the name became paddleball.
As with many new racket sports, the ball was a problem for some time. A tennis ball was too heavy, while the sponge rubber ball then used in paddle tennis was too slow to make the game interesting. After some experimentation, Riskey solved the problem by soaking tennis balls in gasoline to remove the fuzzy coating, leaving a lighter core that still had considerable bounce.
Paddleball remained an intramural sport, confined to the University of Michigan, until World War II, when Army recruits were brought to the university for training. The U. S. Armed Forces Conditioning Committee added paddleball as one of its official sports. As a result, thousands of recruits learned the sport and many of them wanted to continue playing after the war. A number of YMCAs, community centers, and other facilities with handball courts adopted paddleball.
There was still a problem with the ball, though: Its dark color made it difficult to see. Riskey found a pink ball, essentially a colored tennis ball core, which was much more visible but also much livelier. Finally, the Pennsylvania Rubber Company, which manufactured the pink balls, agreed to make a new kind of ball specifically for four-wall paddleball. It was similar to the pink ball, but punctured to reduce its resilience, and the color was a highly visible, bright purple. The official paddleball is still made by Penn, and it's essentially the same except that it's black instead of purple.
The sport suffered from not having a central organizing body until 1965, when the National Paddleball Association (NPA) was founded, with Riskey as its first president.
An even younger sport, racquetball, had been winning many converts in the meantime. In 1967, the U. S. Handball Association and its founder-president, Bob Kendler, began promoting racquetball as well as handball. As a result, four-wall paddleball never caught on in a really big way, while racquetball experienced explosive growth.
Paddleball is still quite popular in Michigan, and there are a few other areas where the four-wall sport is played, generally from November into April.
One-Wall Paddleball
About the same time that Earl Riskey was inventing four-wall paddleball, handball players in New York were creating one-wall paddleball. One-wall handball is an outdoor sport. In cold weather, it's tough on the hands, so some players began using wooden paddles to avoid the pain.
The sport became popular as a winter alternative for handball players during the early 1950s. However, attempts to organize it haven't been particularly successful. The U. S. Paddleball Association was founded about 1960 but didn't last long. In the late 1960s, the American Paddleball Association (APA) was organized, only to be challenged by the Paddleball Players Association in 1974. Later, there was a One Wall Paddleball Association.
All three of those organizations eventually became inactive. The APA was reorganized in the 1990s, but it seems to be inactive again, judging by its website, which contains information from 1998.
One-wall paddleball is essentially handball played with a paddle. For many years, the standard ball was a handball, but that was replaced in the 1980s by a somewhat livelier green ball from Spalding.
