It was love at first sight when Scott Mayo discovered pickleball last year – so much so that he got a tattoo to symbolise “his lifelong commitment to the sport!”
The 27-year-old and a group of friends in Newport, Gwent, started playing last autumn after Scott returned from travelling in Australia and joined a local gym that offered a weekly hour of free racket sports.
He initially roped in three friends to play this sport he had never heard of with an “intriguingly silly name.” He remembers: “Within five minutes of us hitting a ball, we stopped so I could go on the app and book for next day. We all said to each other, ‘This is so much fun!'”
They were all hooked and soon roped in more new players from their close friendship circle. They even created their own version of the DUPR ratings and Scott started writing weekly match reports laden with in-jokes, sarcastic comments and expletives.
Then, just four months after that first game, Scott walked into Newport Velodrome showing off an inky tribute to his friends’ devotion to pickleball. The inscription says ‘WOAT’ (i.e. Worst Of All Time) – a reference to his friend Jack who finished bottom of their bespoke ratings system.
Scott recalls: “My mates looked at me and said, ‘What have you done?’ But it’s a symbol of my lifelong commitment to pickleball. There’s no turning back now! I will die on a pickleball court.”
Scott has quickly become the best player in his group – and one of the best players in Wales. He still plays with his friends, but has also joined clubs in nearby Abertillery and Llantrisant. He plays in the Dragon League and has put himself forward for selection for the European Pickleball Championships in Southampton in November.
He says his “happy place” is practising by himself with a ball machine in a dimly-lit sports hall. “Maybe I am slightly insane with how much I love it,” he laughs.
Scott, who is an Enterprise Officer at Cardiff University, grew up in a sporting household. His father Paul Mayo played on golf’s European Tour for 10 years and his brother Josh is also a golf pro. Scott played at county level at several sports as a youngster, but had never fully settled on one until fixating on pickleball last year.
He recently joined the Board of Pickleball Wales (the nation’s as-yet ‘unofficial’ governing body formed by Paul Byron and Katherine Knowles) with a mission to get more young people into pickleball. “It still has that stigma of being an older people’s sport, so I want to help find younger people in Wales to compete against and play with. I really want to pursue this route and see how far I can go with it,” he said.
Despite his ambitions, Scott will never lose the love of playing pickleball – and other sports – with his lifelong friends. “I don’t know what we would’ve done without the sport,” he says.
“We all finished uni and started choosing our own directions in life, so you start to see your friends less and less. It started as a perfect excuse to meet up and get some exercise, but it absolutely took a hold of us. What we’ve built together is so, so wonderful.”
What’s a tattoo of a potato go to do with pickleball?