Here are Tim and Steve winners of Gold Medal and “Golden Ticket to Nationals” at the 2023 Newport Beach Qualifier tournament,

wearing their PickleTime Scorekeepers, an award they repeated in July, 2024.

Hi, I’m Tim, one of the co-founders of PickleTime. My first time playing pickleball was in about 2012 when I visited my cousin in Las Vegas who lived in a retirement community with pickleball.

I loved pickleball from the first time I played it.

I started playing regularly in 2015 when an athletic club in Portland to which I belong started a program. But I found it was harder to keep track of the score than it was to play the game.

Thus the idea:

A scorekeeper for pickleball

I started with a crude prototype composed of a rotatable bottle cap that pointed to segments of a circle drawn with a marking pen on a piece of plastic cut out of a one gallon milk carton. All of that strapped to my wrist. With that I could keep track of who was serving and whether the server was the first or second server.

Then I finally convinced Steve, my long-time table tennis and tennis friend to give pickleball a try.  He too loved it from the beginning and saw some ways to improve my mechanical scorekeeper and a way to make it digital.  Then we joined with Markus, who has an electronics background and the three of us co-founded the company. 

Now, more than three years since my first idea, we have both a mechanical and digital pickleball scorekeeper.

PickleTime PTDS-1 Digital Scorekeeper Watch

They’re not much bigger than a wristwatch and tell you the score, the server, the server number, and the correct position of every player. 

All of this on the digital unit by pressing one of two buttons after each rally and on the mechanical unit by turning one of three wheels after each rally.