Bullhead City pickleball

The push pin shows the location of Bullhead City's new pickleball courts in Rotary Park alongside The Colorado River.

Google Maps doesn't' show the courts, of course, since they are brand new.  A November 19, 2017, news article said the courts are in the northeast corner of Rotary Park near the intersection of Lakeside and Riverview Drives.  That would put them in the vicinity of the red box we added to this map clip.

Here is the full news article on the new Bullhead courts:

http://www.mohavedailynews.com/news/holding-court-city-opens-pickleball-facility-at-rotary-park/article_82a7e8a0-ccf5-11e7-97ec-df8ad67923f9.html

Blog has been dormant

This blog went dormant back in mid-January, 2017.  We will gradually try to bring the blog back to life by the end of Year 2017.

A possible Clarkdale court

We're trying to get a pickleball court going in Clarkdale.  It would be located on a seldom-used basketball court in the town's Mongini Park adjacent to the old elementary school in Lower Clarkdale.

As you can see from the diagram, there's enough space for one court.  It would be a little tight on the ends but not too bad.  There would be six feet on either end.  The sides would have a lot of space, over ten feet on each side.  The slab is perfectly level but it does have some cracks.  We started working with Clarkdale Town Staff in mid-December 2016 and offered to buy the materials and volunteer to patch the cracks.  Due to the holidays, we didn't really get any meaningful communication going until the second week in January 2017.  We now have a tentative "green light" from Town Staff to proceed when weather permits.  We met with the Town's Public Works Superintendent on January 12th and he is going to let us use some of the Town's concrete finishing tools.

The glitch is that the patch material we plan to use must be applied when temps are above 50 degrees and will not fall below freezing overnight.  In January that's a tough bill to fill!  We'll "git 'er dun" eventually and hope to use the court for Sunday morning play on a regular basis.

The slab is in remarkably good shape.  

We don't know it's age but we'd bet it's at least 50-60 years old.

Here's a rough sketch on how the court would fit onto the slab.

Above shows the location of the proposed court between 

Upper Clarkdale (left) and Lower Clarkdale (right).

1st Annual "Dink For Pink" Tournament

To see the full size photos, scroll to the botom of this post for the link.

The Cottonwood Recreation Center hosted the First Annual “Dink For Pink” Pickleball Tournament Sunday, January 8. Thirty-six players competed in a six-game round robin format.

Event entry fees and contributions raised over $1,300 to be donated to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. ( https://www.bcrfcure.org/ )

“Dink For Pink” is our first pickleball tournament here in Cottonwood. We chose to support breast cancer research in support of one of our players who has breast cancer,” stated Tournament Chairwoman, Terri Clements, adding, “I had hoped it would be fun for all participants and that we would raise money for the cause. We did both so I consider it a huge success. We learned a lot from this first effort and look forward to an even better event next January and every January thereafter.”

Danny Santiago took First Place in “Dink For Pink”. Second place was a 3-way tie between Deb Calia, Peppy Bolfango and CJ Hoyt. Third Place was not awarded. Tournament top finishers were presented gift cards from donors: El Patio, Mai Thai On Main, Starbucks, Nature’s Pantry and Desert Dancer.

In addition to Clements, four volunteers helped stage the tournament. Cottonwood Recreation Services Supervisor Ryan Bigelow helped facilitate the tournament schedule and liability insurance. Cottonwood Recreation Center (CRC) Front Desk Supervisor Lorenda Yoke created the flyer.

“Pickleball is the fastest growing sport in the country for many reasons such as socialization and exercise,” Clements noted, “But I think the greatest thing about it is that people of all ages can participate and have fun.”

Regular “drop in” pickleball hours at CRC are 8 AM to Noon, Monday through Saturday.

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Above is the news release we prepared for Cottonwood's "Verde Independent" newspaper.  It was a great tourney.  We finished 34th out of the 36 players and felt very fortunate not to finish in the actual last position.  Frankly, we expected to finish last and were totally prepared for that reality.  We were quite surprised to be a couple of notches above actual last.  The skill level of the tournament participants was amazing.  Who knew there were so many incredibly awesome pickleball players in this vicinity?

Here's a photo of me with the tourney winner Danny Santiago.  When we faced off with Danny on the other side of the net, I knew it was not going to go well.  He was the main reason we were skunked 9-0 in that game--the only game of six in which we were shut out.  There was a brief time when Danny and I thought we were going to get pair together.  It didn't work out and was a false alarm.  "IF" I would have been able to have one game with Danny on my side, I would have finished a lot higher than 34th, that's for sure.  

We created a Flickr album of some of the photos from the tournament.  It is located here: https://www.flickr.com/gp/thesnowbirds/iz5ot4