Welcome back to all our pickleball players!. We had the first of our two yearly Pickleball Club meetings on Jan. 10 (the next will be in November). Welcome to our newest members: Paula Warhoover, Teresa and Dan Clark, Linda Plant, Ronda Foote, Jann Charette, and Natalya Smith. We hope to see you all out on the courts! We discussed our club’s scheduled hours. Current winter hours until April 1 are Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday from 2 to 5 p.m.; Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday from 9 to 11 a.m.; Wednesday and Saturday from 6 to 9 p.m.; and various Saturdays. We encourage anyone interested in playing (or learning to play) to join us at those times. If you’re new to pickleball and would like an intro/orientation to the game, please sign up on the New Player Orientation sheet found in the glass case at the post office building (the one underneath the pickleball).
Speaking of glass cases and playing pickleball (or tennis), the Sports Court Reservation sheets are also found in a glass case at the post office building (the case that faces east). The sheets are legal size and found on a clipboard there. Both the Pickleball Club and the Tennis Club use these sheets to reserve our club playing hours (we do it monthly). But, really, they are for the entire SunBird community. If you’d like to get some friends together and play either pickleball or tennis, just find a time that is not already reserved, add your name and phone number to the sheet at the start time you’d like, draw an arrow down through the time you’d want to play (two-hour max), and come out and play. We realize not everyone wants to play with a club, but we also want to encourage everyone in the community to come out and use this great resource. We do have lights for nighttime play on Courts 3 and 4. There’s a switch on the light pole inside the courts. Just be sure to turn them off when you’re finished playing.
We had a great Pickleball 4 Purple Alzheimer’s Association Tournament on Feb. 24-26. I think we’ve all been impacted by this disease through close family, extended family, and friends at some point in our life, and support for Alzheimer’s research to find a cure is so important. We want to say a huge thank you to the SunBird community, clubs, and individuals who donated raffle prizes and bought tickets, players who got out there and battled on the courts, and volunteers who donated their time and energy organizing and monitoring play. We will report more about the Alzheimer’s Tournament in next month’s newspaper. Stay tuned!