When Pepper and I first moved to Montana in 2019, we wanted to get to know people in the area. We jumped into trivia nights, I played with a local bridge club, and we even went to a pickup pickleball game. The pickleball crowd was entirely over-60 people whose athletic ability wasn’t stellar, but whose love of the game was obvious. After learning how to play, we jumped into the games. After a while I was asked to “not play so hard” by the coach/organizer guy. Apparently I was running around too much to get deep shots, and generally playing at a higher athletic level than the rest of the people. Fair enough. (We didn’t go back.)
Fast forward to today, when we played pickleball with a couple of senior missionaries (who are, notably, in their 60s). Unlike the Kalispell club, they’re serious players who are quite good. They taught us a few “tricks” of the game– like how to position ourselves to receive the serve and so on– and then proceeded to wallop us. We posed afterward, looking appropriately serious for this serious endeavor.
It was actually a lot of fun. Prior to this, pickleball held no appeal for me because every game I’d played (not many) had been with people who didn’t really know what they were doing, or had little to no athletic ability. Being on the court with solid players completely changed the game!
Since our friends had driven two hours out to the Valley just to visit us, we all went and hung out with the young missionaries too. Our little group played nine-square and had a blast.
