Daniel Mason still describes himself as a beginner when it comes to pickleball – but he already has big plans in and for the sport.
Daniel was born without hands and with half a left arm, but when he joined the David Lloyd Clubs, he met Level 1 pickleball coach and Latvia international Sabine Brezina, one of the staff in Peterborough.
“He mentioned to me, ‘Oh, I used to play a bit of tennis when I was a child,'” she recalls. “I introduced him to pickleball, he had his first session, he loved it, and it all went from there!”
Since their first meeting, the two have worked together to make pickleball a sport he can participate in. His usual method for holding an implement would be to use both arms and squeeze it in his grip, but Sabine realised early on that would be limiting for any racquet sport. The two tried out various adaptations to enable him to play, inspired in part by disabled pickleballer Petey Bruce in the USA, and landed on a technique using boxer’s wrap to bind the paddle and the arm together.
“It’s a work in progress,” says Daniel, pointing out that a slightly different angle in the binding means that he has to play his shot slightly differently too.
Daniel feels very strongly about the role that coaches can play in making pickleball a more inclusive sport. He is full of praise for the fact that Sabine suggested he might like to have a go and saw positive development opportunities for him rather than potential obstacles, adding that this was critical in giving him the confidence to try the sport and be bitten by the pickleball bug. Like every other player, he says, he simply wants to play well, get better and have more even more fun, and Sabine has supported him to do that.
“I want to bring more people into pickleball!” says Sabine, who began playing herself less than two years ago, and has since gone on to compete at the inaugural European Championship. “When I took Dan onto the pickleball court for the very first time I didn’t treat him any differently than anyone else I introduced pickleball to. Of course there were some adaptations we had to make to make it work for him, but in my eyes it was just another person that wants to play this awesome game.”
“It’s a shift of one’s identity”
Daniel also points out that some individuals may not want to be seen as an “adaptive player”, playing in a separate category, and may prefer to play in their age group or the usual capability bands of 3.0, 3.5, 4.0, dependent on their skill. That flexibility, he says, is what makes pickleball great.
Daniel’s sense of self has been altered radically in just the few months he has been playing pickleball. One of the reasons he joined the gym in the first place was to improve his physical and mental health. He did not play sport regularly growing up, with no Paralympics to give him visible role models to emulate, and never considered himself someone able to be physically active.
“Suddenly, to find this, truly it’s brought a different dimension to what I feel I can do,” he says, “it’s a sort of shift of one’s identity. It’s really quite profound on on a certain level, without getting too philosophical about it. It shifts your confidence as a person.”
While Daniel is quick to highlight how much Sabine’s expertise and encouragement has done for him, she is equally quick to hand the credit straight back to him as he continues to liaise with other players and Pickleball England to share his lived experience and help develop policy to expanding the sport’s inclusivity.
“Dan is a very inspiring man,” says Sabine, “and that’s down to him to reaching out to Pickleball England and talking about the inclusion in the sport, and potentially inspiring many more people joining the community who may not have felt like they could before.”
