IT’S AN EARLY Friday morning in late November, and Joseph “Joey” Losgar and seven other men, all dressed in gray sweatpants or shorts and white T-shirts, are setting up pickleball nets in a brightly lit gym. Their sneakers squeak on the wood surface as they roll the wheeled nets to create two makeshift courts.
A hand-painted mural is on the wall, depicting a pickleball doubles match on a colorful, fenceless court as a vibrant sun sets in the distance. Above it is painted “EAGLES” in large, teal capital letters with two birds on a tree branch next to the “S.” Each letter stands for something: Effort, Attitude, Gratitude, Learning, Enjoyment, Sportsmanship.
It looks in many ways like a typical high school gym in America.
But there are immediate clues that Losgar, 34, isn’t in a school gym, a senior center or anywhere in which the sport has become overwhelmingly popular in recent years. There are frequent alerts over the loudspeaker with various codes, and uniformed officers are stationed around the space. The gym, split into two sections by a padded divider, is part of MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution, a high- and maximum-security facility with over 2,000 inmates about 15 miles to the north of Hartford, Connecticut.
The eight men setting up the equipment are wearing prison-issued clothes, and the equipment must never leave the gym — a misplaced paddle during this Friday session caused a brief panic. The scenic pickleball mural was painted by someone who was then involuntarily transferred to another facility.
But pickleball has provided an escape from daily life for dozens of inmates at MacDougall-Walker, some of whom are serving decades-long sentences, and the sport has become a perhaps unlikely source of unbridled joy in a place in which there is often little.
Spearheaded by the Pickleball for Incarcerated Communities League (PICL), which formally launched at MacDougall-Walker in 2023, a tournament is held every Thursday night in the gym, in addition to daily play during open-gym recreation hours and a PICL clinic every Friday with volunteers from the outside. The sport has become so popular, and the program so successful within the facility, that less than two years after its inception, PICL is now in every Connecticut correctional institution and in over 40 facilities across the…
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