South Suffolk Pickleball Club has experienced such rapid growth that its founder Sue Nicol calls the sport ‘dangerously addictive.’
Since the pandemic, the club has had to expand from one to two venues in East Bergholt and Colchester as it has grown its timetable of sessions to five nights and three mornings per week. This packed diary includes matches against other clubs, tournaments and coaching clinics. The club has 110 members, of which 70 play every week.
Sue (pictured above on right, alongside club membership secretary Jo Green) retired as a Pilates and Zumba teacher just before the pandemic, but South Suffolk Pickleball Club has grown so quickly since then that being its Chair has become almost a full-time occupation for her.
Sue tells Pickleball52: “We now play Monday morning and night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday morning and night, every other Friday night and Saturday mornings.
“Other clubs have started visiting regularly for matches and players from other clubs have started coming to our Friday Club. We get enquiries every other day from people wanting to join. We’re building mind-blowingly quickly!”
The club’s event calendar is rammed – and many of the events are followed by drinks and a buffet in the local pub (the landlord is delighted!)
Sue hosts Pickleball England’s East Midlands Doubles League every other month at the club’s second venue, a new leisure centre in Colchester. She says: “We get players coming from all over to play in that, as well as our own club members. It’s maximum 30 players but we’re always over-subscribed.”
Six of the club’s members have gained their Level 1 coach certification and Sue is committed to raising standards by bringing in external coaches too. Sam Basford recently visited the club and is returning in March. The clinic is already sold out.
Amidst the organising, paperwork, WhatsApps and phone calls, Sue has one remaining ambition: to bring in more juniors. They have had a few – including a Ukrainian boy whose family Sue had taken in following the Russian invasion and a local lad who gained a rugby scholarship at a US college (but says he secretly prefers pickleball!) – but Sue is seeking ways to drum up more young participants.
Sue discovered pickleball in 2017 while at a health farm. A keen badminton and tennis player, she had injured her back and was looking for a slightly gentler pursuit. Pickleball fitted the bill.
“It absolutely hit the spot,” she says. “As a Pilates teacher, I saw the potential of pickleball for an ageing population. There’s a lot of squatting, lateral movement, and of course the psychological benefits of how sociable it is.”
Returning from the health farm, Sue searched for a nearby club, found none, so started South Suffolk Pickleball Club herself in 2018. They played happily one night and week, then Covid hit. “It decimated us – we almost had to start from scratch,” she says. But the growth since the end of lockdown has been phenomenal.
“The club is suddenly everything I want it to be,” she beams. “It’s just happened so quickly and it’s such a lot of work keeping all the balls in the air at the moment. I’m being careful not to over-stretch myself, but it is tremendous fun.”
