Ahead of the Game: Carl Foster Spent Half a Century Putting Overlooked Sports on the Air
By Adriana Falco • July 18, 2026 • 17 min read
From Air Force radio in Vietnam to becoming the first voice of pickleball
CARL FOSTER HAS spent his entire career getting to new things first.
He was a 19-year-old Air Force disc jockey broadcasting to American troops in Saigon during the last Tet Offensive, when nobody in the United States had ever heard of pickleball, let alone imagined the sport would someday need a television voice.
He was running one of the first sports talk shows, Carl Foster’s Sports Probe, on cable television before ESPN existed. He built one of the first nationally syndicated tennis shows, The Tennis Magazine Show, before the Tennis Channel existed.
So, when a tennis client asked him, almost as an afterthought, to put together a thirty-minute highlight package for a small pickleball tournament in 2021, Carl did what he has always done: he studied the sport, he showed up, and he ended up building the only regular pickleball program on national television.
Today, Foster hosts Inside World Pickleball on Amazon Prime Video’s PICKLETV Network, co-owns the National Pickleball League’s Boca Surge (formerly Boca Raton Picklers), chairs a nonprofit, the Veterans Pickleball Association, that uses the sport to help military veterans physically and mentally, and runs the World Pickleball Conferences, a pickleball business event series that brings together many of the sport’s leading executives, entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators the country under one roof.
Almost none of that was the plan.
Foster built his career covering one overlooked sport at a time: first tennis, next golf, then finally pickleball; always arriving before anyone else thought to.
What follows is a conversation with Carl Foster about a broadcasting career that started with a cassette recorder behind a high school baseball diamond in little town, Niles, Ohio, wound through a war zone and half a dozen countries, and eventually landed him as the first VOICE of pickleball hosting the Inside Florida Pickleball weekly tv show on FOX Sports, then Inside WORLD Pickleball on CBS Sports Network for the fastest-growing sport in the country, pickleball.
From the Airwaves to the Pickleball Courts
Q: Before broadcasting, before the Air Force, before any of it, where does your story begin?
CARL: I was born in Niles, Ohio. I was due on April 1st, but I fooled my mom and came out on April 4th. I always tell people I was due on April Fool’s Day, but I fooled everybody and showed up a few days late.
My dad was a steelworker for 35 years, and my mom was a homemaker raising five of us. I was the oldest, and I was alone for seven years before my siblings came along. My grandmother raised me a lot in those early years, because my mom was waitressing to help make ends meet, and my dad was at the mill. So, I was very close with her.
“I used to sit behind the diamond at high school baseball games with a little cassette recorder and do my own play-by-play, just dreaming that one day that would actually be my job.” — Carl Foster, Sports Entrepreneur, Sports Media Host, and Event Executive
Q: Racket sports were nowhere in the picture growing up. What did you play when you were young?
CARL: I played everything: basketball, baseball, which was my favorite, and I ran track and cross country, so I was always active. I didn’t touch a racket sport until I went into the military. That is when I really started to pick up tennis a little.
Q: Long before the microphone, there was the newsroom. How did you first get involved in journalism?
CARL: I was the editor of my high school newspaper, The Niles McKinley Hi-Crier, and I wrote sports for the local Niles Daily Times. I used to sit behind the diamond at high school baseball games with a little cassette recorder and do my own play-by-play, just dreaming that one day my passion would actually be my job.
I love playing sports, and I love writing about them, and somewhere in there back then I decided that sports journalism or broadcasting was what I wanted to do with my life
“When I started my pickleball show, I covered the pros because nobody else was. Now everybody covers the pros, so I’ve gone the other way, chasing human-interest stories.” — Carl Foster, Sports Entrepreneur, Sports Media Host, and Event Executive
Q: How did ending up in the Air Force?
CARL: II got a government draft lottery number of 57 with the Vietnam war in progress, which meant I was going to get drafted into the Army whether I liked it or not. I did not want to go into the Army. So, I went down and talked to the Air Force recruiter and told them I was a journalist. They said they had a career field for that. I signed up for four years and went in as a journalist.
Basic training was at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, and that is really where I became a man. You learn a lot about leadership and discipline in a military boot camp.
Q: Take us through the deployment to Vietnam. What was that like?
CARL: My first assignment was Rapid City, South Dakota, editing the base newspaper with Mount Rushmore right outside my window. But I wanted to see the world, so I put in for worldwide duty, and the first opening that came up was Saigon, during the Vietnam War.
It was a challenge, honestly. We were on a big base, but there were rockets going off, and I was there for the last Tet Offensive. The base got hit while I was there, and after about six months they sent me to Thailand. I was only 19 at the time. I had fear, but not as much as I probably should have. I think I would be a lot more scared going into something like that today.
“The pickleball bug bit me, just like it bites everybody else … My paddles are all over the house and the healthy addiction has me on the courts three hours, every day.” — Carl Foster, Sports Entrepreneur, Sports Media Host, and Event Executive
Q: You’ve compared that stretch to the movie Good Morning, Vietnam. How close is that comparison, really?
CARL: It was honestly pretty close. I was on American Forces Radio. Hanoi Hannah was technically my competition for the airwaves. I did a radio show called Good Afternoon, Vietnam, playing music and keeping the troops’ morale up. We were the only real link those guys had to what was happening back home. We had the wire services and the newspaper, and we would play live sports off the feed when we could. I would not trade that experience for the world.
Q: After Vietnam, your military broadcasting career took you all over the world. What was that stretch like?
CARL: After Vietnam, I went to Thailand, to U-Tapao Air Force Base, still working as a journalist. From there, I went to George Air Force Base in California to edit the base newspaper, The High Desert Flyer, which is where I really learned how to cut and paste and edit. That is when I found out I could cross-train from journalism into radio and TV, so they sent me to broadcasting school in Indianapolis, and that is really where I learned my trade.
From California, they sent me back to Thailand, this time to Korat. I worked for the American Forces Thailand Network (AFTN), then moved to Spain for two years, where I was chief announcer for AFN-Spain doing a little of everything: an afternoon drive show, TV news and sports, and even a rock-and-roll show and a country show.
Later, I received temporary duty assignments on the island of Crete and then Rhein-Main in Germany. I also played on the bases’ softball teams and also on the Mean Machine tackle football team traveling to tournaments in Italy and Greece along the way. Plus, I side hustled DJing at the officers’ clubs and NCO clubs for extra money some nights.
So, between the radio job, the softball, and the side gigs, I was basically getting paid to be a broadcaster, DJ at clubs and play several sports, which is not a bad way to spend an enlistment.
Q: How did you end up living in Florida?
CARL: After the military, my first civilian job was back in my hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, as a CBS sports anchor. I ran one of the hottest discos in Ohio back in the 70s, Downunder Disco on the Strip, on the side at night, too.
Around the same time frame, I started my own local sports talk show on cable tv, called Carl Foster’s Sports Probe, before ESPN even existed. I interviewed top sports people like the championship boxer Ray Boom Boom Mancini and the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, Ted Stepien.
Two days later, Stepien called me at 6:30 in the morning and offered me a job as director of broadcasting for his NBA team. That was my first big break. That job had me negotiating television rights with the Cleveland Indians and the colleges and even working live boxing broadcasts with Don King as Executive VP of the country’s first regional sports network, TEN-TV. It was a real education in the business side of sports.
A few years later, Stepien wanted to explore moving the Cavaliers to Miami. He sent me down to scout it. I fell in love with Boca Raton. I told him there were golf courses on every corner instead of potholes.
Stepien said, “Go ahead and set up an office.”
We set up an NBA exhibition game at FAU prior to the Miami Heat even existed.
I was just married, so I said I was in. We moved down in 1983 and never really left. We raised our kids in Boynton Beach because it felt like more of a family community back then, and one of my daughters later even taught at Boca High. These days, I am back living on the ocean in Boca, so it has come full circle.
Q: You built two of the first weekly sports magazine shows on cable, for tennis and for golf. How did that come together?
CARL: Once I was in Florida, I started my own production company, Prime Time Video, and created Inside Florida Tennis and Inside Florida Golf, two thirty-minute weekly magazine shows airing on Florida’s Sports Channel. I eventually partnered with Tennis Magazine and The New York Times, and the tennis show became The Tennis Magazine Show, syndicated to 70 million homes.
We were the only weekly tennis show on television before the Tennis Channel even existed. I had Chris Evert on the show, along with just about every other top name in the sport at the time.
I did the same thing with Golf Magazine for the golf side. We would travel to resorts around the world, places like and they would cover everything because we were basically doing a feature on their property.
I did that for ten years and never missed a week, over 1,000 episodes between the two shows.
“Everybody has a story about pickleball, whether they’re a doctor, a grandmother, or they just picked up a paddle to meet their neighbors.” — Carl Foster, Sports Entrepreneur, Sports Media Host, and Event Executive
Q: What finally got you into pickleball, and how much convincing did it take?
CARL: Honestly, none of it was my idea at first.
I have been the announcer for the Delray Beach Open tennis tournament for 30 years, and the family that runs it, Ivan Baron and Mark Baron, told me they were adding a pickleball event and wanted me to put together a TV show for it. I told them I had no idea what pickleball even was.
This was 2021, right out of COVID. They gave me about six months to study up before the first tournament, up in Port St. Lucie, where Kolter Homes had just built 27 courts.
There were about 225 players there, which felt like a lot for a sport nobody had heard of yet. I interviewed everybody I could; top pro Steve Kennedy, the team from Engage, young pro Rob Cassidy, who was hoping to break into broadcasting himself back then. Later, he did exactly that. I also interviewed Melissa McCurley, who really introduced me to the history of the sport. She was a Navy veteran, so we hit it off right away, and by then she had already turned her company, Pickleball Tournaments, into a real business that just recently sold for millions.
My very first pickleball interview was with Anna Leigh Waters and her mom, Leigh. Anna Leigh was 12 years old and her and her mom had just won her first US Open national championship. We did the interview across the net because everybody was still being careful back then socializing with COVID.
Q: Playing pickleball wasn’t part of the plan at first. When did you finally pick up a paddle?
CARL: Not until after, I had already finished my first three shows. Steve Kennedy was my teaching pro for a segment we called the Tip of the Week.
I finally said, “Give me a paddle. I am a tennis player. I can do this.”
I went out there and started whacking the ball around like every tennis player does at first. The pickleball bug bit me, just like it bites everybody else. My tennis rackets and my golf clubs are in the shed now. My paddles are all over the house and the healthy addiction has me on the courts three hours every day.
Q: Your show made the leap from local cable to CBS Sports Network. How did that happen?
CARL: My Inside Florida Pickleball show was airing on Fox Sports Florida, and I pitched it to Tennis Channel early on. They told me they were not ready for that yet. Funny how things work out.
A friend of mine, who had produced the first US Open pickleball broadcast for CBS Sports, introduced me to an executive there. We put a deal together, and the show became Inside World Pickleball on CBS Sports Network.
Q: You promote your own pickleball tournaments. Tell us about the Boca Masters and how that came together.
CARL: The Barons owned and operated the inaugural World Pickleball Classic in Port St. Lucie, and they hired me to produce the television special covering the event. That assignment opened the door to working with Ken Herrmann and the APP Tour, where I later began running tournaments of my own; the Delray Beach Pickleball Open, a tournament in Plantation, and the Boca Masters, my own hometown event.
Anna Leigh Waters, Ben Johns, Simone Jardim, and just about every top professional played in those first tournaments, because there was no PPA yet.
When Ken sold the majority of his interest in APP to a marketing firm out of Chicago, they wanted to buy my tournaments, too, but those were my hometown events. I started them, so I bought them back and kept them myself.
I still run the Boca Masters every year and the 5th Annual is scheduled for December 2026. I stepped away from the Delray Beach tournament and Plantation, but the Boca Masters is staying mine.
Q: The World Pickleball Conference is yet another important piece of your journey, a business-to-business event you saw the need for and had not existed yet. You developed it, launched it, and still run it to this day. How did this first come about?
CARL: I created the World Pickleball Conference to serve as a grassroots business movement. I saw the need and I saw an opportunity of bringing together the people who are building this sport: the leaders, the innovators, and the wellness side of it, all under one roof.
So, I put the event together, tapped into the relationships I had formed for a great speaker lineup, and then held the first one in June 2024. I was the COO of the World LEADERS Conference held in Palm Beach in 2010-2011 where we had speakers like Tony Robbins, Ken Blanchard, Drew Brees, Urban Meyer, Jon Gordon and Martin Luther King, Jr.
For the past five years, I’ve also partnered with George Domaceti on the World Pickleball Convention and Conference, which has an expo and an educational component. George and I go way back. We met decades ago during the early days of the internet, when he was producing internet expos and I was hosting the Today’s Internet radio and television show.
Then one day, he called me up, saying he was thinking of getting into the business side of pickleball. He shared his idea. Now, George oversees the World Pickleball Convention while I produce the companion World Pickleball Conference. It has become one of my favorite weeks of the year.
This year, we are expecting more than 8,000 to attend. It’s our sixth year and it will be at Palm Beach CC, October 16-18. Also this year, we are also including padel and a veterans Paddle Battle of the Branches charity fundraiser for our Veterans Pickleball Association.
Getting back to the World Pickleball Conference, I have since expanded it and it’s now held four times this year: Palm Beach, Naples, Las Vegas, and Boca Raton during The Masters.
I also developed the Golden Pickle Awards to honor those driving the growth of our sport. The awards are given out during the conference and past recipients include David Johnson, Kyle Yates, Rene Prats, Gordon Kaye, CourtReserve founders Ashley and Tim Owens, Tito Machado, Dill Dinkers founders Will and Denise Richards, and Rommie Maxey.
The next World Pickleball Conference is in Las Vegas, July 16-18 at the Chicken N Pickle right outside of Vegas in Henderson. It’s a great new facility and we are very excited about being there.
“It’s never really been about the sport. It’s always been about the people behind it and the stories worth telling.” — Carl Foster, Sports Entrepreneur, Sports Media Host, and Event Executive
Q: What keeps you doing this, after 50-plus years in broadcasting?
CARL: I do not really think of it as work. When I started my pickleball show, I covered the pros because nobody else was. But now everybody covers the pros, so I have gone the other way, chasing human interest stories, wheelchair pickleball, everyday players as they all have a love for pickleball and a passionate story to tell.
Everybody has a story about pickleball, whether they’re a doctor, a grandmother, or someone who just picked up a paddle to meet their neighbors. That has been true since I was a kid with a cassette recorder behind a baseball diamond, and it is still what gets me out of bed.
Still Chasing the Next Broadcast
Carl Foster’s career has a rhythm to it, even if he never planned it that way. He finds a sport that television has not caught up to yet, tennis in the 1980s, golf alongside it in the 90s, and now pickleball, as he builds the programs for it before anyone else thinks to.
It is the same template every time: study the sport, get to know the people playing it, and put a microphone in front of them. He was doing that from a base in Saigon with a reel of tape and a wire feed from home, and he is doing the same thing today from a broadcast booth, just with better equipment.
What comes next for him looks a lot like what came before: more shows, more tournaments, more conferences, more veterans discovering pickleball through his foundation, and probably a few more people hearing the word pickleball for the first time in Carl Foster’s voice.
Foster has spent a lifetime as a visionary arriving early to create the next big thing. Today, as pickleball continues its remarkable rise, he finds himself exactly where he’s been for more than 50 years: microphone in hand and introducing audiences to the people and stories helping shape pickleball’s future.
About Adriana Falco
Adriana Falco is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Pickleball Weekly, a global digital magazine reaching readers in over 75 countries across six continents. A pickleball player since 2012, she combines more than 30 years of executive leadership with a passion for storytelling that captures every facet of the sport. With a career from international technology companies to major news organizations, Falco covers the people, businesses, innovations, and global trends shaping pickleball’s future, with a mission to connect and inspire the worldwide pickleball community through credible journalism and compelling stories.
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