PORT ANGELES — This will be a pickleball weekend.
Hundreds of pickleball enthusiasts will descend upon Vern Burton Community Center on Saturday and Sunday for the charity 24-hour pickleball marathon.
The Pickle Primavera 2012 — billed as a pickleball celebration of spring — will provide funds to benefit the Shane Park Playground.
The Shane Park Playground Committee still needs to come up with $15,000 for concrete and remaining safety titles that will surround the 6,000-square-foot state-of-the-art playset at the park between Sixth and Eighth streets and E and G streets just west of Port Angeles.
Saturday and Sunday
The pickleball marathon, running from 10 a.m. Saturday to 10 a.m. Sunday at the community center, 308 E. Fourth St., should help make a dent into the final funds needed to complete the Shane Park project.
The marathon costs $10 per adult, and there’s a $5 suggested donation for children ages 5 to 17.
Children younger than 12 must be accompanied by an adult.
Participants can play any time or all the time during the event. They can leave and return an unlimited amount of times.
The marathon is for all ages and skill levels with lessons available. Teams or individuals can sign up.
Equipment will be provided but tennis shoes are required.
Participants can register at Port Angeles Senior Center, 328 E. Fourth St., 360-457-7004.
Pickleball is a racquet sport that combines elements of tennis, badminton and pingpong.
The sport is becoming more popular throughout the country, with hundreds of players throughout the North Olympic Peninsula.
A group of four players who have been participating in pickleball at the Port Angeles Senior Center for years, said between matches Tuesday morning that they would be playing in the marathon this weekend.
“We will be there,” 73-year-old Berit Cole of Sequim said.
“We’re going to be ready to play.”
Berit and her 79-year-old husband, Bob Cole, have been playing the sport for seven years.
The Coles aren’t nearly the oldest in their group that plays pickleball.
“There are several players up in their 80s,” Berit Cole said.
“We have a player 87, and one 85. The 87-year-old leaves pickleball to go bowling. They are really, really good.”
The youngster of the group, 65-year-old Margaret Klover of Port Angeles, said she is excited about this weekend’s marathon.
“If everybody has a good time at the marathon, we can do it again [to benefit] somebody else,” Klover said.
Klover has been playing the sport for 4½ years and has stayed in the beginners-intermediate group at the senior center where she started instead of moving up to the more advanced group.
“This is the group that I started with,” she said. “I feel like I’m at home here.”
The senior center has one court while the Vern Burton Community Center has three courts.
Players need to be at least 55 to play at the senior center but all ages can play at Vern Burton.
The younger players can be intense and fast, kind of like watching top amateurs playing table tennis.
“They play too fast for me,” Berit Cole said.
Although pickleball appears to be similar to tennis, there are key differences that make pickleball more accessible to a wider range of players, particularly children and seniors.
Chief among these differences is the speed of the ball that typically moves at one-third of the average speed of a tennis ball.
Equally important, however, is the size of the court, which is just under one-third of the total area of a tennis court.
But as Berit Cole said, some younger players have taken the sport to a new level.
It won’t matter at the marathon because there will be plenty of opportunity for players of all levels of skill to play.
