By Cathy Blood
Editor-in-Chief, GreenwichPickleball.com
Greenwich, CT
March 31, 2022
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Listen to Four Avid Pickleball Players Make Their Case to the Greenwich BET

There are updates to this story

The March 28 Public Budget Hearing was standing room only.

Passionate residents with placards and pleas turned out in droves. But this Greenwich Board of Estimate and Taxation (BET) hearing required more than just passion.

Our town is known for preferring to toe the line with mill rates and taxes. So residents need to show up to public budget hearings with both passion and data for the projects they feel merit scarce dollars.

So the most effective speakers stay laser focused on facts and stats when making their case to the 12 members of the Greenwich BET.

Pickleball is no different, (despite the quirky, feel-good name).

A few hours into the 4 hour, standing-room-only, bathroom-break-free public budget hearing meeting, four avid picklers got their chance to talk.

They covered the health benefits of Pickleball, the huge number of Greenwich residents playing, and the dire lack of courts in Greenwich.

The ‘Pickleball Four’, three of which are members of the Town Parks and Recreation staff & resident Pickleball Committee, spoke in support of keeping (and not cutting) the $116K for courts currently in the Greenwich capital budget.

Here’s who they are and what they had to say - each with three minutes to make their case for Pickleball before the 12 member BET.

Have a listen!

FIRST SPEAKER

Betsy Underhill is the former Varsity Women’s Tennis Coach at Greenwich High School and USAPA Pickleball Ambassador to Greenwich. Underhill covered the history of Pickleball in Greenwich and its wild growth, especially within the last three years.

SECOND SPEAKER

Peter Urhy is a senior and member of the Greenwich Retired Men’s Association (RMA), whose members enjoy playing Pickleball. Uhry covered the popularity of Pickleball among Greenwich seniors.

THIRD SPEAKER

Jodi Stuart is a 28 year therapeutic yoga specialist, body mechanic, ailments to athletes and back pain to golfers. She has a unique perspective on the benefits of Pickleball to both mind and body.

FOURTH SPEAKER

Candace Garthwaite PhD is a Principal at Greenwich Career Coaching, a Certified Conversational Intelligence (C-IQ) Coach and an avid Pickler. Candace described some of the Pickleball projects in nearby towns, comparing the Greenwich Pickleball court-to-population ratio to other towns. Greenwich has fallen far behind.

So What Comes Next?

The $116K would create three Pickleball Courts at the Bible Street Park in Cos Cob. The money is apt to be cut, however, when the FULL BET meets to finalize the budget on April 19, 2022.

Many more local players submitted ‘on the record comments’ in support of town Pickleball funding as well as emailing BET members and other elected officials. It was a full court press.

Read more about next steps.

To be sure you’re ‘in the loop’ on how to support Pickleball in Greenwich. Subscribe to ‘Opa!’ the GreenwichPickleball.com email newsletter.

Local News Coverage of the Hearing:

Greenwich Free Press on the Budget Hearing | By Leslie Yager, Founder & Editor.
Pickleball appears in a brief paragraph below bump outs, under its own heading. If you’ve never attended a Greenwich public budget hearing, this article gives you a great idea of all the competing interests / passionate residents in our town.

Greenwich Patch on Pickleball in the Budget Hearing | By Richard Kaufman, Patch Staff reporter.
This is a great summary of the Pickleball discussion at the 3/28 budget hearing, and Patch provides a link to GreenwichPickleball.com at the bottom of the article (thanks Patch!)

You can also watch the entire 4 hour video of the March 28, 2022 BET public budget hearing meeting on Youtube.

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Cathy Blood is the Editor-in-Chief of GreenwichPickleball.com (a passion project) and is a recent Pickleball convert. She’s the Partner in charge of Marketing at Speritas Capital Partners, and she owns NEST New Media, a digital content strategy business where she helps businesses tell their story and write about their industry with an engaging, authoritative and ‘converting’ voice.