Ask a group of 12- to 17-year-old pickleball players where they hope the sport will take them, and you might expect a mix of answers. Some may want to play in college, win a major tournament or simply see how good they can become.
But when Ben McNair worked with a group of advanced players at a recent National Junior Pickleball bootcamp, their answers were surprisingly consistent.
Every one of them wanted to play professional pickleball.
“Every single one of them,” McNair told Empower Pickleball.
It’s a pretty big goal for a group of teenagers, but it also says something about how quickly junior pickleball is changing. Young players can now look at the professional game and see teenagers competing at a high level. Becoming a professional doesn’t necessarily feel like some distant dream anymore.
The problem is that while pickleball has created plenty of places for these kids to compete, the development system around them hasn’t necessarily kept pace.
“We lose sight of more of the development side of pickleball and we just go tournaments, tournaments, tournaments,” McNair said.
National Junior Pickleball is trying to fill some of that gap by giving young players something beyond another weekend of matches. Its growing camp and bootcamp program focuses not only on becoming a better pickleball player, but on what it takes to become a better athlete and competitor.
And as more kids begin taking pickleball seriously, that development piece is becoming harder to ignore.
Junior Pickleball Has Plenty of Competition. Development Is Different.
McNair comes to junior pickleball with a background that gives him an interesting perspective on the issue. Before coaching pickleball, he spent years teaching tennis and also played the sport in college. He later earned a master’s degree in kinesiology and health and a PhD in biomedical sciences, with a specialty in cardiac aging and exercise science.
That combination of coaching and education influences the way he approaches young pickleball players today. He thinks about technique, movement and the physical side of performance, but coaching kids has also taught him that complicated concepts don’t mean much if a 10-year-old can’t understand them.
More importantly, his background in tennis gave him a firsthand look at what a more established youth development system can look like.
A young tennis player has a relatively clear path. There are recreational programs, academies, private coaches, junior tournaments, high school teams and college programs. Parents may not know exactly where their child will end up, but they can at least see the different steps along the way.
Pickleball doesn’t have that same established ladder yet.
What it does have is a growing tournament scene and a professional game that can seem unusually close to young players. A talented teenager can see other young athletes competing at a high level and naturally wonder, Why couldn’t that be me?
That’s exciting for the sport, but McNair believes it can also create too much emphasis on competing before young players have spent enough time developing.
“If you’re never willing to take that half step back, your rate of improvement is probably not as much as you think it could be,” he said.
Sometimes getting better means stepping away from the next tournament long enough to actually work on the things that will make you better when you return.
That’s the space NJP’s camps are trying to create.
What Happens at a National Junior Pickleball Bootcamp?
National Junior Pickleball currently offers different camp experiences based on a player’s level. Its broader camps are geared mainly toward intermediate juniors and combine structured instruction with a more relaxed environment.
McNair likes beginning those weekends with an optional Friday mixer where the kids can play, meet him and get comfortable before the more serious training starts. Parents can participate as well, which gives them a chance to understand the coaching process instead of simply dropping their child off and watching from the sidelines.
The NJP Bootcamp takes things further.
The recent bootcamp McNair discussed with Empower was geared toward advanced junior players with at least a 4.0 DUPR rating. Participants ranged from roughly 12 to 17 years old, and this was the group in which every player told him they hoped to eventually play professionally.
For McNair, that means their development has to involve more than hitting another thousand pickleballs.
The bootcamp included on-court training, but players also worked with a mental performance coach and an athletic trainer. They were given off-court fitness programs they could continue at home, allowing them to work on their physical development even when they weren’t on a pickleball court.
McNair describes the goal as developing a more complete athlete and competitor first, and then a better pickleball player.
That’s an important distinction. If these kids want to become professional athletes one day, they eventually have to learn how to train like athletes. That includes fitness, recovery, mental performance, discipline and understanding that development isn’t always measured by what happened in your last tournament.
The Missing Middle of Junior Pickleball Development
The good news is that junior pickleball isn’t starting from scratch. There are more tournaments, more junior players and growing interest in bringing pickleball into schools. College pickleball is expanding, and high school programs are beginning to gain momentum in different parts of the country.
What’s still harder to see is the pathway connecting all of it.
If a 10-year-old falls in love with pickleball, where do they go next? What should structured training look like for a talented 12-year-old? What should a 15-year-old with professional ambitions be doing besides entering tournaments?
Those are questions established youth sports have spent decades answering. Pickleball is being forced to answer them much faster.
Starting in 2027, National Junior Pickleball plans to take its camps beyond its current Las Vegas-area base and host them before every stop on the NJP Tour. The camp will be open to junior players of all ages and skill levels, giving families more access to junior-specific coaching in different parts of the country.
By tying camps directly to the tournament calendar, NJP is essentially putting development and competition in the same place. Players can access structured coaching in the same cities where they’re already traveling to compete, rather than treating development as a separate trip or occasional opportunity.
It’s a direct answer to some of those roadmap questions. Instead of families having to piece together training opportunities on their own, the goal is to make junior-specific development a more consistent part of the NJP season.
And parents are a big part of this conversation.
Most young pickleball players are still being introduced to the sport through their families, according to McNair. But unlike parents signing a child up for soccer, basketball or tennis, many pickleball parents don’t have an established roadmap showing them what comes next.
Building junior pickleball means building that roadmap for families, too.
Where Do Girls Fit Into Junior Pickleball?
There’s another part of the junior development conversation that deserves attention now rather than later.
McNair said boys currently significantly outnumber girls in the higher-level junior population NJP is seeing. The organization hopes to eventually offer girls-only camps, which could give young female players an opportunity to train in an environment surrounded by more girls their age.
Getting girls into pickleball isn’t simply a matter of putting a paddle in their hands. They’re already being recruited into soccer, basketball, volleyball, tennis, softball, gymnastics, dance and plenty of other activities that have well-established youth programs and communities.
Pickleball has to compete for their attention.
That means giving girls places to learn, coaches who know how to develop them, other girls to play with and, perhaps most importantly, a reason to see a future for themselves in the sport.
If pickleball waits until the professional level to worry about how many women are coming through the pipeline, it will have waited too long.
Are We Building the Junior Pickleball Pipeline Backward?
There’s something unusual about the way pickleball has grown.
The professional game took off quickly. College pickleball followed, high school pickleball is beginning to gain momentum, and now more attention is finally turning toward structured development for younger players.
In most established sports, that pyramid is built from the bottom up. Kids enter the sport, receive coaching and development, move into high school competition, potentially continue into college and, for a very small percentage, eventually reach the professional level.
Pickleball didn’t exactly have the luxury of following that blueprint. The sport grew too quickly, and now it’s having to build some of that infrastructure while the next generation of players is already moving through it.
National Junior Pickleball’s bootcamps won’t build an entire junior development system on their own, but they’re addressing a need that’s becoming harder to ignore. The kids who dream about playing professionally aren’t coming someday—they’re already here.
Now the sport needs a development pathway that can grow with them.
National Junior Pickleball’s next bootcamp runs Friday, December 18, 2026, at 6pm through Tuesday, December 22, at noon at Dill Dinkers in Henderson, Nevada. It’s open to players ages 10-18 at the 4.0-5.5 level.
