McHenry’s John Cincola, former UIC tennis standout, turns pro in pickleball

McHenry’s John Cincola, a former men’s tennis standout at UIC, got a friendly push from his mom to try pickleball five years ago.

“My mom found pickleball through a close friend and was trying to get me to play for about a year, but I kept brushing her off,” the 42-year-old Cincola said. “The name even sounded stupid to me. I’m a tennis player. I don’t play that silly stuff.”

It didn’t take long for Cincola to warm up to a new sport.

“I was visiting my parents in the Quad Cities in 2018,” Cincola said. “I had nothing else to do, so I decided to go with my mom and played with her group. It was a super good time. I had a blast. I came home to Chicago right away and tried to find people and places to play.

“I played in my first tournament a month later, and it was never look back after that.”

Cincola was a tennis coach at the Racket Club in Crystal Lake for 15 years after graduating from UIC. Over the past two years, he has played pickleball professionally on the APP Tour (the Association of Pickleball Professionals). He also gives pickleball lessons from his own court in Crystal Lake.

Cincola guesses he has won between 15 and 20 tournament medals (top-three results) throughout his career, including an APP Tour first-place finish in Mesa, Arizona, last year that had him ranked among the top singles players in the world.

He played in the first APP Tour event of the season in Daytona Beach, Florida, over the weekend.

Cincola, who is sponsored by ProXR Pickleball, said pickleball has grown tremendously since he started playing in 2018.

“The pro game is changing,” Cincola said. “In the last couple of years, there’s been two pro tours and the prize money is growing quite a bit. There’s tons of sponsorships and TV airtime now. That kind of stuff never existed before. There’s been an influx of ex-pro and really high-leveled college tennis players making the switch to pickle ball because it has the potential to be lucrative now.”

Cincola started his own YouTube channel, “John Cincola Pickleball,” with instructions for players of all ages and skill levels. He grew the channel to 11,000 subscribers in the first six months.

“It’s become a pretty big focus of mine,” Cincola said. “I feel like there’s a lot of potential in that space.”

Cincola said pickleball, which uses paddles and a plastic ball, doesn’t take long to learn, and anyone can play.

“There’s something about it. It’s not like other sports,” he said. “It’s very accessible. You just need a paddle and a court, and you can even make makeshift courts on gym floors. You can turn any tennis court into a pickleball court. You can take somebody with no racket experience, somebody who has never been on the court before, and you can take them out on the pickleball court and teach them the game within an hour.

“And they can be playing it, enjoying it and having fun. You can have families of young kids to grandparents.”

Elmhurst’s Gail Mazzocco, 60, started playing pickleball in 2021 as something to do with family during the pandemic.

“I first got started in spring of 2021 when my women’s tennis league got shut down,” Mazzocco said. “My children were back home, and we set up a net in our driveway. ... I hopped on Amazon and we bought some paddles. We heard about pickleball before, but we had never played. It was easy to Google and get some basic instruction.”

Mazzocco regularly plays and is now one of Cincola’s students.

“One of the things I appreciate about John’s teaching style is that he describes and demonstrates technical aspects of the game until something resonates with me,” Mazzocco said. “John’s approach has been to build a strong foundation for growth and advancement. We have goals, but the intent isn’t to cap me out at any level. It’s to develop my skill and strategies so I can further advance.”

Skokie’s Jonathan Merchan, 20, is a student at Stanford and another one of Cincola’s students. He played mostly soccer growing up but, similar to Mazzocco, needed something to do during the pandemic.

“There was a park district gym where people were just playing and it was just fun and casual,” Merchan said. “I didn’t know there were any pro tours or pro players or anything. It’s definitely awesome to see it grow. That’s something I’m working on. I’m part of a small group of students [at Stanford] who are trying to start a pickleball club.

“Seeing how much it’s growing, I want to do my part to help grow it among younger college-aged players.”

According to a study by the APP Tour, 36.5 million people age 18 or older in America (or about 14%) played pickleball at least once from Aug. 2021 to Aug. 2022.

Cincola sees pickleball growing even more.

“A couple of years ago when I’d be in an Uber going to a tournament and people would ask me what I did, I’d say, ‘I play pickleball,’ and they had never heard of it,” Cincola said. “Now almost everyone says, ‘Oh, I’ve heard about that.’ Maybe not everyone knows exactly what it is, but it’s becoming way more mainstream now.”