I’ve known of pickleball for at least 25 years, growing up in the Pacific Northwest, we even played it in PE class in middle school. Awareness of the growth of pickleball had drifted my way in passing over the past 5 to 10 years – brief anecdotes or comments, seemingly always from someone who charitably could be described as 50+, I knew it was becoming a “thing” in Florida/Arizona etc…..
One day I was walking through the club where I coach squash and saw some courts set up in the basketball area. I had some time to kill, and so I said hello to the people playing, and jumped in to play a game.
I was told the better players played on T/TH, and that I should swing by on those days and give it a try. Normally my squash lessons began at roughly 3pm, and the pickleball courts were setup from ~12-2pm, so once a week I started popping over to the MAC around noon, grabbing lunch, and jumping in for an hour or so.
The T/TH crowd was indeed more competitive, mostly a ~3.0 to 3.5 level, with a few 4.0 players. Over the course of about 6 weeks I played a handful of times, and began learning the ropes. From day one I had more firepower than anyone else playing in those games, but finding the right balance of how to construct rallies and the risk/reward of when and how to attack was new and fun.
However after about 6 or 8 weeks I found myself attending less regularly, and being a little less excited about it. There were two courts with often ~15 players, which meant a reasonable wait between games. Plus it was relatively mixed ability level, and so often the games often weren’t competitive, I felt content with what I’d learned, it had been fun.
My pickleball journey might have fizzled out there, or been pushed down the road some amount of time, but in a strange and fortuitous twist, the club informed me that I wasn’t “allowed” to play pickleball anymore, due to a change in their employee policies…
Nothing gets me more fired up about something than being told I can’t do it!
So I set off to find pickleball outside of the club, and my eyes would soon be opened to the bigger picture…