Published on Show Me Mizzou Dec. 19, 2024
Story by Joe Walljasper, BJ ’92
The mass appeal of pickleball, the reason the rapid-fire pops of paddles meeting perforated plastic balls have become the soundtrack of parks and recreation centers nationwide, lies in its accessibility. In just a few minutes, it’s easy to grasp the rules, hit a few warmup shots and play well enough to have fun with partners of almost any age.
That’s what hooked Dylan Frazier on the sport as a 14-year-old boy on a family vacation in Florida.
“It was super easy to learn, and you could just go on the court and play games,” says Frazier, now a senior at Mizzou. “And everyone was excited to have a younger kid in the gym playing. That was definitely not very common back in 2016. I was kind of a unicorn.”
At the time, pickleball was pigeonholed as the last stop on a human’s athletic journey — basically bingo with a net. Frazier’s peers didn’t understand why an athletic teenager who excelled in baseball, basketball and football would devote so much time to pickleball.
“There’s always been that sense about pickleball, that it’s silly or, especially back when I started, that it’s an old person’s sport,” Frazier says.
Not anymore. An estimated 13.6 million Americans played in 2023 — almost five times more than when Frazier first picked up a paddle. You can watch live professional matches on multiple cable sports networks and streaming services. As the sport has exploded in popularity, Frazier has grown right along with it.
Now he’s a contract player in the Professional Pickleball Association, where he ranks in the top five in both singles and doubles. He also plays for the Arizona Drive team in Major League Pickleball. He has endorsement deals with Selkirk equipment and Chicken N Pickle restaurants. The sport has become so lucrative for him that he’s finishing his business administration degree as a part-time online student while he travels to 30 tournaments a year and splits time between homes in Missouri and Florida.
The roots of Frazier’s success story were planted decades ago at Mizzou, where his mom, Cindy Frazier, BS Ed ’91, discovered pickleball. She played at the student rec center every chance she got with a small group of true believers. But after graduating, she couldn’t find a game in central Missouri. Fast-forward to the mid-2010s, and the sport was starting to get some traction, especially in Florida, with its large population of retirees.
On a trip to visit Cindy’s father in Punta Gorda, the family hopped on their bikes, rode to a park and played. Then they rode to a rec center and played some more. They did it again the next day, and the next.
“We’d plan our whole day around it,” Cindy says. “Dylan immediately loved it.”
When the Fraziers returned to their hometown of Ashland, they discovered a Columbia-based group, the Show-Me Pickleball Club, that played at an elementary school gym and local park. Dylan and Cindy started playing tournaments together. At the time, the youngest age group usually was 19-and-over, so Cindy would have to call the directors ahead of time and ask them to make an exception for her 14-year-old son.
Frazier said he loved to practice pickleball — something he couldn’t say for the other sports he played — and all those hours on the court helped him consistently deliver delicate dinks and powerful passing shots. Unlike a lot of elite players, he doesn’t have a tennis background. He thinks that’s been an advantage because he didn’t have to unlearn a longer swing. With just a flick of his wrist, he can deliver his signature “speed-up” shot in which he takes his opponent’s soft shot off the bounce and whips a topspin winner.
“If you saw a silhouette of someone speeding up, you would know it was me based on the motion of speeding up with my wrist,” Frazier says.
After graduating high school in 2020, Frazier played in his first pro tournament. It was held in the same Florida city — Punta Gorda — where he first played pickleball. To make it a full-circle moment, he even partnered with Cindy in mixed doubles.
At the time, there was minimal prize money, so Frazier treated pickleball as a part-time job while he studied full-time at Mizzou. As the pro leagues matured and Frazier established himself as a top-10 player, pickleball became his full-time job. He expects the game will grow even more popular as it catches on with people of all ages outside the United States.
Turns out, Frazier wasn’t crazy for devoting himself to the so-called silly sport enjoyed by senior citizens. He was just ahead of his time.
“He loved the game and saw the potential in it,” Cindy Frazier says. “Now, he’s surrounded by people his own age playing all over the place.”
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