Jamestown area pickleball club continues to grow – Jamestown Sun

JAMESTOWN – The growth of the Jamestown Area Pickleball Club continued this past weekend when the club hosted the Meet in the Middle pickleball tournament.

Club president Chad Kleinknecht said the tournament featured 78 people in teams of two in seven divisions. He said the youngest participant in the tournament was 11 years old and the oldest was 70 years old.

Kleinknecht said the tournament was the first the club had ever hosted. Kleinknecht said the teams played between five and 10 games.

“When you’re in a tournament, you can’t have the courts open and ask a lot of teams when we’re playing, when we’re playing,” Kleinknecht said. “It went pretty quickly. It was very, very well organized. When a team was done, you take the clipboard, record it, and then you go straight to the next game. Everyone said they had more than enough games, no one complained that there weren’t enough games.”

Kleinknecht not only helped organize the tournament, but also participated in it, taking third place in two divisions. In one of the divisions, Kleinknecht played with a partner he had never played with before.

“I was lucky enough to watch him and his mixed doubles partner, who won the tournament on Saturday, so I got a little bit of a feel for how he plays,” Kleinknecht said. “It’s a lot about communication and conversations, about who has the middle shot and keeps the balance. … We really got along really well and we played really really well together. Same thing as Saturday, I played with a young lady from Jamestown, her name is Danica, and it was the same thing: communication, keeping it out of other people’s sight.”

Before the tournament began, Kleinknecht and some volunteers helped get the courts playable again after it rained on Saturday, June 21. Kleinknecht said the club has been playing on the court for about three weeks since last October before returning to the court in April. Kleinknecht said the club’s spring league does not have a set day because players have different schedules and the weather does not always cooperate. Kleinknecht said the spring league has over 20 teams with over 40 players. In bad weather, Kleinknecht said, the club plays its games at the TRAC.

The club was also honored with the inclusion of a Jamestown Tourism video showcasing the Applied Digital Pickleball Courts at the Two Rivers Activity Center on June 24 and 25. Warren Abrahamson, marketing manager for the Jamestown Chamber Area of ​​Commerce, said the video is not part of the Discover Jamestown vlog series.

“We’ve found that you live in a community and appreciate the things that it has, but it’s about showing off what we have to others in a very humble way so they can say, ‘You know, Jamestown looks pretty great,'” Abrahamson said. “Many may not know that we have these outdoor pickleball courts. We know that we live here, that a lot of players play here, but there may be people who don’t know that. Our goal is to educate and show that Jamestown is a livable community, but there’s always something going on and there’s something to do in Jamestown.”

Abrahamson said discussions about the videos began three months ago. Filming the video took two days, during which they explored the city.

“This will just be a roundup of several different videos,” Abrahamson said. “The hope is that we’ll continue to dig deeper into the digital world and not just market digitally… Sometimes it’s about having good content. Sometimes a picture can say all you need to know, and we find the better pictures and videos we make, the better stories we can tell.”

Hello,
My name is Max O’Neill. I’m a sports reporter for The Jamestown Sun. I’m a native New Yorker and a 2020 graduate of Ithaca College with a degree in television and radio.