How We Got Started

Kate Beck thrives on community organizing. Whether it’s a political issue, a school carpool, addiction recovery work, or a neighborhood block party, Kate’s joy is to organize people to come together for a common cause.

So it’s not surprising that soon after she got bitten by the pickleball bug in early 2022, she started organizing women interested in competitive play.

She and her wife Veronica, who goes by V, put out the call for a weekly women’s single-elimination bracket tournament, which soon evolved into a double-elimination bracket to give teams more opportunities to play.

Playing was competitive and fun, but running the tournaments was challenging. There was a lot of downtime between matches. Folks showing up at the last minute often required a quick switch of paperwork to accommodate more teams. And it was surprisingly difficult to correctly record who was advancing and who was going to the consolation bracket.  Kate and V often had to interrupt their matches to help sort out the paperwork—not conducive to focused play!

Even after some wonderful volunteers stepped up to help (thank you Dana and Doug!), the tournament format was problematic. One of the players, Marie Abaya, suggested switching to a round robin format. Kate grumbled (she’d already printed out a bunch of brackets on oversized paper!) but in the end decided to give it a try. The Friday Round Robin was born.

 

A few months later a suggestion from another player, Amy Frederickson, got Kate and V thinking about running a ladder league in addition to the Round Robin. They didn’t know what it would take to get a league started (or even what a ladder league was, to be honest), but hey, more pickleball equals more fun!

Fortunately, Yvonne Calavan, one of the most organized people you’ll ever meet both on the court and in life, stepped up to help. She interviewed other folks who were running ladder leagues and researched pickleball software. Over coffee and pastries at Kate and V’s kitchen table, the three of them met to hash out the details. Yvonne and V took a deep dive into the inner workings of Pickleball Brackets software, while Kate recruited players.

It turns out that Pickleball Brackets requires a club and league name. And that’s how SeaShore Picklers came to be.

After a small pilot session in August and September 2022 to test out the software and logistics, SeaShore Picklers ran the first open session of their ladder league in October 2022. As of spring 2024 there have been six full sessions, with close to 50 women participating in each session. Kate, V, and Yvonne keep fine-tuning as they go, to make the league as fun, welcoming, and competitive as possible.

The Friday Round Robin continues to evolve as well. The popularity of the event (sessions are full and waitlisted within minutes of being posted!), combined with Kate’s desire to play competitively, led her to create a weekly offshoot Queens Court event for women wanting more casual play. 

In the fall of 2023 Marie Abaya stepped up to organize a new SeaShore Picklers event: Team Pickleball. Loosely based on Major League Pickleball, Team Pickleball is designed to be a women’s competitive development league with four different levels of players on a single team. The trial run of Team Pickleball had eight teams participating, exceeding Marie’s goal of six teams. Word got out about how fun it was, and the second session boasted 12 teams!

Kate, V, and Yvonne have always believed strongly in contributing to their community. That’s why no matter how much SeaShore Picklers grows and evolves, they’re committed to continuing their practice of giving back: raising money for donations of pickleball equipment, recruiting volunteers for local tournaments, and supporting members in creating offshoot projects to spread the joy of pickleball far and wide.