GLIL YAM, Israel — Lee Sieradzky was looking for a change of scenery when he left his family and friends in New Jersey to move to Israel seven years ago. He found a better work-life balance. He found love, meeting his future wife while playing volleyball on a beach in Tel Aviv.
Sieradzky might have also found a calling.
Not in a new job, since he still works as a financial analyst and underwriter, as he did in New York City. The biggest change came in how the now 32-year-old bonded with the people of his adopted country.
The vehicle? Pickleball.
Sieradzky didn’t invent the game here as James Naismith did with basketball after migrating to the U.S. from Canada in the late 1800s. Yet like the original Dr. J, who brought his sport from Springfield, Massachusetts, to points West — including starting a team at a university in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1898 — Sieradzky has done the same with pickleball in Israel.
Though he didn’t even begin playing seriously until three years ago, the former high school basketball player from Montville has become Israel’s most recognizable name in the sport as founder and chairman of the Israel Pickleball Association.
In that role, Sieradzky holds free clinics near his home in the Tel Aviv suburbs, where he and wife Sherly live. He also administers WhatsApp and Facebook groups to organize tournaments and put together teams for international competitions.
Sieradzky recently held qualifying events to determine who will represent Israel in this summer’s Maccabiah Games, a biennial event for Jewish athletes around the world that dates back to 1932. This year’s competition in Israel marks the first time pickleball will be played.
“Lee is Israel pickleball,” said Shmuel Itzhak, an Israeli who spent his entire adult life in Norfolk, Virginia, before returning to live here full-time with his wife Shira in 2024.
Said Sherly Sieradzky, “He doesn’t have enough hours every day to do what he wants.”
‘A wildfire effect’
What makes this story even more compelling is its timing.
Sieradzky’s pickleball crusade to help teach and grow the sport coincided largely with the most horrific event in Israel’s then-75 years of statehood — the terrorist attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, when more than 1,400 were killed, 250 others were kidnapped and the bloody two-year war with Iran and its proxies began.
“Early on, I would say people wanted to figure out the situation, the new normal,” said Sieradzky (pronounced Suh-RAD-ski). “Once the new normal was understood, people wanted to figure out a way to reacclimate their lives to what they enjoyed most and (get away from) what was distracting them. Before the war, there was Covid… Providing that consistent healthy habit for people helped a lot of people get back in rhythm and focus on themselves.”
Before the war began, there were only a handful of places to play throughout the country, mostly scruffy courts typically squeezed into tennis centers in bigger cities like Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa.
Now, pickleball groups have grown in more than 30 communities, with an estimated 80 courts and 3,000 players. Games are played every day of the week, even on Shabbat.
Sieradzky’s only prior connection to pickleball was learning the rules and playing a little in a gym class at Montville Township High School. After a few months of playing at a tennis center in Jaffa, a historically mixed neighborhood of Arabs and Jews in south Tel Aviv, Sieradzky saw the potential throughout the country. He formed the non-profit IPBA and began his grassroots campaign to raise money, interest and awareness.
“The truth is, there were small communities that were progressing on their own,” Sieradzky said, sitting at a cafe near his home on an unseasonably warm December afternoon. “I was kind of the accelerator that helped these communities and gave them a bridge to cross-collaborate and mutually benefit. In order to progress professionally and legitimately, you need to add some structure and rules.”
Sieradzky sees a parallel with the rapid rise in pickleball’s popularity in Israel with what happened in the U.S during and immediately after the pandemic, eventually going overseas, particularly in Asia.
“There are 60 million playing in China,” he said. “We see that there is a wildfire effect with the sport, given its easy accessibility to create a playable area and how easy it is to learn the game. Given the Israeli spirit of being active and community-based, we knew that as soon as we put it in front of people, they would be curious. And once they were curious, they would try it.”
Interest in pickleball increased last fall with Israel’s performance in The World Cup tournament in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In an event featuring players from 80 countries, Israel won three medals, and its open division team won two of three matches.
The senior team, captained by transplanted South African Tanya Silverman, lost in the quarterfinals to the U.S., which won the event.
“We didn’t come with too many expectations, to be honest, and we performed very, very high,” said Adam Bachmann, 43, who captained the open division team and won a silver medal in the 35-and-over men’s singles competition.
Sieradzky, who played in the tournament, said that as word spread about the team’s performance in Florida, he heard from players on all levels who “found inspiration seeing a sport that seemed just to be a silly hobby to be played amongst friends (becoming) a global activity to uplift a struggling nation.”
Bachmann saw the interest throughout the country mushroom during the war as it did in the U.S. during the pandemic, when people were fearful of getting sick and stuck to outside activities. Playing pickleball with a war raging from all sides presented its challenges as well.
Bachmann recalled having to scurry to nearby bomb shelters “four or five times” when the all too familiar sirens went off during the middle of his games, signaling that rockets or deadly drones had reached Israel’s airspace. Once the “Iron Dome” intercepted and detonated these explosives and the all-clear message was received, the games continued.
In that way, pickleball was no different than other activities, like going to the beach or the mall or keeping a regular hair appointment, as many Israeli women do on Fridays before Shabbat begins at sundown. The long history of war with neighboring countries, dating back to its own war for independence in 1948, normalized, if not lessened, the fear.
“As weird as it is to say, I think people in Israel are used to this kind of situation where they get rockets shot at (them),” said Bachmann. “It’s a nationwide thing that life goes on. It’s part of being Israeli. We love sports, and no one is going to take it away from us.”
A little help from friends
While many give Sieradzky credit for growing the game, he had help from a community of players, many of whom found this new athletic addiction in the U.S.
Itzhak and his wife started playing in southern Virginia during the pandemic, and after the country began to reopen, they took annual winter trips to Florida to work on their game. On one of those trips shortly after the war began, Itzhak told some of his new pickleball friends in Boynton Beach that he and his wife would return to Israel shortly with one goal in mind.
“We are going to build a pickleball court in Zikhron,” he said.
After lining two makeshift courts with tape and chalk on a basketball court, the Itzhaks enlisted the mayor of Zikhron Ya’Akov, a city of 25,000 south of Haifa, to completely resurface another basketball court into a pickleball court with permanent lines. From an initial group of about 20, there are now 200 regulars fighting for court time.
“I now have to use a spreadsheet to have everyone sign up,” Itzhak said. “What we have done here in putting pickleball on the map in Israel is unbelievable. It’s almost unique in how we did it in Zichron.”
And then there’s the story of the Ein Habsor pickleball team.
A settlement founded as part of the 1982 Israel-Egypt peace accord located just three miles from the Gaza Strip, Ein Habsor was one of many communities under siege in the hours after the attack by Hamas began at the Nova music festival.
Operating a “war room” out of Regev Harlap’s house, the settlement’s small security detail was able to hold off terrorists with no casualties and only a few injuries until help arrived from the Israel Defense Forces.
Just like when he and his family were first relocated to Ein Habsor from Sinai in 1982, Harlap and the other residents were evacuated to Eilat, the country’s southernmost city, near the border with Jordan.
During the five months his family spent in Eilat, Harlap and a friend, Iftach Gepner, studied how to heal their community once it returned to Ein Habsor. They decided that an athletic activity was the avenue to explore. Gepner had recently returned to Israel from Denver, where he discovered pickleball and saw how Americans formed their own communities around it.
“There was a great study of post-trauma community recovery we learned, and there was a clear understanding that around sport you will reunite a community after a big event — an earthquake or another of that nature,” Harlap said. “We looked for volunteers and we knew we needed some founders around the globe to help us.”
They found a partner in CityServe, a Christian aid organization based in Bakersfield, California, to build courts in Ein Habsor. Last June, two tennis courts in the settlement were converted into four pickleball courts, Harlap said. CityServe also provided equipment. It led to the only non-profit pickleball facility in the country.
Only one problem: Nobody knew how to play the game. He recalled passing the empty courts one night with his wife while walking their dogs and decided that he needed to start a group. Returning with the proper equipment, Harlap began hitting the ball with his wife for an hour. He then began to educate himself on the game’s many rules and recruit his neighbors.
“I created a group — I made a logo, I made a T-shirt and made stickers and opened a WhatsApp group called EHPT,” he said. “Me and my wife are the engine. We have about 120 players, twice a week from 6 p.m. to midnight. We train people. We’re doing tournaments. We have players from 8 (years old) to four players past 80.”
Recently, the community held a tournament to honor the original residents of Ein Habsor. Making the drive to the settlement that day, Sieradzky felt trepidation that eventually turned into a tremendous sense of pride.
“It was emotional, the drive down there,” said Sieradzky. “You drive on what they call the ‘Death Road,’ which is where a lot of the shootings took place. Each person in that community has a story and was directly involved in that day. Somebody told me his brother took bullets and they had to drive out and had to find help the morning of all the chaos.”
Some who have moved from a U.S. pickleball hotbed are shocked to see the interest in Israel.
Leo Mindyuk emigrated to the U.S. from Russia 11 years ago. He came to Israel in the fall to help his parents, who moved from South Florida when his father needed to undergo medical care. Mindyuk, 32, had started playing pickleball a couple of years ago in Miami and didn’t realize it was being played here.
One day, he noticed Israeli pickleball groups all over social media.
“I didn’t bring my paddle or my shoes,” he said. “I still don’t have my paddle.”
Yet now, with paddles he borrows, he plays in several games a week, using buses, trains and the GETT taxi service to reach the brand new courts at the Jaffa Tennis Center, located off Ed Koch Street, no less. He was also playing on three brand-new courts at Tel Aviv University until the noise complaints from people in the neighborhood shut the games down in mid-December.
Sieradzky takes what he hopes is merely this interruption in stride, saying that these issues happen with pickleball in the U.S. and with many other new ventures in Israel.
“I think in my opinion it has to do with the amount of red tape that comes with Israeli progression and trying to bring forth a new idea,” he said. “Every time we take one step backwards, we find a way to take two steps forwards. So whatever challenges are presented … it makes the desire a little stronger and adds to the legitimacy of finding a way through the barrier more worth it and more rewarding.”
(Don Markus retired in 2020 from a 45-year career as a sportswriter, the last 35 spent at the Baltimore Sun. He is now an avid pickleball player.)
