Tag: Club SpotLight

Even without a dedicated court to call its own, Lakewood Ranch Pickleball Club is spreading its wings.

“SOMETIMES A NOISY flyover happens,” says Bob Haskin, president of the Lakewood Ranch Pickleball Club. The notoriously vociferous sandhill crane graces the club’s logo and is the namesake of its popular Sandhill Classic tournament. But the bird and the club share another distinction: They’re not tied to any one part of Lakewood Ranch, a sprawling, 51-square-mile planned community on Florida’s Gulf Coast, 45 miles south of Tampa and 20 minutes from downtown Sarasota.

When the Southern Nevada Pickleball Club launched an adaptive program for former service members, their numbers—and their purpose—grew.

AT FIRST GLANCE, the regular Tuesday/Thursday pickleball sessions at Las Vegas’s Dula Community Center look like any other. But dig a little deeper and you’ll learn that many of the players on the court were in the military and are there to not only play pickleball but also build community with fellow veterans. Those twice-weekly sessions are a driving element of the Southern Nevada Pickleball Club’s (SNPC’s) multipronged mission: to increase participation in the sport, address the needs of seniors, build a youth pickleball presence, and provide programs for veterans in need of adaptive services.