Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
Pickleball: It’s fun, you should give it a try
I blame the name for thinking that the whole thing was purely novelty, a gag dreamed up on TikTok by a teen cryptocurrency tycoon.
Pickleball.
And yet, those wanting to play in Blenheim at 1pm on a Wednesday had to wait their turn. A cacophony of ping pong-like sounds but heftier, the indoor sports stadium was a hive of doers and join-in-the funers.
But it wasn’t like this. Tony Hogg has been there since the sport first found a home there in 2020.
“I didn’t expected it to be like this... there’s a lot of fresh faces,” he said.
My own face was the freshest and with hand-eye coordination cred on the line, I was uneasy.
It’s not often you get to try a new sport though, and Tony likened it to a combination of tennis, table tennis, and badminton, and that sounded doable.
It all made sense once Tony handed me something placed somewhere on the paddle-racquet spectrum.
He then said “that’s a pickleball,” and pointed to hollow plastic ball, slightly larger than a tennis ball, but with holes, which felt both familiar and foreign. I was sure I’d seen one before in the back of mum’s garage.
My first game was up, and I was told Wednesday sessions were pretty much always in doubles format. My lovely team-mate, Pam, explained serves were made underarm behind the back line, and warned that unlike tennis, pickleballs don’t bounce much.
Pam was right.
My mind was locked into tennis-mode; swing and a miss, swing and miss, swing and a miss, as I expected the ball to bounce up and hit the paddle.
“You’ve got to hit hard hard.” Thanks Tony.
Bright red and over-thinking every movement, a quick switcheroo lands me with Tony as a team-mate, probably as
he’s the best person to pick up my slack.
However, his advice sunk in, and whacking the ball in a scooping motion, with a little bit more grunt then what seemed required, put it over the other side. It kept working, and I was having fun.
Tony was keeping score, and it’s amazing how quickly learned fun can turn into competitiveness, as I was keen for us to make a comeback from 0-7.
The scoring and rules seemed simple, but it still required a google search when I got home later.
Essentially, you can only get a point if you’re the serving team. If you wanted to hit the ball without letting it bounce, volleying could only happen outside an area Tony called the “kitchen,” the area closest to the net, marked out by a line on either side.
My brain hadn’t retained any of the explained rules at the time, but not knowing what was really going on didn’t hinder me or the fun or I was having during my first time trying pickleball, which is a great thing.
Tony and I did climb back to lose 11-9, and I’d earned a postgame chat. He told me that pickleball started off at Blenheim Indoor Sports with only a couple of its five courts in use, “and then it grew from there”.
Pickleball has become so popular across the top of the South Island that Richmond Tennis Club recently taped pickleball lines onto two of its tennis courts, and is planning to install six permanent pickleball courts later this year.
Pickleball is held at Blenheim Indoor Sports, Battys Rd, on Wednesdays 1-3pm and Fridays 6-8pm. Cost is $6 per player with all equipment supplied.
Organised pickleball in Richmond is currently played at the club on Mondays 6-8pm, Tuesdays 9.30am-11.30am, Wednesdays 6-8pm, and Fridays 9.30am- 11.30am. Club members play free, and cost is $5 a session for non-members.