Hello everyone! My first post will be a brief glimpse of my introduction to the sport of pickleball and the people that helped me along the way. The posts in the future will involve places I travel, tournaments and the awesome people I have met.
So here goes….
The first time I ever heard of pickleball I was December 2017. I was on a brief vacation/getaway to Fort Collins, Colorado and happened to visit a local golf course on a rainy, winter afternoon. As I drove into the facility I noticed what appeared to be very small tennis courts. They were painted green with nylon nets and odd, random lines, surrounded by tall chain link fencing. My first thought was, “what are they doing on those”.
Confused, I asked the young lady in the club house what those courts were. She replied, “pickleball”. Okay…..I had no idea what that meant and told her so. She laughed and showed me a small room filled with solid looking, over-sized ping pong paddles and these odd, neon colored whiffle balls. “Pickleball”, she said again. And I nodded, with more questions than answers.
The first time I ever played pickleball was February 2018. I had returned home and found out that there were pickleball matches on certain nights at an event center named Memorial Hall. I arrived with no expectations, paid and walked down some steps to the playing surface (wooden basketball flooring) with portable nets and taped lines. Coming from a tennis background the noise was quite loud.
Admittedly, the game “looked” easy enough from a distance. Straightforward, with obvious patterns, the four people per court moved about with purpose and ease. A lovely lady named Cathy took me to a vacant court, handed me a wooden paddle and explained the rules and scoring. She was gracious and more than patient as I had no real idea what the kitchen was or why. And the scoring? Why three numbers? But I began. And boy was I awful! Absolutely terrible! The balls moved both slower and faster than I thought they would. The refused to bounce off the ground or the floor like I believed they should and I had to swing using every muscle in my body.
As bad as I was, I kept trying. I realized soon enough that touch was more important than pace, and that getting to the kitchen line was the best place possible if you wanted to win the point. And getting hit by the ball did not hurt and was actually part of the game.
I would like to say I fell in love with the game immediately, but it took awhile. I still had golf and tennis, so pickleball took a back seat for awhile. Yet, eventually, it began taking up more of my time. I thought I was getting better…..until I played my first tournament that is……
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