It’s pickleball all the way for Scott Tift – who is focusing on the sport full-time to set up a new academy with a difference in Kent.
It will have a junior section as well as all the usual adult sessions – and the next step will be to build up links with local schools and offer SEND sessions as well as para-pickleball…and likely even more.
Supported by Pickleball Complete and Joola, the Pickleball Complete Academy will be based at St Lawrence College in Ramsgate, and is all set to launch next month on 19th September.
Scott was previously director of a sports coaching company, offering extra-curricular sport across the area. He’ll be continuing that provision, but is now turning his attention solely to pickleball.
“Pickleball has taken off massively,” he says. “If you don’t jump into it now, you’re going to be left behind, and I want to be a part of the Kent movement, really, to make pickleball massive in this area.”
As a player, Scott helped Baypoint to the English Pickleball League title earlier this year, and next on his agenda is the Welsh Open, before concentrating on the English Nationals – plus a trip to Finland for the mixed doubles at the Finnish Open.
And he is particularly keen to ensure that young people get the chance to play, with the Pickleball Complete Academy becoming a junior hub and a model that can be rolled out across the country.
“Juniors is the way forward to keep pickleball alive. You see it in other sports, clubs that don’t have junior sections, they tend to peter out after a while, because obviously adult membership gets older and can’t play anymore, so I think juniors is going to be the way that a lot of clubs will go in the end.
“What we want to do is make sure there’s a model that works for everybody and is easily transferable around the country, and try and put the policies and everything in place so that it’s a lot easier for clubs and a little bit less scary for people that haven’t been involved in education or or the safeguarding of children to implement the junior set-up.”
The fact that pickleball is a new sport means it has no stereotypes attached to it, and boys and girls are equally likely to play.
“Every educator talks about breaking down the barriers,” he says. “Pickleball does it very, very well, because there are the mixed doubles, because there is the men, the women, the singles, the para: every single aspect of every walk of life can come together on one tournament, and I think that’s massively important, which is what we want to show in the junior schools and the secondary schools.”
