You are cordially invited to join us for tonight’s 8pm Zoom Chat with Wayne Elderton, ChPC | AceCoach & North Vancouver Tennis Centre https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81381747989
BACKGROUND
In early spring we tried to explain a new iteration of Jamboree. Troop culture…practice culture...merit badges...field kits...an Atlas...idols...envelopes...and what felt like dozens of other layers we were about to add on top of a game that already had weird rules.
The idea was overwhelming to everybody involved.
The message came back the same way every time. Why don't you guys just do a normal league and straightforward drill sessions? You'll make a killing.
We listened. Hour after hour, we patiently listened. And somewhere in there we stopped asking how to go bigger and started wondering how to make everything smaller and safer.
The week before the Jamboree’s Fairgrounds residency began, a player messaged to say she had a longtime friend who coached tennis and wanted us to meet.
We had a million things to do. Did I have time to grab coffee with a random tennis coach?
His name was vaguely familiar. Wayne Elderton. There was a vague trail of online breadcrumbs that led to that coffee.
Pickleball remains a young sport, still deciding what it’s going to become. A decade ago, before the growth curve went truly haywire, a tennis coach named Mark Renneson began making some of the first genuinely useful explanations of how a game most people had never heard of could be understood, played, interpreted.
Renneson’s YouTube lessons became an influential lens. Pickleball Canada tapped him to help build national curriculum.
Much of Renneson’s thinking came from Wayne.
Tracy Bennet, who is now Head of Pickleball Coach Education in Canada, emerged from that same tree.
So does the tree itself, more or less. When Pickleball Canada went looking for someone to build this country's first national coaching program, they went to Tennis Canada's Tennis Professionals Association. Which means the way Canadians are going to be taught pickleball, for a generation, has tennis fingerprints on it. This has been highly controversial.
What most of us don’t see are Wayne's fingerprints.
He ran Tennis Canada's coaching development and certification in British Columbia for over thirty years. He has trained more than 1,500 coaches. He is the second Canadian ever to be named International Master Professional by the PTR. He is one of the architects of Red/Orange/Green — the system that gives a seven-year-old a shorter racquet, a slower ball and a smaller court, so the game is scaled to the player instead of the player being scaled to the game.
Which is one way to describe a pickleball court.
I met Wayne that week and confided some of our doubts. He listened, and then he started talking about the training environments he had built over thirty years, and the pushback every single one of them got at the beginning. Not some of them. Every one.
That quick coffee had turned into several hours.
When it was done he looked me in the eye and said: you guys are not pushing it far enough. Go bigger.
Tonight's conversation will be all over the map. We’ll discuss his work with Pickleball Canada on the national program. Constraints, and the Game-Based Approach he has spent a career on, which is not quite the same thing as what we do at Jamboree
Pour your favourite beverage and join us at 8pm.
