Some people throw out cracked balls. Sandra Herd sees creatures.
Sandra had been issued a challenge.
The Jamboree had been created to keep pickleball unique. It was a different approach to competition, to training, to community. We wanted a prize that wasn’t the same identical mass produced medal that tournaments seemed to be buying by the pallet. We wanted to find new ways to use old balls. We wanted a Stanley Cup.
The creature that emerged from Sandra’s workshop looked nothing like a Stanley Cup.
It had eyes, a nose, an actual paddle, a hairline, and an unmistakable inner life. It was a cross between an Oscar, the Stanley Cup, and an Anna Leigh Waters Fraggle. It was cute and disturbing. If felt alive.
It became known as Jamboreenie.
The rarest of Jamboree artefacts. Jamboreenie is pickleball's answer to the mass-produced medal. Sandra Herd upcycled a broken pickleball and some thrift store finds..
PBJ: CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT YOUR INSPIRATION?
SANDRA HERD: Jamboreenie came into being some time after you asked about the merit badges. I had a broken ball in my hand. I basically just thought, this could be a trophy guy. Simple as that. I make props and puppets so it’s not uncommon for me to envision “things” as creatures. Then I just started puzzling through how and playing with stuff I had in my house from puppet and prop making day—eyes, noses, hair.
Then I had to figure out how to make him stand.
PBJ: WHAT MATERIALS DID YOU USE?
SH: I was cruising through the dollar store and saw these packages of kids’ party favours. They were plastic bats with an elastic string and ball attached. A vision of them as shoes for the base popped in my head. Took them home, traced out some felt “shoe pieces,” poked some holes, laced with a piece of wool I had and glued them on. Base solved.
I tried making pickleballs out of the balls attached to the bats but they weren’t great and I happened to have a bag of cheap dollar store pickleball key chains and so I used those balls.
Jamboreenie poses with Jamboree’s first meit badges. Dollar store plastic bats become shoes. A woodworker's paddle, painted black. Curly brown hair assembled with tiny elastics. The most considered homemade pickleball trophy in existence.
PBJ: ALL FROM THE DOLLAR STORE?
SH: I still needed a paddle. I chatted with a wood worker friend and showed him pics from Etsy of little wood paddle shapes. He made me some.
I painted them black, then cut tiny strips of coloured electric tape to wrap the handles. I printed some black backed signs on label paper and cut to fit the paddles.
Attaching the paddles and balls was easy with braided pipe cleaners.
Katri Ulmonen, David Book, Marie - Pier Marineau Lavoie. To hold a Jamboreenie is to hold an object with a spirit — a pickleball award unlike anything else in the game.
PBJ: WE’VE GOT TO ASK YOU ABOUT THE HAIR?
SH: Yes I was trying to capture Chris’s hair look!
The hair was the hardest. All I had was brown curly and it was a challenge to secure it because I couldn’t attach inside and had to bring it back outside. Tiny elastics helped and lots of patience. And glue guns rule!
PBJ: WHAT DO YOU HOPE HAPPENS TO EACH JAMBOREENIE?
SH: I hope people enjoy their Jamboreenies and that they make them smile and encourage fond recollections of their Jamboree and pickleball in general.
Mariko Wakefield, Chuck Jung (aka 3), Chris Shu.
The Stanley Cup has been to the bottom of Mario Lemieux's swimming pool. It has eaten cereal, baptized babies, and been left — more than once — on the side of a road. This is not neglifence. This is the point. The Cup is the rare trophy that nobody owns; you win it, you get your time with it, you hand it back. Its dents are its résumé. Hockey figured out, over a century ago, that the most valuable object is the one you have to give away.
Teams who win one become stewards, not owners. They take it to their home courts in the off-season — sometimes back to their hometowns to visit families. It rides on dashboards. Some people sleep with it beside their bed. (Nobody involved seems to find this strange.) Then, when next season’s finals comes around, the stewards carry it back in and put it on the line, where any team can take it from them.
Teams who win a Jamboreenie become stewards, not owners. It rides on dashboards. It sleeps beside beds. Then it goes back on the line — for any team to claim.
A medal commemorates a result. Jamboreenie commemorates a relationship — between you and the thing, and between you and everyone who held it before you, and everyone who will attempt to pry it from your team this month. Its felt will wear. The electric tape will fray. Someone, eventually, will have to explain a missing foot.
All of this makes it worth more.
Sandra Herd looked at a broken ball and saw a living trophy.
Behold the next incarnation of Jamboreenie. Pickleball Jamboree's traveling trophy — a homemade pickleball award given to Jamboree champions each season. It is the only pickleball trophy of its kind: handmade, community-owned, and more valuable every time it changes hands.
Reply to this message with a story about your time with one of the Jamboreenies. Or let us know a similarly magnificent trophy you have won.