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Cool Classes: Pickleball

Brett Davis (center) offers Pickleball tips to Hunter Brown (right) and Michael Talbert.

Michael Talbert shows up to pickleball class early on a Friday with a new Gamma Fusion 2.0 paddle. “I upped my game,” he explains to Hunter Brown, who arrives with his fiancé Lauren Smeddon on this June morning.

Brown begins to twist at the waist. Once. Twice. He’s finished warming up. In a few minutes, he and others will take part in lessons and games on a shiny, newly refinished floor in the Lifetime Activities Center on Salt Lake Community College’s Taylorsville Redwood Campus.

That’s right. It’s a class for pickleball, one of many fun courses from which students can choose within the Lifelong Wellness program to fulfill a one-credit requirement within their majors while at SLCC. Pickleball, in case you haven’t heard of it, shares some of the tennis vernacular – serve, volley, fault, doubles, singles – only the serves are underhand, the court is smaller and there are paddles instead of racquets. The ball, however, looks more like a whiffle ball.

Avery Jones smashes a return in Pickleball.

Now you’re ready to play pickleball. And so is Talbert, 40, who lives in Sandy with his wife and child. The 13-year Navy veteran worked on aircraft while in the military. Now he’s at SLCC studying aviation maintenance and plans to continue with aerospace at a four-year school and then, hopefully, a job with Boeing. “I didn’t know what it was,” he says about pickleball. “Now I’m in the class, and it’s fun.” He heard it combines elements of badminton, tennis and ping pong. He’s right.

Oh, and there’s a “kitchen” in pickleball, but you’ll have to take Brett Davis’ pickleball class if you want to know more about that. Davis, also a tennis instructor at SLCC, has been teaching pickleball at the college for four years, during which time the sport has grown in popularity. “It’s very competitive,” he says. “It’s strategic. It’s like chess, because it’s slower (than tennis). You have time to think. And you’re not as sore (as with tennis) afterwards.”

But what about the name – pickleball? Davis, no doubt like a lot of serious pickleballers, heard it has something to do with how a dog named Pickles chased the ball belonging to the people who invented the sport. Pickleball allegedly arose out of boredom. No surprise there, as was probably the case with most sports. And the name may have also been derived from a comparison to oarsmen who were “leftovers” from other boats. You’ll have to cobble together your own sources for a more definitive answer – or just go with the dog story.

Suffice it to say, Brown, 20, and his fiancé have a blast on the pickleball court. He is taking pre-med classes at SLCC and wants to be an anesthetist. “He signs up, and I’m like, ‘What? He’s taking pickleball?’” laughs Smeddon. “I really didn’t know what it was, and then my mom started getting really into it. He played with her, and it was super fun.” Future mother-in-law, also a tennis player, usually beats Brown at pickleball. Strategic, indeed.

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