A Harlem community group is making sure that neighborhood kids are getting a chance to become part of the pickleball craze.
On Wednesday, a group of about a half dozen kids from the Taft Houses, a NYCHA development located on East 115th Street, limbered up with calisthenics, practiced their swings and let some pickleballs fly on the seasonal Wollman Rink courts in Central Park.
“I just think of the ball as my brother,” one of the young athletes joked after finishing getting her first crack at the plastic ball.
Harlem nonprofit, Solutions Now, connected the kids to a six-week session that is part of a series of community initiatives that the courts operators, CityPickle and Wollman Park Partners, are providing for free to local youth groups to learn what the paddle sport phenomenon is all about.
Katherine Hedden, the director of community outreach for CityPickle, who was leading the lesson, said that her organization has been overseeing similar sessions with 12 different groups this summer, including Challenged Athletes and the Lower Eastside Girls Club.
“I get the fun part, where I get to teach them. And hopefully they’ll go on to play, and they’ll really love it,” said Hedden.
Joann Fennel, a Taft House resident, whose son was part of the program said that she had never heard about pickleball before the program, but for the last couple weeks her son couldn’t wait for his lesson.
“These kids are experiencing something that they probably wouldn’t experience playing in their life. So this is new to them,” she said.
Fennel said that the program became the only outdoor outlet for many of the kids this summer because the playground and park in the Taft Houses is currently under renovation, with scaffolding blocking off the kids from playing. It’s been like this off and on since before the pandemic, she said.
Hedden said that she’s identified a lot next to the NYCHA development where she wants to help the kids set up their own pickleball court, using paddles and a net CityPickle has donated. The donation represents an extension of the existing program.
Richard Habersham, the former Harlem Congressional candidate who started Solutions Now, said that his intention with the pickleball sessions is to get the kids to see “how the world works and see outside of their five square block radius.”
His group started out doing food drives during the pandemic and is now focusing its programming on the Taft Houses.
