The story below is from our January/February 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
The former congressional candidate and university professor has found his newest passion—and a surprising source of community and personal growth—on the pickleball court.
Dan Smith
Carter Turner has spent the better part of his adult life looking for a kind of truth that has broad application. He may have found it in its most basic form on the pickleball court.
Turner has a PhD in Religious and Theological Studies, has run for Congress twice, has worked at Radford University for two decades (teaching Religious Studies and raising money), and is one of those largely responsible for the most recent attention to widening I-81.
Those don’t all logically fit together, but Turner blends them well and finds an easy mesh with his most recent passion: pickleball. It is a game co-founded in 1965 by Congressman Joel Prichard of Washington, and brought to overwhelming popularity in the past seven or so years.
Turner, like so many pickleball advocates, has become passionate about the sport, which for a time was thought to be for old people. It now crosses all lines of age, demographics, education and athleticism. Pickleball, roughly tennis on a smaller court, appeals equally to a 12-year-old gym rat of a basketball player and an 88-year-old twice-great grandmother. And they sometimes play against each other … with outcomes that might surprise you.
Dan Smith
“Three or four years ago, I made the decision to see how good I could get at pickleball. I had the skills and did everything I could to get better. I even stopped drinking.”
Turner gravitated to pickleball a few years ago. He was the tennis pro at Hidden Valley Country Club and had been a head pro at a club in Atlanta, but “I had some back problems” and in the 1990s looked for activity that wasn’t so demanding. “I was pretty crippled,” he says, “and at the end of my rope.” A spinal fusion became “the best health decision ever [for me].”
In 2017, he had a heart attack, an “important moment,” for his future. He started playing pickleball in order to get some movement in his routine. He was teaching at Radford at the time.
“Three or four years ago, I made the decision to see how good I could get at pickleball,” he says. “I had the skills and did everything I could to get better. I even stopped drinking.”
Since then, he has qualified for the nationals five times, earned his pickleball teaching certificate, become a USA Pickleball Ambassador, gained a sponsor (Onyx, which makes paddles) and begun teaching professionally, though “I have dialed that back some.” He plays senior tournaments professionally.
Turner has been married for 28 years to Karen Turner, a real estate professional, and their daughter, Callaway, works for a PR firm in New York City.
Turner has learned that “the game is nuanced and has a lot of complexity. For two years, I didn’t realize what I didn’t know. There is a lot more to it than meets the eye. Every shot hit is an effort to make your opponent hit it back high enough to put the ball away.”
He insists that “one of the biggest misconceptions about pickleball is that it is for old people. I think that in the next 10 years, it will replace tennis.” Some areas, he says, have seriously begun that transition, partly because “there are more injuries in tennis. Pickleball is less dangerous. It is easy on the joints and the body. Pickleball’s growth is on the corpse of tennis.”
Turner envisions “100 courts in the Roanoke Valley” in the near future. He calls pickleball “the fastest-growing sport in human history.”
And that brings us to a basic truth Turner has been searching for. “Pickleball is great for the body, improves the memory, eyesight, balance. It brings people together. There is a tournament with a 90-year-old division. You don’t have to go out and find players; you just show up and play. And you meet new people. It is a model of inclusion that is different from any other sport.
“If you are isolated, you can get active. Physical advantage is negated. I think it will be an Olympic sport soon.”
Turner has been working to bring people together for years and pickleball “provides the opportunity to interact and see the world the way we do. I ran for Congress because I wanted to bring people together. I traded my passion for politics for pickleball.”
In mid-November of 2024, Turner finished second in singles and men’s doubles in the national championship tournament.
The story above is from our January/February 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!