Abby Fung wasn’t exactly expecting to come away from the English Nationals with a silver medal.
But that’s exactly what she did, partnering Rachel McCrae in the women’s doubles, and falling only to the mighty Thaddea Lock and Molly O’Donoghue in the final.
“You just fight every point,” she tells Pickleball 52, adding that there was no pressure on her or Rachel because their opponents were such heavy favourites.
In one of sport’s streaks of irony, Abby is on Thaddea’s Premier Pickleball League team, Skechers – but the pair had never played each other before.
“They are really strong,” says Abby, “so you just actually can’t make a slight mistake!”
A student at the University of Essex, she is enjoying being part of Team Skechers this season, who head into match weekend 3 to play Surrey Smash and North London Storm.
“Obviously, we have a really good team,” she says. “Everyone just gets along so well and everyone has their own strengths.”
And she didn’t know her team-mates before the draft – in fact, she didn’t even expect to get drafted because she is so new to the sport. She went along to the trials “for fun”, she says, and that was one of the first five times she had ever even played pickleball.
“I play tennis and I used to study and then I got quite a few part-time jobs going on and so just a lot going on. So I didn’t actually expect to get into pickleball competitively, like go to Nationals.
“It’s actually quite a big change. I love it so much.”
She says she thinks tennis gives her transferable skills for pickleball – and she concentrates on training for that.
“I haven’t touched my paddle since nationals,” she confesses. “I play and train all times a week and every Wednesday is our uni match day.”
She adds: “If I think about the first time I played in PPL, I couldn’t roll a ball. I didn’t do any soft play, just because I come from tennis and a lot of driving is fine, I’m driving all the balls – so even though I played with Thaddea, on my first PPL, I did horribly, we lost.
“But now I think about it, I went all the way from my first time playing PPL to now good enough to be in the [final] of the nationals. It’s actually quite a big improvement!”
