We were able to resume our free June beginners lessons in 2021 after having been unable to hold them in 2020 due to Covid! For the first four Tuesday evenings during the month of June at 6pm at Whittier Park, a group of 32 SMPA volunteers provided loaner paddles, balls, and drill instruction to help beginners learn the basic strokes and rules of pickleball. The SMPA volunteer instructors who were invited to participate were given detailed lesson plans to learn and follow for the clinics. All instructors were of 3.5 playing level or above, most had previous pickleball instruction experience, four were certified pickleball instructors, and two were certified pickleball referees.

While in past years we’d had perhaps two dozen participating beginners for our free June lessons, we expected and prepared for up to 64 beginners this year due to the high demand we’d already seen for our ladder leagues during May. Surprisingly, but wonderfully!, 97 new players turned out for the first lesson!! We handled the amazing turnout as best we could during the first night’s 90 minute lesson, and Paul modified the lessons to be two 60-minute sessions for the following weeks with a cap of 48 players for a 6pm session and the rest welcome at a 7pm session. And we had 101 beginners total across our 2nd week’s two sessions, and 98 in total for the final lesson sessions following a week 3 lesson rain-out. We had 23 instructors present on average for each week of instruction which brought our student:instructor ratio to approximately 4:1 in week one and nearly 2:1 from week two on!

Beginning on June 11th, we added free Friday night beginner’s mixers at Upton Park so all of our new players could practice the skills they learned on Tuesday nights! These mixers continued throughout the summer, and were very popular!

In June 2022, SMPA held another round of beginners’ pickleball lessons with student numbers remaining high, but we held no-beginners’ mixers in 2022 instead introducing a beginners’ pickleball league for newer players who reached the 2.5 level. Realizing that our all volunteer run 501c3 non-profit organization cannot sustain teaching 100+ beginners at a time both due to the burden that puts on our volunteer staff as well as the burden adding 100+ new players annually puts on our already overburdened courts (our 15 courts hold just 60 players total at any given time, but our membership has been averaging >400 members for the past several years), SMPA’s board of directors recently voted to cease offering large group pickleball lessons. Therefore, in 2023, SMPA may again offer some beginners’ mixers as part of a set of mixers for various playing levels, and we will be re-vamping our beginners’ lesson program entirely due to the huge surge in pickleball player numbers that has happened over the past several years, taxing our courts’ capacity and over-burdening our all volunteer staff, particularly the key members of our all volunteer staff who are responsible for the majority of our programming, events, and business operations.