'A Pickleball Christmas' screenwriter Blake Rutledge primed for Lifetime premiere

Blake Rutledge pointing near a pickleball court. — Screenwriter Blake Rutledge is extremely proud of this pickleball project. Blake Rutledge

'A Pickleball Christmas' screenwriter Blake Rutledge primed for Lifetime premiere

Matt Cudzinowski

Dec 19, 2025 05:00 PM ET

It was also around that time that I decided to write a pickleball comedy pilot for a TV show about a former tennis player named Luke Hollis, who blows it in his final tennis match. He's back at home five years later, and this is like a half-hour streaming comedy, so it was maybe a little more R-rated, and he's getting fat and he's really crude, and he discovers pickleball, and the idea is that he's going to reclaim his fame and have a second wind in his career. As time goes by, he discovers this kind of community.

I met a director at the same park. This director read that pickleball script and he goes, 'Oh, this is pretty good. My agents are actually looking for scary movie pitches.' I pitched him a horror film on a pickleball court, and he took that and pitched it to Tubi, a streaming service, and we got a movie made in 2022. That was when I first started getting produced, all through pickleball. So every friend I'm making in Los Angeles, every professional connection I'm making, even in the film industry, is through pickleball.

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Then the Writers Strike happens and I'm not able to sell anything. I need to make rent, and so I'm getting good enough at pickleball to start teaching at a private club in South Pasadena, and it's called iPickle at Arroyo Seco Racquet Club. It's a wonderful job, super flexible, and it also has its own wonderful community, and from there I'm meeting more writers, directors, actors, producers. I met a producer from Lifetime in late 2023, and she asked to read my pickleball pilot. She goes, 'We love this story of a former tennis player who discovers pickleball and learns something. Would you be interested in developing this with us for Lifetime?' I was like, 'Absolutely!' And then I got one question, 'Can you make it Christmas?' I was like, 'Sure! I would love to!' That's kind of how this movie was born.

I ultimately got this through having a pickleball script in my back pocket and working as a teaching pro at this local pickleball club, so when you watch A Pickleball Christmas, it's about a local hybrid pickleball-tennis club which needs some saving, so it's completely based on where I work.

We worked on a fresh script with the same concept and some of the same characters throughout 2024, and we were developing it, and then the movie was shot this past summer in Canada.

Is the main character Luke Hollis inspired by a real person or personal experience?

I wish I could tell you there was a real person. I think partly he's inspired by me in the sense that I tend to be a really competitive athlete. I grew up playing a bunch of sports—football, soccer, and baseball—and I kind of found that I had this tendency when I played to get incredibly competitive. What I found is when I played, it's such an isolating experience sometimes. You can win the game on the court, and then you go home and it feels like you've lost this secret other game, which is about being a part of a community, making friends, things like that. I think I really felt that when I was younger, and so when I found pickleball, I was so struck by this community aspect that we'd forget who won. You play a game at this park, you forget who won, and you just run it back. There was this community spirit.

Luke Hollis was born out of my realization, or at least my experience, of kind of learning, 'Oh, there's another game to be played here, that it's not just about winning, that it's about community spirit.' But then it's very natural, as I teach a lot of tennis players who come in, and there's a type of player who learns pickleball who is used to just hitting the ball as hard as they can with every shot. The beauty of pickleball, however, and this is in the film, is that you learn to slow it down, you learn to use your power when necessary, and you also learn when it's time to dink, when it's time to drop, and when it's time to play softly and with finesse. I think what I was hoping for with the movie is to kind of draw that, kind of map that onto a more an emotional journey, too. It's like as we're learning to slow things down with our game, we're learning to go through life with a little more finesse.

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Talk about adding a Christmas element to your script. How was the process?

Most writers will tell you that constraint is very welcome. Obviously there is kind of a structure to how these movies go, and there's a certain set of expectations when you make a Christmas film, especially for Lifetime. The network is actually really great. I think there was this mutual understanding of what the expectations are and what usually happens in a movie like this, but they told me when they were developing it, they said, 'Write the Christmas movie you've always wanted to write. Don't think of this as having any rules. Write the movie you want to write, and it just happens to be released on Lifetime.'

There's a certain way these things go or kind of a certain flow to these movies, so it actually really helped get things going, and it made breaking the story a little easier. You almost have more fun. When there's constraint, when you know the lines within which you're operating, you can kind of have fun and create your own spin on your version of the Christmas movie, your version of the sports movie.

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A recent trailer for A Pickleball Christmas provides some insight on the interplay between Luke and Caroline. Could you expand on that relationship?

At least at the start of the movie, Luke is a hot-headed tennis player. He's known for hitting the ball as hard as he can. He has a nickname, Luke "The Brute." Anyone who plays tennis or has any adjacency to tennis knows it's such a mental game, and it creates a lot of very interesting personalities. And so he's coming in, he's a singles player, and he has a line somewhere in the movie where he says, "I don't play doubles." As we know, though, pickleball is primarily a doubles sport, so you kind of have to learn to play well with others.

Caroline, on the other hand, she's a little more established at the club and she's a little more established in the pickleball world. She's part of a community of players, not only at the club where they work, but also at a local park, which is very much inspired by Allendale Park, the community where I learned from. She's much more ingrained there.

James Lafferty and Zibby Allen on the court. — James Lafferty (Luke) and Zibby Allen (Caroline) on the court. Lifetime

And so you hope in a movie like this that each character has a little bit to teach each other, that it's not just one character's all great and one person has room to grow. That's what's great about any relationship, that one partner is able to kind of elicit something new out of you that you didn't even expect. What I'm hoping for is that these characters have something to teach each other. Luke kind of makes his way from this guy who's all about winning and doesn't play doubles, and he discovers this community of pickleball. There's this scene, there's a point when you play pickleball as well where you're like, 'You know, I could use some power here. There's actually a big benefit to having a former tennis player on my court, and then there's some benefit to having someone who is maybe more obsessive or more ambitious, like that flavor. We could all use a little bit more of that in our life as well.' Hopefully, the merging of those two characters brings out something greater than the sum of their parts.

What do you hope viewers will take away from the movie?

If they haven't played pickleball, I hope they get a taste of it and just how wonderful it is and how easy it is to learn. What I also hope they take away really is the spirit of pickleball, which is the fact that you can get four players on a court—or as you can tell by that one scene in the trailer, you can get 16 players on four pickleball courts—and you can kind of feel that energy and that buzz of so many pickleball players in one place. I hope non-players will take away that, and that players will take away some joy of being represented on the big screen.

The theme that I'm really interested in by writing this movie is kind of the limits of competition, the limits of being a win-at-all-costs competitor versus what you get from joining a community. You might make small sacrifices for something bigger. I think there's this idea of, within the context of sports and within the context of competition, where to find the limits of yourself and your own individualism, and where you can make small sacrifices to find an even greater reward in the whole community you're playing with.

James Lafferty and Zibby Allen looking at each other. — James Lafferty (Luke) and Zibby Allen (Caroline) have great chemistry in the film. Lifetime

Is there anything else you'd like to share about A Pickleball Christmas?

I really hope people love it. I think our leads James Lafferty and Zibby Allen did such a great job. They're so fun together. Hopefully, players will be able to see a little bit of themselves and how they play pickleball. There's definitely some deep-cut references that some diehard pickleball players will be able to pick up on. You might see some ATP, you might see some Erne, you might hear "body bag." We might get into some banter about how pickleball was named in the first place. You might hear something there. It's just a really fun time that celebrates the real spirit of why we play pickleball in the first place.