Natasha-Lara Hood’s life is sport. She works in sport (now in tennis after some time in football and in the broader sphere of active lifestyles) – and is starring for R3 in the Premier Pickleball League this year.
She came to pickleball via tennis, having got a college scholarship to go to the USA – where she stayed for almost eight years, moving to different areas, from Oregon to Minnesota to California.
“Tennis was never really the main focus,” she says. “The agreement with my mum was that academics came first and tennis was a part of it.”
She returned to the UK in May 2023, a year after discovering pickleball.
“I only played it once or twice while I was out in the US,” she confesses. “Everyone said, ‘Oh, you must have played loads in the US’ – which would have made sense!”
But it was certainly not the case. Indeed, Tash and pickleball did not seem like a perfect match at first.
“The first time I tried it, I was like, ‘I absolutely hate this, it’s awful!'”
She had no intention of playing pickleball ever again until she moved back to London and wanted to meet more people, and her brother suggested pickleball – with one of his tennis friends, Rhodri Oliver.
“I turned up one day – again, didn’t really like it. And then about three months later, I went back and never left.”
Oliver is now her mixed doubles partner – although they are on different teams in the Premier Pickleball League, with him representing The Pickleball Store.
And pickleball is now, obviously, something she loves.
“The more I started to play and unlearn a bit of the tennis, I actually started to enjoy it more and more because I think initially I was just trying to play tennis on a smaller court, and I didn’t quite understand the tactics or the game plan or the patterns.
“After I officially retired from tennis, I had to reset and think, ‘I can play a sport and not have it all just be about achievement.’
“I started to see pickleball as a thing of, I can do this once a month. It doesn’t need to be serious. It can just be for fun. That was the first time that I’ve had that with a sport and it hasn’t been about training and taking it really seriously and competing. That was quite eye-opening.”
Despite that more relaxed attitude towards competition, Tash was number one in the overall draft for this year’s PPL – although she says she was not even expecting to be drafted at all, and had hoped to maybe get a place in a Challenger team.
“It was quite a shock to the system. It put quite a lot of pressure on me, it made me quite nervous because I think everyone felt, ‘Oh, okay, well, she’s got a lot to show,’ but I think that’s all now died down and no one really remembers, which is quite nice!
“It was great because [the draft] came out early in the morning and I literally just turned off my phone, went to lunch with a friend, turned it back on in the afternoon and was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve got so many lovely messages from people.'”
The R3 squad has skewed young this year, with Lauren Gosling catching plenty of attention in the first match week when she was named MVP.
“When I first looked at the team, I thought, ‘Oh, I’m a bit of a mother hen in this situation!'” Tash says.
“It’s funny because I would say that when they go out on court, you kind of forget how young actually they all are, just because they’re all of them are very level-headed and carry themselves really well.
“Ewan [Skillicorn], again, is incredibly young. And I forget that every single time. Even off the court, he’s so mature for his age. And he just like continuously impresses me to the point where I forget just how young he is. And sometimes I have to go, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re doing A-levels. That’s crazy!'”
Going into match weekend 3, Tash admits there was some expectation on R3 last time out because they had done so well on the opening weekend.
“The first [weekend], we all felt very relaxed because none of us knew what was going to happen.
“I felt there was a bit more pressure on us on the second one, and I think we were all maybe a bit more nervous, made a few more mistakes than I think we normally would.
“Now it’s fixture 3 – and we know that even when we’re a bit nervous and maybe not playing our best, we can still deliver.”
