PICKLEBALL HAS ARRIVED IN THE COTSWOLDS
Hi, this is Tony Coe again with the Refinement NOT retirement podcast.
Today I want to talk about Pickleball, the fabulous sport with a quirky name that has brought enormous joy to our lives.
Pickleball has taken the USA by storm in the past decade. This new sport’s growth rate in America has been phenomenal, and now it’s spreading like wildfire in the UK and across Europe too. It's even arrived in rural England, in an "Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty" called The Cotswolds.
Imagine a sport that combines the best parts of tennis, badminton and table tennis - that’s pickleball in a nutshell. If you like any of those sports, you’ll likely take to pickleball like a duck to water! It’s a game that doesn’t take long to pick up - and it’s far less physically demanding than tennis.
Best of all, older people can defeat young’uns with guile because there’s a lot of strategy and finesse involved. This means it’s a fantastic, cross-generational sport. Like many families, Christine and I enjoy playing with our children and grandchildren - and we can still beat them believe it or not!
Discovering this wonderful sport has certainly been a major REFINEMENT in our lives. When we lived in London, we loved it so much that, with another pickleball couple (Andy and Sandy Homewood), we started and ran our own club in Surrey called WASSPS, which is still growing from strength to strength under the leadership of the Homewoods.
We left London in 2020 because of COVID and for a while struggled to find anywhere to play. We missed playing terribly. Eventually through Pickleball England’s dynamic CLUB LOCATOR on the organization’s website, we found a great venue in the Cotswolds.
Recently, Christine and I made two podcast episodes about this fantastic sport. In the first one we talk about our own Pickleball journey, and in the second I was thrilled to interview Karen Mitchell, the co-founder of the sports English organizing body, Pickleball England.
We hope you enjoy listening to both episodes. Part one is here and part two is here
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