Pickleball gained millions of new players in the last year alone. Most are making the same footwear mistake tennis and running converts always make when they switch sports.
Pickleball Added 5 Million New Players Last Year. Here's the Shoe Mistake Most of Them Are Making
Introduction
Pickleball has grown from roughly 4.8 million players in 2022 to over 22 million in 2026, gaining an estimated 5 million new players in 2025 alone. That growth makes it, by a wide margin, the fastest-growing sport in America.
Most of those new players didn't start their athletic life on a pickleball court. They came from tennis, from running, from the gym, or from no consistent sport at all, drawn in by a game that's easy to learn and social by design. That's the appeal, and it's also the problem. A tennis player switching to pickleball brings tennis habits with them. A runner brings running habits. Almost none of those habits account for what indoor pickleball actually does to your feet, and the mistake shows up in the same place for nearly every new convert: the shoes.
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The Mistake: Wearing the Wrong Shoes for the Wrong Reason
Ask a brand-new pickleball player what shoes they wear and the answer is almost always whatever they already owned. Tennis players wear their tennis shoes. Runners wear their running shoes. Gym-goers wear cross-trainers. It seems reasonable. Shoes are shoes.
Except pickleball's movement pattern, short, explosive, multi-directional bursts with constant stop-start changes, is closer to squash or badminton than it is to tennis or running. Running shoes are built for forward motion and offer minimal lateral support for the side-to-side cuts pickleball demands. Tennis shoes are closer, but many new players are wearing worn-down pairs originally broken in for a different surface and different footwork.
The result isn't just a performance issue. It's a hygiene one. Shoes not designed for pickleball's stop-start intensity run hotter and sweat more inside during a session, and new players, unfamiliar with how demanding the sport actually is on the body, rarely think about what that means for what's happening inside the shoe between games.
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Why New Players Underestimate Pickleball's Intensity
Pickleball has a reputation, fair or not, as an easy sport to pick up socially. That reputation undersells the physical demand of competitive or even moderately serious play.
A 90-minute open play session at a busy indoor facility involves dozens of short sprints, hard stops, and lateral pivots, played on hard indoor court surfaces that generate significant heat through the sole. The average foot has approximately [250,000 sweat glands](https://www.apma.org), and during that kind of session, they're working at full capacity regardless of whether the player realizes how hard they've actually been playing.
New players, especially those coming from lower-intensity backgrounds, consistently underestimate this. They finish a session feeling more winded than expected and chalk it up to being out of pickleball shape. What they don't clock is that their shoes absorbed the same intensity their lungs did, and unlike their cardio, their shoes don't recover with a few deep breaths.
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What Happens When New Players Skip the Hygiene Step Entirely
Established athletes in high-intensity sports tend to have some baseline hygiene routine, even an imperfect one. New pickleball converts often have none, because nobody told them they'd need one for a sport that looked this casual from the outside.
The bacteria responsible for shoe odor, primarily *Brevibacterium*, *Staphylococcus*, and *Micrococcus*, thrive in the warm, damp environment created during play and can double in population roughly every 20 minutes in the right conditions. A new player who plays two or three times a week without any interior shoe treatment is building a bacterial colony from week one, with no baseline awareness that it's happening.
By the time the smell becomes noticeable, usually a few weeks in, most new players assume something is wrong with their shoes rather than recognizing it as a completely normal consequence of an intense sport they didn't realize was intense.
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The Fix Isn't Complicated, It's Just Unknown
None of this requires new players to overhaul their gear immediately. It requires awareness of three things most of them simply haven't been told:
Pickleball shoes exist for a reason. Dedicated pickleball or court shoes offer lateral support that running and worn tennis shoes don't, reducing both injury risk and excess interior heat buildup.
The shoe needs attention between sessions, not just the body. New players stretch, hydrate, and ice sore knees. Almost none of them think to address what's happening inside the shoe itself, even though it's absorbing similar stress.
Treating the interior matters more than spraying the outside. Odor sprays address the surface. The bacteria live in the insole foam, which needs a [90-second sanitization treatment](https://getfreshtrax.com/how-it-works) to actually reset, not mask, the problem.
I talk to a lot of people who picked up pickleball in the last year purely for the social side of it, and almost none of them expected it to be this physically demanding. The shoe mistake isn't stupidity. It's that nobody told them pickleball plays a lot rougher than it looks.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Do I really need dedicated pickleball shoes, or can I use my tennis shoes? Tennis shoes are a reasonable substitute if they're in good condition, since both sports involve lateral movement. Running shoes are not, since they lack the side-to-side support pickleball's movement pattern requires.
How often should new players clean or treat their pickleball shoes? For players in their first few months, treating the shoe interior after every two to three sessions is a reasonable starting habit, tightening to after every session as play frequency increases.
Why do my new pickleball shoes smell worse than shoes I've worn for other sports? Pickleball's stop-start movement pattern generates more localized heat and sweat than steadier activities like running, so bacterial buildup can happen faster even in a newer shoe.
Is it normal for pickleball to feel this physically demanding as a beginner? Yes. Despite its reputation as an easy, social sport, competitive and even casual open play involves significant sprinting and directional change, comparable to squash or badminton rather than recreational tennis.
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