Equipment & courts
Dues buy pickleball equipment and supplies, facility improvements and court accessories.
Pickleball in Johnson County goes back to 2009. Ron Stiers, a local businessman, had discovered the game while wintering in Mesa, Arizona, and became our first local USA Pickleball ambassador. That year he recruited his neighbour Myra Clark and a handful of others to try it, and a North Liberty Leader article in August pictured five local players: Diane Hardy, Dianne Day, Louis De Grazia, Judy Schroeder and Bob Hardy.
The word spread. The Iowa City Senior Center added pickleball to its activities and about twenty people showed up. Local recreation centers lent gym space, players taped the court lines themselves at Mercer and in North Liberty, and handyman Bob Hardy poured cement into five-gallon buckets with pipes set in them to hold the nets. The heavy buckets were wheeled into place on dollies, and Bob built a brace for the middle of each net.
By February 2010 about 28 players were on the list. Today the club has hundreds of members, on courts all across the county.
The Senior Center director, Susan Wakefield, videotaped those early days. Part 1 shows the cement buckets being wheeled in. Part 2 is from that February.
The videos are full of familiar faces. Players still on the courts today include Jan Calvert, Jeanne Liston, Mike Untrauer, Myra Clark and Ricarda Patterson. Also in the videos are early players who have since moved away or stopped playing, and some we have lost: the late Bob Hardy, the late Dianne Day, Diane Hardy, Judy Schroeder, Kathy Breese, Lucy Koontz, Ron Stiers, Ruth Baker, Vern Kollasch, and a Michelle whose last name we no longer have. If you know it, or if you spot yourself in the videos, tell us. And if anyone would rather not be named here, we will take their name off.
Watch Part 1 · the early days Watch Part 2 · February 2010
Adapted from a history Duane Miller wrote in 2019, for the club’s tenth anniversary of pickleball in the county, with help from Myra Clark.