Rash of pickleball paddle pilfering reported in D.C. area, East Coast (2024)

Jose Reyes, the owner of the D.C. shop Tennis Zone Plus, said the description sounded just like a group who had taken “a couple of squash rackets” from his store. After he passed the warning message along to other area colleagues, he learned that shops in Virginia and Maryland had also been hit, losing a combined $5,500 worth of pickleball paddles to groups that seemed to use the same tactic.

Police haven’t confirmed that the same group struck all three stores in the Washington region but say they are investigating the possibility.

The D.C. area is not the only place seeing pickleball paddles being plundered from stores as the sport continues to rise in popularity. A retailer in Colorado, for example, told a local CBS affiliate that it lost $30,000 worth of pickleball paddles in an alleged rash of thefts in February. A Las Vegas store reported losing $4,000 worth of paddles in mid-April; the Las Vegas Review-Journal published surveillance footage of women appearing to hide the paddles under flowy clothing before walking out with them.

So, why pickleball paddles? Maybe it’s because they’re easy to hide under billowy clothing and (perhaps surprisingly) expensive. High-end paddles can run for upward of $250 each.

“It is a small, high-dollar item,” says Tyler Bunch, co-owner of the Virginia-based sports retailer Alpine Ski Shop. “That’s all I can think of. You sell them on eBay for $200 apiece or marketplace or Craigslist. … It is a high-dollar, relatively small-packaged item that can be easily concealed and taken out.”

Bunch, too, learned about the pickleball-pilfering phenomenon the hard way. After he received a warning from Reyes about a group of three people allegedly stealing from tennis stores, one of his managers remembered that a group fitting the description had just been in their Fairfax location.

Bunch said they pulled up the security footage from the day before Reyes warned him, April 23, “and sure enough, it was just like the text showed.”

The footage, which Bunch shared with The Washington Post, shows a man distracting a salesperson while two women wearing loose skirts and scarves walk into the store and head to the pickleball section. Bunch said he thinks that within about five minutes, the women took about $1,000 worth of merchandise: four high-end Selkirk Luxx pickleball paddles.

Local tennis shop owners say the thefts in the D.C. region didn’t stop there. A few days later, a similar-looking group struck again — this time at Tennis Topia, a Rockville, Md., tennis and pickleball mainstay. The local blog Rockville Nights first reported the theft, which allegedly happened on the afternoon of April 26, a few days after the Alpine Ski Shop incident.

Of the three local stores, Tennis Topia was hit hardest. Store manager Sara Healy estimates that 20 to 30 paddles were lost, or about $4,500 worth of merchandise. Her description of the incident? Eerily similar to Bunch’s.

“Three people came into the store. One of those individuals, a man, distracted one of our sales reps, asking them questions, while the other two, who were women, stole a lot of paddles, hiding them underneath their skirts,” she said.

Rockville City Police Lt. Jason West, whose department is investigating the Tennis Topia theft, says he can’t confirm whether the same people were responsible for other thefts, but the question is “part of our ongoing investigation.”

But after reviewing video footage from Tennis Topia, Bunch at Alpine Ski Shop said that “we were positive that it was the same people” who hit his store.

So he sent a warning further down the coast to a store in North Carolina.

“It was too late for us,” Bunch said, “but hopefully we can spread the word.”