You might have seen Charlotte Pressley in the media recently – feted as the first student in the UK to receive a university sports scholarship for pickleball.
Although she’s been playing for around two years, coming to the sport from tennis, she already has a huge background in the sport – beginning with her old tennis coach and now top pickleball star Mollie Knaggs.
Mollie’s trailblazing helped to inspire Charlotte.
“I played for maybe four or five months, and then I went to the English Open!” Charlotte tells Pickleball 52. “I was like, ‘Oh, no, I’m going to be absolutely terrible!’
“I went there, had Mollie’s support the whole way through, and managed to win it. Ever since then, it’s been absolutely nuts.”
Charlotte returned from the English Open as a gold medallist in the women’s doubles 3.0+ alongside Alice McCormack – and though her success might have surprised her a little bit, it certainly didn’t surprise Mollie.
“I didn’t really have an expectation. I just thought, ‘I’ll just go play, see what happens, meet loads of people, discover the sport’, because Mollie kept telling me, ‘You’re really good at it,’ and I was like, ‘No, surely not.'”
It was perhaps an obvious next step for Charlotte and Mollie to pair up to play doubles in 2025, winning bronze at the English Nationals.
“I got a text from her literally a couple months before – ‘Do you want to go to Nationals together?’ And I looked at it for 20 minutes and I was like, ‘This can’t be real. I don’t know what she’s thinking.'”
Charlotte asked Mollie what category she was thinking they would enter together – and the reply was quick.
“‘You’re coming to the pro category with me.’
“I feel like that’s when a penny dropped for me. OK, I’ve got to be some sort of good if Mollie Knaggs will play Nationals with me.”
It’s no surprise that Charlotte is already thinking about the possibility of professional pickleball achievements.
“I do want to pursue as much as I can do with my [pickleball] career and see how far I can go. Being 19, my parents kept telling me all along I’ve got a really big opportunity to try and go all the way if I wanted to.”
Charlotte is now in her first year studying sports coaching at Canterbury Christ Church University. Her success at the English Open caught the university’s eye as an international competition that warranted the award of a scholarship – meaning the university offers support for talented athletes.
And that helps when it comes to a tournament calendar that sometimes clashes with assignment submissions.
“They extend deadlines, they will authorise my absences, they’ll catch me up with everything I need to do,” Charlotte explains.
And she adds that she’s also in the process of setting up a pickleball society on campus – and has enjoyed introducing new players to the basics. It’s given her added impetus to perhaps one day emulate Mollie’s achievements with Spicy Pickleball Academy and Mpower Women’s Pickleball events.
“I was helping a few of these girls, just getting the basics over the net, and I could see their faces lit up. And I think that’s when it clicked for me a little bit, a Mollie situation, where I can actually help people with my knowledge. That’s definitely put in my brain that I do want to somehow involve as many people as I can.”
