Welcome back to my little Foghorn history corner that I call The Port Hole. It’s based on the name this very newspaper almost used. I was waiting for the right idea to come to me, and I finally got it this semester. Let’s get to some history, shall we?

Now, I’m well aware of the fact that the phrase “I knew it before it was cool” has been done to death, but this time it makes sense. Del Mar was onto something decades before it came into public favor, and The Foghorn has records.

Of all the recent phenomena to hit the planet, or at least the United States, which one has the college capitalized on far before it was in fashion? That would be the sport of pickleball!

While the country has suddenly taken to the tennis-adjacent sport in the last couple of years, it seems like the college has newspaper records of the sport being considered as far back as 1995. Don’t believe me? Maybe the image serves as good proof of that fact.

It comes from a Sept. 6, 1995 issue of the Del Mar College Foghorn, where the eighth and final page displays a so-called events schedule that primarily just posted the campus’ intramural sports.

The schedule had your usual college sports suspects: flag football, volleyball, and basketball, the kind you wouldn’t bat an eye at here or any other campus. But sitting on the third row of the schedule, a listing for “Pickleball M/W Singles” was present.

While one instance of the sport being mentioned may be a fluke, it returned later down the line. Another issue from the following year, namely in the next semester of spring 1996, still had pickleball listed in the sports section of The Foghorn.

Seeing that it stuck around Del Mar for some time convinced me that it was a success to some extent. There was no fluke here, pickleball had a presence on campus grounds far before it had a presence on the national stage.

I had heard a little bit about the sport’s long-time presence on campus around the Foghorn lab, however having it before my very eyes changed my beliefs. I thought we only had pickleball for a few years before the craze, not decades beforehand.

After seeing it on the front page of an old paper lying around the Foghorn lab though, I was wholly convinced of its presence in the Del Mar space. Surely a paper from such a long time ago could not be lying, I thought.

This little discovery was surprising and simultaneously impressive. Who would’ve thought that this community college was a site of something ahead of its time, however little it may be? Not me, obviously.

It was interesting to find out how long Del Mar had pickleball on its campus, especially in a time before it had taken the country by storm. Speaking of times long gone, tune in next time when I take a light-hearted look at how things looked way back when.