Keep playing Ladies play pickleball at the Bristol Senior Center this winter. Pickleball remains popular during winter, moves indoors Story & photos by Erica Drzewiecki What some thought would just be a passing craze has turned into a lifestyle for a growing group of local residents. They come together at the Bristol Senior Center several times a week and when covid-19 closed the facility over the winter, they moved their program outdoors. “We took the nets out back and played in the parking lot through January and February,” said Mike Pletscher, one of dozens of members who comes to the Senior Center every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for Pickleball from 1 to 4 p.m. Dozens more play Wednesday and Friday evenings from 6 to about 8:30 p.m. Pickleball employs a paddle slightly larger than a ping-pong paddle, a ball similar to a wiffle ball and is played indoors and outdoors on a court about the size of one used for badminton with a modified tennis net. It was dubbed “the fastest B6 Connecticut PRIME TIME • January 2022 Pickleball employs a paddle slightly larger than a ping-pong paddle, a ball similar to a wiffle ball and is played indoors and outdoors. growing sport in America” over a decade ago. Back then Bristol Senior Center Director Patty Tomascak and Assistant Director Jason Krueger made it their mission to introduce the sport to local seniors. “It was the fall of 2013; we called it the Director’s Challenge,” Tomascak recalled. The pair started playing in the center’s gymnasium, inviting members who poked their heads in to join a match. Rich Berardy was one of those early players. “I came down here and saw people hitting a ball back and forth,” he remembered. “There were four of us who started playing. Within six months we had a dozen people.” Senior Center staff installed pickleball nets and repainted the gym floor to create two regulation-size courts. Now it’s become such a hit, that
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