Top: Steve Diffley, playing with Michael Osowski, serves to Fred Pedersen (black shirt), playing with John Gallovic (purple). Above, left: left to
right: Erica Gidion, Dick Gurley, Grace Gilligan and Karl Rice tap the handles of their paddles together after a game. Above right: Erica Gidion
returns the ball.
TODAY, pickleball has become America’s fastest grow-ing
racquet sport, with an estimated 2 million players
nationally. It’s arguably the most user-friendly sport
around, and frequently enjoyed by the country’s eldest
inhabitants.
“It’s the only sport at our ages that we can play as a team sport and get
exercise,” says 66-year-old Jim Chaffins, who plays three days a week at
the Wrightsville Beach tennis courts. “Basketball’s probably out because
of knees and so forth. Skills have eroded. A lot of us can’t play tennis any-more,
but we can play pickleball.”
Picture a thicker, oversized pingpong paddle, a tennis court cut in half,
and a ball with holes through it like a whiffle ball. Most of the action is at
the net, so there’s not a lot of ground to cover. Exchanges can be rapid
fire, so hand-eye coordination helps.
“It isn’t such a large court, so you can cover the area,” says Dick Gurley,
70, one of the regulars at the Wrightsville Beach courts. “You do get a lot
of exercise. It’s not a slow sport. You can hit the ball hard.”
The sport’s initial surge in Southeastern North Carolina can be traced
back to 2011 in Brunswick County, where a tribe of players discovered a
new accessible activity.
“I got here in 2011 and there were six to 10 people playing in
Brunswick Forest,” says Marty Smith, a USA Pickleball Association ambas-sador.
The job of an ambassador for the USAPA is to grow the sport.
Brunswick Forest is now home to an estimated 500 players, with nearly
800 in the town of Leland, and 1,300 in Brunswick County as a whole.
This hodgepodge of a sport has bled over county lines into the
Wilmington area.
“We started the Cape Fear Pickleball Club in mid-2015 to promote
pickleball in the greater Wilmington area,” says club president Kevin
Chandler.
The club now has more than 200 local members and continues to
grow.
The sport came across the Heide Trask Drawbridge in 2015, when the
Wrightsville Beach Foundation donated pickleball nets for residents to
use and visitors to rent. Tennis courts were lined and lessons were added
under Jackie Jenkins, tennis professional and instructor for the town’s
parks and recreation department.
“If you are familiar with tennis, or if you have enjoyed tennis in the past
and have enjoyed playing at the net in doubles, it’s very similar to that,”
says Katie Ryan, recreation program supervisor of Wrightsville Beach
Parks and Recreation. “Even if you’ve never played tennis, it’s an enjoyable
game.”
Chaffins, a Wrightsville Beach resident, became a pickleball player after
taking lessons from Jenkins.
“About a year ago, several of us took lessons,” he says. “We liked it so
much, we started checking out the nets on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
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WBM june 2017