Newfield boasts successful father-son pickleball duo

Pickleball is taking the country by storm, becoming the fastest-growing sport nationwide for the past few years. The pickleball craze has captivated the local community, particularly in Newfield for one father-son duo.

Adam and Andrew Brechner have been playing pickleball together for five years. Like many current players, Adam has a background in tennis and racquetball and had an initial aversion to the sport, calling it “tiny tennis with a wiffle ball.” But once he found people playing it at the Jersey Shore, he instantly fell in love with the sport, a love that would carry over to his son Andrew.

“After I found pickleball. I haven’t played either tennis or racquetball again,” Adam said. “It’s just so much more fun. Only a couple months after I found it, I invited Andrew because with racquetball and tennis, height matters a lot. If you’re short, it’s much more difficult, but I knew pickleball is a sport with a small court where his height wouldn’t matter.”

“I played at the YMCA pretty regularly,” Andrew said. “I liked it a lot, because I could play with him. I fell in love with it pretty quickly.”

The pair have since gone on to excel in tournaments across the state and the nation. Out of the 15 tournaments they’ve participated in, they’ve medaled in 13 of them and have won eight. This has helped Andrew become ranked among the top 60 juniors (18 years and younger) in America.

They’ve managed to find time to play and excel despite Andrew’s heavy involvement in other sports at Newfield. The rising sophomore was part of the varsity soccer and baseball teams this past season while also playing junior varsity basketball. Even with travel baseball this summer, Brechner has had more time to play and has found some overlap between pickleball and his three other sports.

“They’re all competitive,” Andrew said. “Hand-eye coordination is a lot of the same. I think it helps with movement a lot. Those are the main similarities there.”

The easy comparison to make with pickleball is to tennis, but the two are radically different in many ways. For one, a pickleball court is much smaller, making for more fast-paced rallies. There’s also the ‘kitchen,’ which is a seven-foot space on each side of the net where players are not allowed to volley the ball. Adam shared how he’s had to adapt to the sport from his tennis background. 

“There are plenty of things that do transfer over, but there are a lot of shots in pickleball that don’t exist in tennis,” Adam said. “Touch is a big part of pickleball, so that was that little bit of adjustment with the spins (backspin and topspin), the weight of a racket versus the paddle, and the ball. The brilliance of pickleball is the difference between the soft touches, and then the rapid, fast smashing back-and-forth is what I think makes pickleball so special.”

Pickleball has gotten a reputation as a sport solely for older, unathletic people. The Brechners know first-hand that this is far from the case.

“As I’ve played a lot of singles [tennis] tournaments, playing singles pickleball was way harder on the body than the singles tennis,” Adam said. “It seems illogical because tennis is a bigger sport, but there’s way more movement in singles pickleball. Physically, it’s a lot more exhausting on the body, so much to the effect that a lot of people and a lot of pros don’t play singles pickleball because it’s so hard on the body. It’s super easy to get into it as a beginner, but mastering it and all the touch and spins and everything is what’s difficult. So the level of athleticism you need to get to a high level is much higher than people think.”

They’ve also witnessed how much pickleball has evolved in the area, especially in Ithaca. A big part of the sport’s local explosion in popularity has been Lesa Carter, who owns Pickleball Mania in The Shops at Ithaca Mall. She turned what used to be Planet Fitness into another place to play pickleball. She also helped lines get painted on the Cass Park tennis courts to create more pickleball courts. According to Adam, the number of people playing in Tompkins County has quadrupled since he and Andrew teamed up. That trend is sure to carry on as time goes on.

“When we first started playing at the YMCA, there’d be maybe 16 other people,” Andrew said. “But then when we’ll go to Cass Park or Pickleball Mania, all the courts will be full and there will be people waiting. I think it’s grown a lot since we’ve started playing.”

“Pickleball is just so unique in that you show up to a facility and you play with other people,” Adam said. “It’s something where people mingle together, you find people of your ability, and you just play socially and competitively if you want to. That makes it such a welcoming, different kind of sport. It’s for everyone to play and get better and enjoy whatever level you want to be at.”