Pickleball Youth Outreach Community Programs in San Francisco

SFPC has been developing community Pickleball youth outreach programs.  An active group of volunteers, led by Luke Vandertie, have an on-going program with the San Francisco Boys and Girls Clubs with weekly after-school late-afternoon play sessions held at 3 different SFBGC locations in Excelsior, Hayes Valley and now at the Mission’s Columbia Park clubhouse facility.  The kids have a ball.  Additionally, a regular community training session is held weekly at Outer Mission’s Minnie & Lovie Ward Rec Center, hosted by Mary Jue.

Certain SF Unified schools have also been approached. In fact, Girard Watts, a teacher at Visitation Valley Middle School and a regular at the Louis Sutter courts, has been successfully introducing Pickleball to interested students in his class. How successfully?  Well, here’s a video link and below is a testimonial written by a budding super star pupil.  It reads:

Dear Mr. Watts.

I think there should be more Pickleball / PE time everyday because its fun and it gives us exercise for the day. Now you must be wondering what the other students would do if they didn’t wanna play pickleball. They could play 4-square and read. Now if your wondering how we could fit that into our daily schedule, we could do a mixed schedule where when its EID, bookclub could be doing math, and when its time for Readers, we could be doing book club on articles we read. That way after the time for everything has pasted, we could play pickleball. This also teaches students how to multi-task even when others are doing something else.

We give the author an A for critical thinking and creative writing!

None of these programs go anywhere without volunteer involvement.  To learn more, CLICK HERE and we’ll get you started on having a blast while you’re sparking an interest in active sports with a whole new generation of San Francisco youth.