The pickleball craze has reached Wakefield High School.
With 18 members and growing, pickleball has become the latest new club at the Arlington school. Spearheaded by senior and varsity tennis player Keyla Park Hernández and her father, Paul Joseph Park, who serves as the coach, the club meets Monday and Wednesday afternoons.
The club’s teacher sponsors are pickleball players and Wakefield staff members Jackie Cubero and Ashley Rickman. Cubero has played the sport for 15 years, competing in national tournaments.
Park met Rickman’s parents playing the sport locally, and discovered their daughters each had a Wakefield connection, one as a student and the other a physical-education teacher.
The Wakefield club plays matches among the players, sometimes on the Wakefield tennis courts with makeshift lines and dimensions. Recently the club held a tournament, with some of the players playing three matches.
Wakefield club members have been donated pickleball paddles from a manufacturer and have been offered lessons from Down the Line Sports Center in Fairfax County.
The club is working to attain on-campus facilities of pickleball lines and nets at Wakefield, along with roll-on nets, and wants to establish full club status at the school. The hope from the club is that some or all of the seven tennis courts can be updated to include pickleball lines and nets.
“We are just getting organized to show and prove there is a demand for pickleball at Wakefield,” Paul Joseph Park said. “I think we are on the right track.”
Paul Joseph Park said there has been interest at forming similar pickleball organizations at Arlington’s Washington-Liberty and Yorktown high schools, but not to the level yet as at Wakefield.
Some of the other Wakefield players are Adrian Judson, Alec Fleisher, Alex Oketch, Allison Kopcznski, Amariss Claudio, Bryant Gultom, Gabby Speller, German Hernandez, Jack Oliver, Matan Ferguson, Sebastian Fletcher, Zidan Ahmed, Kevin Arispe, Neila Lindsay, Jackson Tush and Samuel Rodriguez.
