Pickleball is like if you played ping-pong on the table itself. I realize I just described tennis but I feel like my description is actually quite good. It’s a speedier, more accessible, more team friendly and sociable version of tennis. It also annoys the hell out of people. For better or worse, pickleball is America’s fastest-growing sport—and, as a new study shows, a great way to wreck your eyeballs.
According to a study in JAMA Ophthalmology, eye injuries from pickleball are spiking harder than the pickleball that your soon-to-be ex-friend just spiked into your orbital socket. Researchers analyzed emergency room data and found a 405-per-year increase in pickleball-related eye injuries since 2021, topping out at an estimated 1,262 in 2024 alone.
The injuries are being caused by the two components that make up Pickleball: flying paddles and the pickleballs themselves.
The data, pulled from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, looked at injuries between 2005 and 2024. Out of an estimated 137,000 total pickleball injuries nationally, about 3,112 were eye-related, and all of those occurred post-2014, with 88 percent happening just in the past two years. The most common victims were players aged 50 and older whose reflexes are perhaps not as keen as they once were.
Some of the more common injuries sound pretty gnarly, too. People are getting their retinas detached and their eyesockets broken. Pickleball is even responsible for an uptick in something called hyphema, the medical term for when your eyeball starts bleeding internally.
The researchers say this is all happening because of the sudden flood of new, casual players who may lack the hand-eye coordination or physical stamina of a seasoned athlete who would be better equipped to fend off a ball being paddled at them. This would be fine if only people were wearing eye protection, which the researchers say people aren’t doing nearly as much as they should.
Pickleball has been around since the 1960s but it took a global pandemic making people go stir crazy for it to gain any traction before booming in popularity. Now that it’s at its apex, people are realizing that there actually is just a tiny bit of danger involved in the sport we all know as Big Ping Pong.
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