Bill Lafferty – Shouldering a load

Bill Lafferty is a “doer” and says he can’t count the number of times he’s been mistaken for a park maintenance person. He’ll be sweeping courts or repairing a net at Presidio Wall or Rossi and someone will say, “Can’t you do this another time. Don’t do this during the day, we want to play now.” To which he smiles and says, “I explain that keeping the courts in good condition is a community effort, and I’m a volunteer – I’m not with Rec and Park.”

For those of you who play Presidio Wall regularly, you might also know Bill as that “old guy who makes all those announcements”.  But his full-throated communiques at PW this year have been absolutely critical given all the procedural and access hours changes coming from Rec & Park needed to keep play organized and neighborhood residents tolerant.

Volunteers for the San Francisco Pickleball Community (SFPC) do much to ensure that players are able to enjoy the game. Bill is great at equipment logistics and repair, but even he can’t keep up with demand created as the sport explodes in popularity.  Volunteers have usually been responsible for putting up the nets before open session play and packing them into lock boxes at the end of the scheduled day. Bill explains, “SFPC has supplied 43 to 46 portable nets at our court locations. It was hard for the volunteers; they got scheduled and were on call to help when needed.”

To help our exhausted volunteer crew at PW, Bill led the transition to rolling nets, a problematic move when a court is shared. But pushing the wheeled nets off to the side when not in use has worked out, and Presidio Wall now has twelve rolling nets, ten of which were provided by donations from the Community. Bill noted that, “rolling nets make it easier for older people to play and make it less likely that a net will be destroyed.”  That’s another thing about Bill – he really cares that our public courts are open and accessible to everyone who wants to play.

Bill was also a critical leader and the main installer of the paddle queues that were rolled out and adopted at PW this year. The racks may look a bit like a Rube Goldberg contraption, but they’ve been effective in managing the chaos that usually occurs on Courts A-F on a crowded weekend day.

At Rossi, Bill designed and built a box and lock system for net storage.  It’s worked well, but recent vandalism has him improving upon the design and lobbying Rec & Park to allow rolling nets and dedicated hours.  We all know that progress with Rec & Park is difficult and slow and takes patience. Bill is very passionate about continuing to meet player demand as best he can and doesn’t understand why Rec and Parks is so slow and reluctant to support the sport.  It pains him to see how few courts, especially permanent ones, there are in the City.  But no matter how helpful volunteers are, we can’t build our own pickleball courts, so Bill continues the good fight trying to secure additional public court venues.

Bill was introduced to the game in 2016 by Carolyn Harvey, his neighbor and the person who brought pickleball to San Francisco. They played in Golden Gate Park before the Goldman Tennis Center replaced the aging courts. He’s played consistently ever since, with time out for, as Bill expresses it, “age-appropriate injuries:” foot surgery, shoulder surgery, and now knee problems.

But Bill is no one-dimensional Pickleball fanatic who hangs out in his workshop fixing nets when not playing. He’s an active senior with other hobbies – hunting boar with a bow and fishing in Baja, for example.  You may also see him around town walking his dog or riding his e-bike, which he does every day from his home in the Inner Sunset to the Presidio Wall and Rossi, or to the Boys & Girls Club, where he’s been a youth Pickleball program volunteer.

Before he retired 16 years ago, Bill was with the Fire Department, first as a fireman and then as a paramedic. As Bill says, “Firemen are there to serve. When the fire alarm goes off, there’s no red tape.” He wants to see SF Rec & Park do the same with Pickleball.

Bill has been a superstar when it comes to volunteerism and doing all he can to serve our Pickleball community. Many thanks and kudos, Bill !!

-Judy Goddess