QUAD CITIES PICKLEBALL CLUB ANNUAL PICNIC AND MEETING
SUNDAY, SEPT. 25 3:00pm
Cindy Wiseman presented these remarks because our President, Steve Morrison, was sidelined with Covid.
· Welcome everyone, and thanks for coming.
We extend a big thank you to Julie Miller and the Social Committee for putting on an extraordinary event.
We hope everyone realizes that just by attending this picnic you have received full value for your $15 annual membership!
· Tournament
Before we summarize some of the activities the Club has undertaken in the past year we would like to recognize the terrific job that Yen Dao, Cindy Wiseman, and the rest of the tournament committee did in running an outstanding tournament last weekend. There were about 400 participants, nearly double last year’s number. The money that this tournament nets will be used for the benefit of all Club members in the year to come.
I hope you like the little gifts you got when you checked in today. You can thank last year’s tournament committee for those.
The Past Year
Let’s quickly run through some of the highlights of the past year and recognize the people who made them happen:
1. Memberships
As usual, Annie Edwards has been working hard behind the scenes to keep our membership roster up to date and send countless communications out to our members.
We currently have between 500 and 600 members. It’s hard to get closer than that because there are about 150 people whose memberships are due this month and who have not rejoined yet. We expect that most of them will.
2. Court Amenities
This past year the Club took a very proactive approach to helping out our various locations with whatever they needed to improve conditions. We spent more than $6000 on anything from windscreens to nets to squeegees and ball holders, for ten different locations.
We plan to take the same approach in the next year.
Thanks to Gina DeWulf for coordinating that whole effort. And thanks to all the Court Ambassadors who worked with her on this project.
3. We have also bought 2000 pickleballs at discounted prices and resold them at cost, saving our members over $3000 compared to retail rates. In fact, if you bought as few as nine balls from the Club you already paid for your annual membership.
We’ll continue buying them as long as you keep breaking them.
We have just about sold out of the last batch but another 500 balls were ordered the other day and should be available very soon.
4. Training:
Ruth Senneff and Sharon Walters between them taught just over 150 new pickleball players how to get started with the game.
By the end of next week Steve Ebner will have coordinated six advanced clinics, teaching about 96 people in 3-day, 2-hour clinics.
Ruth’s Youth Committee put over 150 of the area’s young people through basic pickleball training, tournaments, and a lot of good times in eight different communities.
5. Social Events
Julie Miller’s Social Committee organized numerous fun events for us in the past year, including a beautiful Christmas party, a night out with the River Bandits, two Dinks and Drinks sessions, free donut distributions, and, of course, this picnic.
6. Media:
First, we have a beautiful new logo. This was created by a consultant in a project led by Ruth Senneff.
Then, our new website. We felt this was necessary not because the previous website was bad but because it was so difficult to update. We wanted to move to a new platform to make it easier to keep it updated and current for all of you. I hope you’ve all had a chance to look at it. If you haven’t, please do so and we’d love to get any feedback you’d like to offer. I’m particularly pleased with the map-based approach to finding out where our playing locations are.
Thanks to Kate Parr, Chris Rodrigues, and Anne Colville for helping lead that effort.
Third, because of our new logo of course we had to have new merchandise. Thanks to Judy Peterson, Cindy Wiseman, and Dave Langrock we have a shop full of new shirts, hats, and visors, not to mention bag tags and koozies for sale at very reasonable prices. If you haven’t checked those out yet, you can do so here today, or check on the website at any time.
7. Changes to Playing Locations
a. The Tennis Club has created eight permanent indoor pickleball courts.
b. Sheridan Meadows was resurfaced
c. Six new courts in Muscatine are almost finished
d. Unfortunately it looks as if we’ll be losing the Life Fitness Center
Sometime in 2023, we hope to see:
e. Kiwanis resurfaced
f. Mel McKay resurfaced and possibly expanded
8. Presentation to Ruth Senneff
We are very sorry to be losing Ruth Senneff to another town. She has been involved with the Club from its very outset, has been on the Board, has taught hundreds of new players through the Pb101 program, and has been the driving force behind a dynamic and growing youth training program for many years. We can only hope to keep these things going when she is gone.
As a small token of our appreciation and thanks for all she has done the QC Pickleball Community is pleased to provide Ruth with a gift certificate to a garden shop in Ankeny to help her start developing the yard and garden in her new home. If you didn’t already know, another of Ruth’s passions is gardening and we understand she will have plenty of that to do in her new home.
Some of her pickleball friends have donated money as well, and we are simply passing that on to Ruth to use as she develops a new youth training program in her new community.
9. Thanks to the outgoing Board members
a. Scott Campbell VP
b. Laurie Ochs, Treasurer
c. Ruth Senneff, At Large
d. Cindy Wiseman, At Large
e. Tim Harty, At Large
10. Your 2022-23 Board
Incumbents: Steve Morrison, President; one more year
Calvin Moss, Secretary; one more year
New Nominees:
Gina DeWulf, Vice President; two years
Frank Ludgate, Treasurer; two years
Five At-Large Candidates:
Brad Dye, continuing for one more year
Sue Erickson,
Carolyn Hingst
Christine Rodrigues
Terry Wangler
Please contact any of these Board members with suggestions for making our Club even better.
11. You can see that we’ve had a busy year as a Board and as a Club. More importantly, we hope you’ve all had a good year of playing and mostly having fun. We are seeing that pickleball is evolving, not only in terms of playing styles, but also because of the pressure on the courts caused by the explosive growth in new players. We are lucky in this area to have so many choices of places to play. However, we know it is more difficult now for newer players to always find a place where they feel comfortable playing at their level.
One of the challenges we face as a Club and a community is to find ways to continue to make everyone feel welcome and to look for approaches that allow players of different skill levels to fit in.
So let’s all be aware of that and do everything we can to help make all players feel welcome, regardless of ability and experience.
Thanks again to Julie Miller and the Social Committee for organizing this great event.