A student is combining her leadership skills, passion to outreach to the community, and love of an uprising sport to bring a new club to Revere. Although it’s not exactly traditional, the members of this club meet in parking lots outside of the school to play their unique sport: pickleball.
Junior Lauren Tompkins added to the already extensive list of clubs at Revere High School (RHS) with Pickleball Club. The sport is booming in popularity among all ages, and Tompkins took the initiative to bring the fun and social sport to the high school.
Tompkins took the lead in Pickleball Club as the founder and president. She introduced the club, explaining what they do.
“Pickleball Club is a fun way to get involved with the school. We meet and we play pickleball and we play doubles and we just have a lot of fun,” Tompkins said.
Tompkins explained how she got into playing pickleball and why she brought the club to Revere.
“I started getting into pickleball last summer, and I just realized that it’s a really fun sport. . . . I thought that there’s not really many clubs like that at Revere. A lot of the clubs you sit down in classrooms and you talk about stuff, but there’s not really many interactive clubs. So I thought it would be a really good thing to bring to Revere and get kids more active and more involved,” Tompkins said.
Since pickleball is growing in popularity, many people are finding ways to play pickleball in their communities. Billy D’Amico, a coach at Revere, is the adviser of the club. He explained the growth of pickleball he has noticed.
“It’s a way to get everybody involved. It doesn’t require too much strenuous activity, so elderly people can play it with their grandkids. . . . It’s not really age discriminant [like] tackle football or lacrosse,” D’Amico said.
Since pickleball depends heavily on the weather and other factors, the club’s meeting schedule will accommodate that. Tompkins explained their meeting calendar.
“We’ll maybe play once a month, maybe twice a month and really just as much as we can. We’ll try and get some in and then next year when we start it, we’ll have pretty much heavy meetings in the fall, and we’ll try and have heavy meetings in the spring because it’s kind of almost seasonal, so you won’t be able to have many in the winter,” Tompkins said.
During the times that they can, the meetings will start right after school since other sports need to start around that time as well.
“We’ll be playing in parking lots and we have nets that you can fold out and set up, and then I’m hoping to get some chalk and do a little drawing of the perimeter and the lines that it takes to play. . . . It’ll be right after school and then people will kind of meet together, and I have snacks so we’ll eat some snacks and then we’ll try and get right into playing as soon as possible because there are sports going on. We’ll try and get right into playing and then we’ll be playing doubles so we’ll get people together and try to do a little bit quicker games,” Tompkins said.
Tompkins took leadership of this club from the beginning, initially bringing her ideas to D’Amico for help.
“Lauren bringing it to my attention was great. I’ve seen her play enough basketball where she is a commanding leader on the court. She has a very good determined attitude, and I think she’s gonna do the same with Pickleball, where she knows that she’s basically the captain of the club, with me being the adviser. But I will let her have the reins to it for the most part, because I do trust her in doing what’s best for herself, as well as everyone else in the club,” D’Amico said.
Although the club has only had one informational meeting, the turnout was still good. Student participant Gayle Mischic explained how they spread the word about the club.
“We had a bunch of flyers around the school. We made an Instagram and a Google classroom. . . . [Social media] definitely brings more awareness, we’ve seen a big jump in followers,” Mischic said.
Their advertising on social media helped Pickleball Club gain a lot of new members. To accommodate these members, Tompkins had to get creative about where to get materials to play.
“Dr. Peltz has been really supportive and really great about this club, and he offered to use some of his money from his teacher account. With that money, [he] bought about three or four of the nets and paddles. . . . I have a net, and I also have a set of paddles. And I also told anyone in the club, if they had anything, some of my friends have stuff, that they can bring them in and we can use that,” Tompkins said.
Now that the club has the materials they need and the weather is starting to get warmer, they will start having meetings more frequently. As the club starts up, the members are thinking about new ways to expand the activities they do. Mischic spoke on a possible method.
“We could expand it and teach little kids pickleball in middle school or have a partnership with the elementary schools. That would be really cool. Or we could do something over the summer like teach kids how to play pickleball,” Mischic said.
As the Pickleball Club starts up at Revere, they are looking for new members and ways to incorporate their sport into the community. It is a new club that has strong leadership and an inclusive atmosphere. To join Pickleball Club, reach out to Lauren Tompkins and join the Google classroom.
