Pickleball Eye Injuries: What the Numbers Actually Say

In 2025 a team writing in JAMA Ophthalmology did something nobody had done for this sport: they went through twenty years of US emergency department records and counted the pickleball injuries that involved an eye. The headline figures are these.

• An estimated 3,112 pickleball-related eye injuries reached US emergency departments between 2005 and 2024.
• About 1,262 of them happened in 2024 alone — roughly 40 percent of the entire twenty-year total in a single year.
• From 2021 the count has been rising by about 405 cases a year.
• More injuries occurred in patients aged 50 and over than in patients under 50.

That last line is why this page exists on a site for players over 55. But the most useful thing we can do with these numbers is not repeat them louder. It is to tell you precisely what they prove and what they do not, because the gap between those two things is where most coverage of this study goes wrong.

The one thing these numbers cannot tell you

They cannot tell you your risk.

What the study reports is a count, not a rate. A count is a numerator: how many injured eyes turned up in an emergency department. A rate needs a denominator too: how many people were playing, and for how many hours. The study has the first number and nobody has a reliable version of the second.

Why that matters here more than usual: participation in this sport did not drift upward over the period in question, it exploded. US participation reached nearly 20 million players in 2024, up 45.8 percent in a single year, and pickleball was the fastest-growing sport in the country three years running, up 223.5 percent over three years. If the number of players roughly triples and the number of injuries roughly triples, the chance of any individual player being hurt has not changed at all.

So two statements are both honest, and you should be suspicious of anyone who gives you only one of them:

• Pickleball eye injuries are rising sharply. True, and not seriously disputable. Hospitals are seeing many more of them.
• We do not know whether pickleball has become more dangerous to your eyes. Also true. The published data cannot answer it.

There is a second limit worth naming. These are emergency department visits. They exclude every injury treated at an urgent care clinic, every one seen the next morning by an ophthalmologist or an optometrist, and every one that somebody decided to sleep off. The direction of that error is one-way: the true number of injured eyes is higher than 3,112, not lower.

Why 50 and over is the larger group

The study’s finding that more cases occurred in patients 50 and over than under 50 is not, on its own, evidence that older eyes are more fragile. The simplest explanation is who plays: pickleball’s demographic skews older than most sports, and adults aged 60 and over account for 74.1 percent of all pickleball emergency department visits of every kind. If most of the players are older, most of the patients will be too.

But there are reasons beyond headcount, and the American Academy of Ophthalmology names the age group directly: it singles out players 65 and older as higher risk. Three of those reasons are worth understanding, because each one suggests a different response.

Reaction time. AAO puts the relevant figure plainly: a pickleball can travel up to 40 mph and cross the court in under half a second— faster than a reflex blink. That is not a statement about older players; it is a statement about every player. Nobody blinks in time. The protection has to be on your face before the ball is hit, because there is no reacting to it.

What the impact lands on. An eye that has had cataract surgery contains an artificial lens implant, and AAO lists IOL dislocation and detached retina among the risks of that surgery. A blunt impact to an eye in that condition is a different event from the same impact to a 25-year-old eye. We have written the full version of this argument in pickleball after cataract surgery, and its conclusion is the one most people get backwards: surgery makes the case for protection stronger.

The falls route. The published mechanisms in the study are a direct hit from the ball, a direct hit from a paddle, and falls. For an older player the fall is not a footnote — 56.1 percent of pickleball injuries in patients 60 and over are ground-level falls. An eye injury caused by going down onto a court surface, a fence post or your own paddle handle is a senior-specific pattern, and no pair of goggles addresses the cause of it. That is a court-awareness, footwear and backpedalling problem, and it is the subject of how to prevent pickleball injuries.

What the injuries actually are

“Eye injury” covers an enormous range, from something that resolves in two days to something that permanently changes your vision. The outcomes named in the published sources, roughly in order of severity:

• Corneal abrasion. A scratch on the surface. Extremely painful, usually heals.
• Hyphema— bleeding inside the front of the eye. Needs assessment, because what else the blow did is not visible from outside.
• Berlin’s edema— swelling of the retina after blunt trauma. Vision usually recovers; sometimes it does not fully.
• Retinal tear or detachment. A surgical emergency. Delay costs sight.
• Lens or IOL dislocation. The natural lens or an implant moving out of position.
• Globe trauma and orbital fracture.The most severe categories recorded in the study — structural damage to the eyeball itself or to the bone around it.

For scale, AAO reports that nearly 30,000sports-related eye injuries are treated in US emergency rooms every year across all sports. On that scale pickleball’s 1,262 is a small slice. It is also a slice that barely existed in 2005 and is growing faster than almost any other, which is the honest way to hold both facts at once.

What to actually do, in the order it is worth doing

The data does not justify alarm. It does justify one cheap, permanent decision and a couple of small habits.

1. Put polycarbonate in front of your eyes. AAO advises polycarbonate safety goggles with front and side coverage, and for racket sports specifically it points to protectors meeting an ASTM standard. The standard that applies to racket sports is ASTM F803; the one printed on industrial safety glasses is ANSI Z87.1, and it is not the same test. Our pickleball eye protection ranking sorts every model we list by which of the two its maker actually claims.
2. If you wear glasses, do not assume you are covered. AAO says ordinary eyeglasses are not adequate protection and can make an injury worse if they shatter. Either wear an over-the-glasses protector on top of them or get prescription sports eyewear in polycarbonate. The practical options are in playing pickleball when you wear glasses.
3. Make the ball easier to see. A ball you pick up late is a ball that arrives before you are ready, and that is the mechanism behind both the ball-strike and the lunge-and-fall routes. Contrast is a buying decision, and it is the one our pickleball ball ranking is built on.
4. Stop backpedalling for overheads. The single commonest way an older player ends up on the ground is walking backwards for a ball and losing balance. Turn and move, or let it go. Falls are on the eye-injury mechanism list, and this is the habit that removes most of them.
5. Know what is an emergency. Sudden flashes, floaters, a curtain or shadow across your vision, blood visible in the eye, or any loss of vision after a blow is a same-day matter, not a wait-and-see one. Retinal detachment is time-sensitive.

One note for club and HOA committees

If you are the person being asked whether your courts should require eye protection, the governing body’s position is useful to know precisely. USA Pickleball’s health and safety guidance states that proper eye protection is highly recommended for all players— and that is a recommendation, not a rule. Nothing in the rulebook requires it for recreational play.

Which means the decision is entirely yours to make locally, and no rule stands in the way of making it a condition of play at your own courts. If you want a single sentence for the meeting, this is the one we would use: the governing body recommends it, the Academy of Ophthalmology recommends polycarbonate with side coverage, emergency departments saw roughly forty percent of twenty years’ worth of these injuries in 2024, and a compliant pair costs less than a sleeve of balls.

And if the same committee is dealing with the other complaint that gets senior court hours cut — the noise — the governing body publishes a list for that too. Our quiet pickleball balls and paddle pads page ranks the six options we can verify against USA Pickleball’s Quiet Category, which is a far better thing to take to a board meeting than a seller’s adjective.

Everything on this page is somebody else’s published number, attributed to whoever published it. We own no clinic and have measured nothing. Our methodology is here, and this is general information rather than medical advice — a blow to the eye is a question for an eye doctor, today.