Islanders chosen for Hall of Fame
Published 11:30 am Sunday, January 19, 2020
The 1948 Bainbridge High boys basketball team and Barney McCallum, one of the inventors of pickleball, will be inductees for the Kitsap Sports Hall of Fame Class of 2019.
The Kitsap Athletic Roundtable recently announced the inductees for 2019. The Hall of Fame induction ceremony will take place at 1 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 25 at the Kiana Lodge in Poulsbo.
Led by first-year head coach Tom Paski, who would go on to a successful 22-year tenure at Bainbridge High School, the Spartans defeated Kalama 42-40 at Hec Edmundson Pavilion at the University of Washington to capture the first and only state championship in program history in 1948. Bainbridge went 8-4 during the regular season and defeated Sequim 57-40 in the West Central District Tournament. The Spartans went on to beat Harrington, St. John and Sequim in the state tournament on the way to the finals.
Barney McCallum has been chosen as the first-ever recipient of the Kitsap Athletic Roundtable’s Lifetime Achievement Award as one of the three men who invented the game of pickleball.
McCallum, then-U.S. Rep. Joel Pritchard and Bill Bell were at Pritchard’s cabin on Bainbridge Island when they combined elements of badminton, ping-pong and tennis to create pickleball. McCallum made the paddles and was the driving force behind its growing popularity.
