America's Fastest Growing Sport Comes to Rye Brook / Port Chester

Rye Brook’s Birthday Bash will be bigger and better this year. The giant slide will be there. So will the water balloon guns and the air bounce and many more rides for the kids. Accompanying them this year will be a fun event for the parents, a Pickleball demonstration.

Never heard of it? Pickleball is a fun sport that combines many elements of tennis, badminton and Ping-Pong. It’s played both indoors or outdoors on a badminton-sized court and a slightly modified tennis net. Participants use a paddle and a plastic ball with holes. The game is played with either doubles or singles.

A Pickleball paddle itself is about double the size of a ping-pong paddle and the lightweight ball resembles a plastic wiffle ball. Power is not the secret to success but strategy and controlled ball placement are. A Pickleball court is about one-third the size of a tennis court, which means less ground to cover. Maybe all of this explains why it is particularly popular with 40+ men and women. “I used to play tennis so Pickleball was a very easy sport for me to learn to play and have fun while remaining fit”, says Rye Brook resident Ashok Pahwa, who claims the sport is “more addictive than ice cream or binge watching Netflix”. Ashok currently plays on courts at the Eastern Greenwich Civic Center and says he is looking forward to playing on courts in his own village.

The demonstration during the Rye Brook Birthday Bash will be held on the Basketball court in the Rye Hills Park (connected to Crawford Park) from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm on Saturday June 16, 2018.

Robert Bertolacci, Superintendent of the Rye Brook Parks and Recreation Department said “We are excited to bring something new to our residents. We are always on the lookout for innovative new ideas and the fact that Pickleball is one of the fastest growing sports for adults in the country made us want to look at it more closely as a potential candidate for further development based on resident interest.”

For more information, email RyeBrookPickleball@gmail.com