Is Pickleball a Good Way to Make Friends as an Adult?

Adult friendship has a logistics problem: nobody schedules it. Research on how friendships form points at a simple mechanism, accumulated hours of repeated contact, and a weekly pickleball session is one practical way to log those hours. Here is what the research says and how to make a session do friendship work.

What the research actually found

University of Kansas researcher Jeffrey Hall measured how many hours of time together it takes to move through the stages of friendship, publishing the results in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. In his data, hours spent together was associated with closer friendships. The specific estimates: casual friendship tended to form around 40 to 60 hours together in the first six weeks after meeting; the chance of a casual friend becoming a friend passed 50% at around 80 to 100 hours together (individual study estimates ranged from 57 to 164 hours); and the chance of a friend becoming a good or best friend passed 50% at 119 to 219 hours, depending on the study and period measured. Read these as rough ranges from two studies, not a personal countdown.

Why pickleball fits the mechanism

A standing pickleball session is repeated contact on a schedule: same courts, same day, overlapping faces. A two-hour open play with rotations gives you partner after partner, plus the between-games downtime where the actual talking happens. Two sessions a week is roughly 200 hours of court-side contact in a year; even one weekly session is over 100. Nothing is guaranteed, but the session puts the repeated contact on your calendar; the rest is up to you.

Show up to the same session on purpose

If friendship is a goal, consider keeping one recurring session and protecting it, so the same regulars see you week after week and faces get familiar. You can still drop in elsewhere for variety; the recurring session is the one that turns strangers into recognizable faces.

Do the small conversions

Hours together only count when they include actual contact, so do the small things that turn proximity into conversation. Learn and use first names. Arrive ten minutes early and stay ten minutes after. Sit with people between games instead of scrolling in the corner. Compliment specific shots. Ask regulars about their week and remember the answers next week.

Move one relationship off the court

Court friends stay court friends until something happens off the court. After a few weeks, pick the person you click with and suggest something small: coffee after the session, a practice hour before it, a tournament entered together. Hall's study also found that hours spent on leisure activities predicted closeness better than hours in closed settings like work or school, which is an argument for time together doing something you both enjoy.

If you are shy or new

Let the format work for you. Rotations remove the need to ask anyone for anything; your paddle in the queue is the introduction. One honest sentence, "I'm new here," gives regulars a job to do. And set a comfortable target: one name per session is a fine pace, and twelve weeks of one name is twelve people who know yours. That is a dozen future partners, carpoolers, and post-game coffee invitations, all from a pace that never once required you to be the loudest person at the courts.

Run the hours math for your own life

Take Hall's ranges as a rough map. One two-hour session a week is about 100 hours of contact in a year; two sessions a week doubles that budget. Set against his figures (casual friendship around 40 to 60 hours together, friendship around 80 to 100), a recurring session adds up to a meaningful amount of the currency his study measured. The math is approximate; use it as a reason to protect the session, not as a promise.

What pickleball will not do

It will not pick your people for you, and it will not compress the timeline. Some sessions are cliquey, some nights are flat, and the hours still take the hours. Treat flat sessions as data, try a different session time, and keep the long view: this is a months-long project that happens to come with exercise attached. The players who succeed at it are simply the ones who kept attending while the hours quietly did their work.

The Europe angle

Dedicated venues give a scene one permanent address, which makes the same-session-every-week habit easier to keep. Pickle Haus (pickle.haus) is setting out to build the first and biggest network of dedicated pickleball centers in Poland, with a vision to lead across Europe. The brand describes this as its ambition; the centers are not open yet.

The bottom line

Hall's study measured friendship in hours together: casual friends around 40 to 60, friends around 80 to 100, good and best friends beyond that. A recurring pickleball session is one practical way to log hours with the same people; the names, the conversations, and the off-court invite are yours to add. If that appeals to you, pick your session and start attending it on purpose.

Sources

• University of Kansas - Study reveals number of hours it takes to make a friend
• Hall 2019, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships - How many hours does it take to make a friend?
• USA Pickleball - What is Pickleball

Sources checked 21 Oct 2026. Header image is illustrative, not a photo of the events described.