About

Service Pickleball is a movement.

Skylar Hinrichs fell in love with the sport of pickleball in 2016. Having grown up playing tennis, he and his dad decided to pick up a $20 wooden pickleball set one Saturday to hit the ball around. 

Some competitive pickleballers noticed them playing and they must have looked confused because the competitive players invited them onto their courts and started teaching them the rules and strategy.

The rest is history.

As he started playing more regularly, Skylar started noticing that outdoor balls tended to crack pretty often, deeming them unplayable. When a ball cracks, most players throw it in the trash can, unless there happens to be a recycling bin at the courts (and let's face it, most plastic that's thrown into standard recycling bins isn't actually recycled anyway).

That’s just part of the game.

pickleball with a crack linking two of the holes. Broken pickleballs are no longer playable, so pickleball players tend to throw them in the garbage can.

But recently, we have begun seeing our beloved sport sweeping the nation, with NBA stars, billionaire entrepreneurs, and social media influencers all buying into the pro pickleball scene (and playing the game themselves).

So far, this boom has resulted in 4.8 million pickleball players nationwide, up from 2.8 million in 2016. 

Of course, we all love seeing this incredible sport become the new obsession of the country, but one thought can’t get out of Skylar’s head:

With that many pickleball players, how many broken balls are we throwing in the trash each year?

Answer: A really big number. In short, too many.

So Skylar started Service Pickleball to do something about it.

He leaned on local Lincoln, Nebraska pickleball friends and all-around legendary humans Dawson Adams and Mike Evnen to help brainstorm some details of the effort, then jumped right in.

Service Pickleball is collecting broken pickleballs, with the goal of reducing the amount of pickleballs in the landfill. As for what we're doing with the broken pickleballs, we're weighing several different options, each of which must be friendly to this beautiful planet we're on. 

Our mission is to repurpose 100,000 pickleballs. With your help, we can get there.

Grab an organic cotton shirt from our store today to support the movement!