Queen City Pickleball Hub officially opens at Evraz Place

REGINA -

The Queen City Pickleball Hub officially opened to the public on Saturday.

The facility, located in the Canada Centre West building at Evraz Place, has 12 courts, instructors and equipment available for rent.

“We’ve been planning for a year now and all the hard work painting lines on our hands and knees making sure they are all perfect, getting the space and figuring out all the organization,” Raymond Greenwood, general manager of Queen City Pickleball hub, said.

The pickleball community has been working with the City of Regina and Regina Exhibition Association Limited (REAL) since 2017 to bring the sport to an indoor facility.

“There was a real lack of indoor facilities in Regina and as you know the weather here isn’t great in the winter so that’s something that is needed,” Greenwood said. “We have some really good outdoor facilities, but indoor was lacking.”

REAL said bringing a space for pickleball to the Evraz campus fit right into its plans to revamp the centre to make it usable and profitable all year round.

The Hub will be set up in the facility unless there an event, like Agribition or other home shows, need the space.

“Essentially when those events come back, they will move their nets out, they will move their equipment out and we will still deliver those events. We will clean up then we will move pickleball back in,” Tim Reid, CEO of REAL, said.

The renovation to the facility to get it ready for pickleball cost about $3 million with $2 million coming form the city, $800,000 from REAL and the remainder coming from private investors.

“We need to fulfill more of this and I think you will hear that later this year,” Sandra masters, Mayor of Regina, said. “We’ve got more courts coming, we’ve got an indoor skateboard park. We are a winter city, we are going to embrace it, we need to create indoor spaces as well.”

Greenwood said the sport has about 1,000 players in Regina alone, so having a space like this allows everyone a chance to hit the courts. It also provides an opportunity to bring in new players.

“It’s a very inclusive game. People can play in wheelchairs, people can play with one arm, people play that can’t hear, people play with arthritis or sore knees, everybody plays. It’s not a sport that takes a lot of athleticism like tennis does, it’s a participation sport,” he said.

Greenwood adds that the Hub is also hoping to attract more youth to the game.

Courts can be rented through the Hub’s website queencitypickleballhub.com. It’s opened seven days a week from 9:00am to 9;00pm throughout the summer, with the hope of expanding the hours in the winter.

THE HISTORY OF PICKLEBALL

Greenwood said pickleball can be described as tennis played with ping pong paddles on a badminton court.

“It was invented in Washington state, I think it was in 1966, and a congressman was looking for something to do with his kids,” Greenwood said.

He said they took some old paddles out of their garage, they had some whiffle balls and they put up a little net and started hitting the ball over.

“The kids really enjoyed it,” he added.

Greenwood added that it was a niche sport until around 2005 when it started exploding in the southern snowbirds communities.

The name of the sport allegedly came from the inventor’s pet.

“The reason it’s called pickleball, my understanding is, they used to have a dog called pickles that would go retrieve the balls in the bushes and so they called it pickleball,” Greenwood said.