By Alex Abrams - Red Line Editorial Maximum-security prisons like San Quentin in California and Rikers Island in New York don’t seem like the type of place where one might expect to find Roger BelAir, a financial expert in his late-70s who has been featured on the cover of Money magazine.
However, he’s also a passionate pickleball player who believes inmates can benefit mentally and physically from playing the sport while incarcerated.
“What happens when you play pickleball is you don’t think about your problems,” BelAir said. “You just think about hitting that ball over the net.”
BelAir co-founded
Pickleball for Incarcerated Communities League (PICL), a nonprofit organization that has helped get pickleball introduced into 80 prisons and jails in 18 states across the country. He has heard from inmates and prison officials about the positive impact that they’ve seen since they started playing pickleball in their facilities, often with members of rival gangs sharing the same court.
PICL received a grant earlier this year from USA Pickleball that will allow the nonprofit to provide more pickleball equipment to prisons, including nets, paddles and balls.
While pickleball is regarded as America’s fastest-growing sport, it’s also teaching the country’s large prison population how to follow rules, work as a team, show good sportsmanship and feel a sense of camaraderie and humanity. Since many of these inmates will someday be released, BelAir said society benefits from them becoming better people while serving their sentences.
“It brings me tremendous satisfaction. I’ve had a very blessed life,” BelAir said. “But absolutely nothing I’ve ever done is in the magnitude of what’s happening right now because there’s probably 1,500 or maybe 2,000 people today playing pickleball inside prisons every single day. And you know what it does is it changes lives.”
BelAir first learned about the sport around 15 years ago when the athletic club that he belongs to started a pickleball program. His friend suggested he try it, and BelAir fell in love with it as soon as he did.
He then came up with the idea that would eventually become PICL while watching TV one Sunday evening.
BelAir and his wife have watched “60 Minutes” for the past 30 years, and they saw a segment in 2017 about the thousands of inmates who pass through Cook County Jail every year. BelAir watched on TV as inmates sat around and played cards, and he told his wife that they should be doing more with their time.
His wife politely nodded her head at his suggestion.
“A couple minutes later, I said, ‘You know what, they should be playing pickleball. I’m going to buy the equipment. I’ll go back there on my own dime, and I’m going to teach those guys the game,’” BelAir said, figuring that pickleball would give the inmates a chance to exercise and learn teamwork. “Well, that really raised an eyebrow for her.”
His wife was skeptical. She wasn’t sure Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart would respond to BelAir’s letter asking if he could teach pickleball to inmates, and the sheriff told USA Today in 2018 that he initially thought the idea was a joke.
Dart hadn’t heard of pickleball before, but his daughter — who was age 8 at the time — knew about it and convinced her father to let BelAir bring the sport into the jail.
“If it hadn’t been for that little girl, we wouldn’t be talking today,” BelAir said.
Inmates at Cook County initially had no interest in learning how to play pickleball from BelAir, who was 70 years old at the time. However, as soon as he gave them pickleball paddles and brought them onto a basketball court with lines drawn with tape, they started laughing like “a bunch of third graders” while hitting the ball back and forth.
It didn’t matter that they didn’t know the rules at all.
USA Today published a front-page story about BelAir introducing pickleball at Cook County. The story provided a level of credibility to his idea and helped open more doors for him to bring pickleball into other prisons across the country.
BelAir said one of the main factors that determine whether a person will be able to avoid returning to prison after being released is if they feel a sense of community. For some inmates, pickleball has given them a community to belong to while incarcerated.
BelAir said he’s now working on a program that would give inmates who are avid pickleball players a paddle upon their release from prison.
“When somebody gets out, they can get a paddle and then they can go down to the local public courts, make new friends, get exercise and get established back in the community,” he said.
Alex Abrams has written about Olympic and Paralympic sports for more than 15 years, including as a reporter for major newspapers in Florida, Arkansas and Oklahoma. He is a freelance contributor to USA Pickleball on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc. 
