Now that the Winter Olympics are long past and March Madness is nearing its climax, the sporting world is gearing up...for the 3rd annual NYC Parks Senior Games.
You've got all the classic events: Basketball, track and field, swimming, table tennis. But this year also marks the return of one of the hottest new sports in Brooklyn: Pickleball.
"It's new here, very new," Johanna Moran, a retired schoolteacher from Bay Ridge, told WNYC. "I just came back from Florida, where it's the thing to do."
Moran, a regular at the Fort Hamilton Senior Recreation Center, was playing pickleball for just the third time. "I came to my yoga class—I do yoga here at 11 o'clock—and they always ask me if I want to play pickleball," Moran explained. "So today I said, do you play pickleball today? He said, 'yeah, come!' So I did a few errands, I had lunch, I came back, and I won the game!"
The sport itself is a cross between tennis and paddleball, played with solid paddles and a porous ball similar to a whiffle ball.
"It's a very confusing game, because if you played tennis, the scoring is fakakta," explained Maureen Maloney, who was filling in on Wednesday afternoon as a line judge.
Pickleball made its Senior Games debut last year, where Bay Ridge resident Richard Mahaney first encountered it. "I got my a** kicked," he told WNYC. "I'd never played before—but I got hooked.
"Now it's probably, from what I hear, the fastest growing adult sport in the country," Mahaney added.
It's also growing in Brooklyn. Recreation centers in Sunset Park, Brownsville, Williamsburg and Bay Ridge are all holding clinics in lead-up to the Senior Games, which will take place in Brooklyn and Staten Island on May 7 through May 11. Any New Yorker aged 50 or older can compete. Check the NYC Parks site for more details.