Rick Bell, SCPA’s newest board member, is shown above with his wife, Mary Bell, daughter Kaitlin, her boyfriend Drew, and Winnie the dog. Kaitlin and Drew have played pickleball with SCPA when visiting Summit County. Rick and Mary hail from Ohio and are enthusiastic Ohio State Buckeyes fans (misguidedly, in the opinion of your author, a Penn State alum). Rick is retired from Chrysler Corporation, where he was the Automation Trainer. He’s been involved with nonprofit organizations and especially youth sports for many years —including as a soccer referee, coach and President of the Salem Soccer League. Rick’s other passion (more…)

Pickleball … or snowball? For the past couple of months, Tom Richmond and Dave Morse have been leading a quiet movement to play outdoors all year long! Tom tells us that shoveling off a court at Trent Park is easier than it looks. They even got a group out to play, surrounded by snow, on the day before Thanksgiving! How SCPA first heard of this phenomenon: On November 17, Jerry Veazey emailed, “Joni and I walked down to get a paper this morning and heard pickleball noise coming from the Trent Courts. We found Tom & Dave playing. “We Summit (more…)

SCPA member Kai-Peter Koenig immigrated to the United States from Germany at age 10, just seven or eight years after WWII.  Eager to fit into his new country, Kai-Peter adopted the first name “Pete,” Americanized the pronunciation of his last name, and quickly learned perfect, unaccented English.  In his early 20s, Pete served as an officer in the US Army in Korea, where he met his wife Lillian, also a US Army officer.  He subsequently made a career of healthcare management for the US Department of Defense.  In 1977, deeply inspired by the groundbreaking mini-series Roots and its exploration of  assimilation versus (more…)

After trying pickleball just a couple of times last year, new SCPA member Ruthie Kimmons is really jumping in now.  She’s showing such rapid improvement that we were surprised to learn Ruthie has no racquet or court sport in her background. Originally from New Orleans, Ruthie, a registered nurse (mostly critical care) for over thirty years, now splits time between Tucson and Silverthorne.   Ruthie and her husband Robert, a clinical psychologist, got a jolt last month when, just a few weeks after closing on their new home in Wildernest, they were forced by the Buffalo Mountain fire to evacuate!  But all (more…)

Bet you didn’t know that SCPA has a Junior Olympian among our members!  Rick Garcia took first place in a Junior Olympics diving competition at age 12.  He went on to earn a gymnastics scholarship to Colorado State University,  where he competed in vaulting, trampoline, and floor exercise.  He could even do a double back flip! A Summit County resident for more than 30 years, Rick retired a few years ago as Keystone’s Emergency Services Manager, as well as a Lieutenant in the Snake River/Lake Dillon Fire Department.  He lives in Silverthorne’s Eagles Nest neighborhood with his wife Gretchen. Rick got a (more…)

David and Junior Sirionel hail from Houston, TX, where David owned a tattoo and body piercing business.  They moved to Silverthorne in 2015, along with Junior’s two older brothers.  Father and son discovered pickleball at the Silvethorne Rec Center drop-in in January 2018 and fell in love with the game. Just four months later, Junior won the advanced consolation round of SCPA’s April-is-Pickleball-Month fun tournament.  He and his father have been known to wear matching shirts and/or hats to drop-in play, and do a little dancing between games. The Sirionels’ steep and rapid climb up the pickleball learning curve has been (more…)