Pickleball Scotland Ambassador Sandra Macrae picked up an academic prize at the end of 2024 – marking the development of an incredible project that’s now unfolding across the country.
In front of a delegation of over 170 attendees representing 50 different organisations and institutions, Sandra’s was selected as the best oral presentation in the good practice category at the Scottish Physical Activity Research Connections conference for her case study of Pickleball for Wellbeing, based on a 12-month pilot project delivered in conjunction with Pickleball Scotland.
And it shows how much she’s achieved – going from a pickleball novice who picked up the sport as a student during recovery from a serious illness to an important advocate for its health and wellbeing benefits.
“I was looking for an activity that wouldn’t be so vigorously paced as maybe some of the other racquet sports, and pickleball really just came about accidentally, because I was on the campus at the Academy of Sport and Wellbeing, which is the sports and fitness centre attached to the University of Highlands and Islands at Perth, they had a community-access recreational session running there that I just chanced upon,” she explains.
“I thought, ‘Well, that looks a little bit less intense than some of the other racquet sports.’ The joy of it is that pickleball is so accessible for a number of reasons, but one of the main ones is that, of course, it can be played indoors all year round, and that’s not an issue in other parts of the world, but here, particularly in Scotland, we have such poor weather at times over the winter, but our outdoor season for any outdoor activity is so short. If you talk to any tennis players here in Scotland who are playing outdoors, their season can tend to be quite short, so it’s not uncommon for people to be looking for an indoor activity. I think it’s probably taken off reasonably well in Scotland because of that.
“So it’s an all-year-round activity, but also just really easy to pick up. I thought, ‘Well, it looks like I could manage it.’ It’s a smaller court space. It’s indoors. I’m not going to be outdoors in the elements. There’s just a lot that was very accessible about it, so I gave it a go.”
“People who want to be fit and well would love this!”
That accessibility included the shorter game rotations, every eight minutes, meaning that rest breaks were built into the session. She was also struck by seeing the players – who she describes as people who looked like her, coming from all backgrounds and just wanting to have fun and enjoy the sport for its health and wellbeing purposes rather than serious competition.
“They were people my sort of age, who were interested in being fit and active and being a bit social. You could hear the laughter. They were all laughing and having fun.”
Sandra was on a career break after her illness and had decided to go back into education. Pickleball became the focus of her research during her MA studies in the area of health and wellbeing. Many people who have not participated in sport before, or at least not for a long time, can find it intimidating to go into a sporting environment, and may well have anxiety around competition or even social gameplay.
“It can take a fair bit of endurance,” says Sandra. “Even allowing for rotations on and off court, not everybody really has the endurance for that initially – it depends how much physical activity they’ve been doing.
“It definitely did occur to me very early on, ‘I love this, it’s great, and I can imagine lots of other people that want to be fit and well would love it, but they might not have the endurance for it, and they might also find it difficult to [progress] straight into standard recreational play, where it’s timed and also scored.'”
Sandra suggested to the club that it would be a good idea to run a session at a more moderate pace, with an emphasis on participation rather than competition. With their backing, she facilitated that, and trained as a Pickleball Scotland ambassador.
And the sessions took off so quickly that there was often a waiting list of people wanting to attend. That was when Sandra decided to go all-in and applied to the Pickleball Scotland Coaching and Education pathway, getting support from the Perth and Kinross Live Active Leisure Sport for Change Network’ to develop an inclusion format for pickleball focusing on its positive psychological benefits.
“People who lack confidence for participation in sport – can you get them moving more? Can you offer them an entry point that’s modified in a way that means they don’t experience that barrier to participation?” she explains. “What you want is people just to enjoy the game so they’ll come back next week.
“I didn’t intentionally join a pickleball club looking to do that! It just occurred to me that the timing was useful.”
Smiles matter more than scores
Sandra delivered the pilot project in Perth for 12 months with a weekly 90-minute session for up to 16 players using three courts, helping participants progress towards the Scottish government’s recommended guideline for 150 minutes of physical activity per week. The intent was for the sessions to be confidence-building and inclusive for everyone – no matter what the health condition, recovery journey, disability or additional support needed.
Sandra found that with players’ sense of belonging and confidence increasing, their self-esteem and identity also changed, and as they gradually increased their endurance and improve their pickleball skills in a relaxed, fun way, then they also started feeling motivated to engage in other healthier lifestyle habits. That meant that Pickleball for Wellbeing was not only aligned with the Pickleball Scotland and Sport for Change inclusion ethos, but also met the challenges documented in the 2024 Scottish Government Physical Activity and Recreation for All framework.
When Sandra qualified as a Pickleball Scotland club coach, she partnered with
Scottish Disability Sport to learn their Inclusive Practice approach and she used
the STEP (space, task, equipment, people) framework for adapting pickleball so
that it could be safer, more welcoming to all, and as inclusive as possible.
“If someone has had a hip replacement, a knee replacement, surgery on their back, we could reduce the court space, just play it as a game of dinking and not use the whole court,” she suggests. “We never said to any of our participants, ‘You have to play the game this way.’ We said, ‘As long as you’re having fun and moving about, that’s enough for us.'”
Now an officially endorsed inclusion format that has been adopted by Pickleball Scotland, the Pickleball for Wellbeing mantra, ‘Smiles Matter More Than Scores’, is spreading across the country as well as further afield, with sessions starting up in different communities for lots of different groups.
As a member of the coach development team, Sandra now delivers the specialist Pickleball Scotland continuing professional development training course for ambassadors and club coaches to learn how to facilitate Pickleball for Wellbeing inclusion activity. In collaboration with the coaching and education officer at Pickleball Scotland, Professor Nanette Mutrie, she has already helped train 25 facilitators, with more courses planned for this year. Some of the newly-trained facilitators had started out as Pickleball for Wellbeing participants themselves, and their success stories are, Sandra says, invaluable, and evidence that the format works.
“The sense of empowerment is extraordinary,” says Sandra. “If they then facilitate that next cohort of new participants, the new participants will then be talking to someone with lived experience, who can say, ‘I’ve been where you are. I know what it’s like to turn up somewhere and not be very sure of yourself, but you’re welcome here.'”
