There were medals galore for Scott Mayo at the recent Welsh Open – finishing as runner-up in the men’s singles and men’s doubles alongside Rob Adams, and picking up gold with Maisie Wise in the mixed (as well as winning the team event with his doubles partners and Georgie Girt).
It’s a great way to start a month in which he’ll be captaining Team Wales at the forthcoming European Championships.
Scott, from Newport, comes from a sporty family, and played golf as well as plenty of other sports growing up. He discovered pickleball when his gym membership included access to racquet sports.
“I always played squash or badminton with my brother, not at any high level or anything at all, just for a bit of fun, and a nice way for me and my brother to spend some time together.
“Then I saw a thing called pickleball as one of the free racquet sports. I thought it was a typo. I was like, What on earth?”
Within the first five minutes of playing, he’d booked in to play another three times that week.
“I don’t have a racquet sport background, but what it reminded me of was playing bat and ball in the sea, or in the garden with my brother – we’d always make up sports, using a skipping rope as a net and using a bat and ball that you’d find on a beach. It gave me that nostalgia, and it made me feel like a child again.
“It gave me that new lease of excitement that I’d lost in golf, for example. I really wanted to go and play this sport, just purely for the absolute love of it.
“Even though it’s so technical, and there’s all the intricacies and things, I think the deep root of it is just like pure fun.”
Scott hopes that more good sportspeople will take up pickleball, and help to raise the standard of the game across Wales – as well as represent the nation in future international competitions.
“I want it to be the case that we find those players who really can go and represent at the highest level. I do think that we can definitely do that. Compared to last year, we’ve all improved drastically.
“So I do think that we can go to Rome and put a really positive light on on the improvements that we have.”
The last year has brought plenty more tournament experience not just for Scott but for the rest of the team, and they are much more used to the spotlight now.
“I’m a different person this year, going to play and going to represent, because I have those nerves, but those nerves are more like excitement. The difference is preparation. This has been a year of preparation, not knowing I was preparing for this [competition] necessarily, but preparing myself for bigger pickleball tournaments.”
And that all feeds into his captaincy.
“I’m very much a thinking person. I write a newsletter called The Paradox of Now, and my catchphrase of that is ‘improving my small corner of the world’; it’s about the 920 months that we all have on this planet.
“But I balance that out! I’d like to think that I have a playful side too. So you’ll definitely see me smiling and having a joke on the court.
“I want what is best for my team, because I am proud to be Welsh and proud to be doing these things too.”
He gave each team member a memento as they headed into tournament prep – a Lego figurine styled as a gladiator, with the Pickleball Wales logo.
“I’m backing my team as my gladiators,” he says. “I wanted them to have a keepsake of something to remind them of how big and how important this is.
“When their grandkids come over in 30 years’ time, and they point at the little Lego gladiator figure and say, ‘What’s that?’ they can reminisce and have that moment of nostalgia and memory to remind themselves that they have represented their country.
“I want them to feel the occasion. I want them to be in the moment, in that occasion. I want them to embrace and play every point, whether they’re watching or playing it, and I want them to really take that in. Obviously, I can’t control that. Only they can control that.
“But what I can control is the feelings and the speech and with the things I’m giving them, as a reminder to be in the moment and to be present and enjoy it –
but compete in it as well.”
