USA Pickleball Collaborates with ATSM International to Set Equipment Testing Standards That Aim to Ensure Quality and Safety
ASTM is one of the world’s largest international standards developing organizations, publishing some 13,000 standards each year.
By Bob Reinert
Red Line Editorial
Advances by equipment manufacturers in recent years have challenged USA Pickleball to implement advanced testing techniques to develop paddle specifications that will ensure the integrity of the sport going forward.
Toward that goal, USA Pickleball has joined forces with ASTM International’s sports equipment committee, which has established a new pickleball equipment and facilities subcommittee.
“USA Pickleball’s equipment certification has philosophically taken a ‘crawl, walk, run’ approach,” said Carl Schmits, USA Pickleball’s chief technical officer. “Our team wanted to ensure our process was timely, affordable, implementable and had input from manufacturers so we could respond appropriately to equipment developments in the industry. We’re excited to announce we’ve now entered the ‘run’ phase.”
Founded in 1898, ASTM International is one of the world’s largest international standards developing organizations. It has 35,000 members across 150 countries. Some 13,000 ASTM standards are published each year.
“You have to have the expertise in order to start a subcommittee, because we don’t want to be creating, obviously, technical standards, especially safety standards where we don’t have all the right people at the table,” said Dan Smith, ASTM vice president for technical committee operations. “That’s what really is the strength of our process is that we’re wide open. There are no barriers to entry into ASTM, so we invite all interested stakeholders.”
Because pickleball is played on a court that measures 20 feet wide by 44 feet long, innovations that increase the speed and spin rate of balls coming off paddles can adversely change the game and affect the health and safety of players of all ages and ability levels.
“Both power and spin need to be aligned with that relatively small footprint of the pickleball court,” Schmits said. “The ball itself can come off (the paddle) pretty quickly.”
Paddles can send balls across the net at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour and with spin rates of 2,400 revolutions per minute. In a short period of time, USA Pickleball has developed testing techniques to measure the power and spin rates that paddles produce.
The whole process, Schmits said, took about six months, and the organization is now moving from indirect tests to direct or dynamic testing.
“We’re directly testing those attributes of the paddle that we’re trying to bound, and that’s power and spin,” Schmits said.
Using data from high-speed cameras, radar and embedded sensors, USA Pickleball should have reliable testing for spin rates by the first quarter of 2025.
“We’re very excited about that,” Schmits said. “We do take care in this kind of research. It’s very data driven. We look for good data, not just data, and information and data that we can trust.”
As Schmits pointed out, the testing and resulting specifications haven’t been developed in a vacuum. USA Pickleball has received feedback from within the industry, including from plays.
“So it was a very thorough process,” Schmits said. “There was a great deal of enrollment with many critical stakeholders in this process.”
The response from manufacturers, Schmits said, has been collaborative.
“They asked for it. It’s been embraced,” he said. “They felt the sport was accelerating or being sped up too much. It was changing the nature of the game. A core philosophy of ours is to protect the integrity of the sport, which includes its nature as a game of finesse.”
Once established, testing methods and specifications will be made available so that manufacturers can use them to develop products.
“This will be pickleball’s own standard,” Schmits said. “Our tests are open book. There’s no surprises or anything.”
Paddles that don’t meet power and spin rate specifications will be phased out in two steps “as quickly as possible without incurring commercial damage,” said Schmits.
Schmits said that it’s vital to cooperatively set a universal standard that allows for continued innovation in pickleball.
“That’s still important. The dynamic tests or direct tests actually put us in a much better position to allow that to happen without disallowing specific materials and things like that,” he said. “It’s so important for the growth of the sport to avoid fragmentation. In this sport, I’m very concerned for the potential for fragmentation … of standards and in certification.”
As long as paddles meet specifications for power and spin rate, it doesn’t matter how manufacturers get there, according to Schmits.
“We won’t tell you how to build a paddle,” Schmits said. “Just meet the specification that everyone else is. We try to keep a level playing field there.”
Bob Reinert spent 17 years writing sports for The Boston Globe. He also served as a sports information director at Saint Anselm College and Phillips Exeter Academy. He is a contributor to USA Pickleball on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.
