London Pickleball has rapidly become one of the biggest pickleball clubs in the country since its founding in January 2020, with a highly active membership of over 400 players.
Of those 400, 260 play at least twice a month in the nine sessions per week that the club puts on for all skill levels from 2.0 to 4.5.
“We have right down to people who are 2.0 level players, and we have players that are 4.5 level”, says Louise Stephens, who helped to found the club in 2020.
Louise Stephens helped get the club started. She first came across the game in 2016 and volunteered at another club before starting London Pickleball.
“I loved it straight away, I was totally hooked after one go”, she told Pickleball 52. However, she got off to something of a stuttering start, because straight after her first two sessions, she headed to America.
She revealed: “Instead of going skiing at Lake Tahoe, which was the holiday plan, I googled pickleball at Lake Tahoe and went off and played pickleball instead!”.
Despite rupturing her ACL on holiday whilst playing pickleball, Louise’s enthusiasm for the sport remained undimmed and she helped to create a pickleball club in 2016 upon her return to the UK.
London Pickleball was formed four years later thanks to Louise’s belief that the game should be open to everyone, not just those able to meet a certain required standard.
“I started up a new group which I called London Pickleball because I wanted anybody from anywhere being able to come and play,” she says.
No membership fees are charged, with players simply turning up and paying for each session they join. Louise is keen to ensure that nobody pays for sessions they cannot attend.
The success of the club has also enabled her to assist new clubs, providing nets, paddles and balls to clubs in Camden and Edmonton, along with supplying nets to Gareth Golightly, the Wheelie Pickleballer, to help with his efforts to set up pickleball sessions for veterans.
The community ethos runs deep in the club, whose membership includes players with Parkinson’s disease, along with 12 deaf players.
“The fact we welcome everybody and accept everybody is probably why we’re successful”, says Louise.
“We’ve got one woman who is so, so bad. She’s done Introduction to Pickleball about 16 times, and she says, ‘do you want me to stop coming?’, and I’m like ‘No! You’re first on my list, if you want to come, come!’ She needs the sport for her mental health.
“It’s the one time of the week that she gets out of her house, and she smiles for two hours, and to me, that’s what pickleball is all about.”
The wider community also plays a key role in keeping the club running, with Amanda Traylor working hard behind the scenes to keep on top of all of the admin involved in running a club with 400 members, and senior players helping to coach and run sessions throughout the week.
“Amanda is amazing,” says Louise. “I get all the credit and she does all the work!
“When people talk about the pickleball family, sometimes it sounds a bit corny, but it is a family and it is a community.”.
With the sport having grown so much in the last few years, Louise says she is proud to have been involved from the start: “I know it’s going to grow and grow and grow and we’re all going to get left behind.
“But we’re part of the legacy. My partner and I won the women’s doubles at the first ever Nationals. No matter who wins it now, they can never say they were the first! We can say we were the first winners and I’m quite proud to say that I started up one of the first successful clubs and that I was the first ever Volunteer of the Year [in 2021]”.
