Some Members Can Add to Club Coffers and Get Their Dues Paid Too
Fact: Not everyone who plays pickleball is old enough for Medicare. But those who are can help bolster our club’s finances if they carry an Advantage or Supplement plan from an insurer such as United Healthcare.
Element3 Health, which first partnered with Evergreen Pickleball Club last year, has rebranded as Grouper, probably because it’s available to all kinds of groups (quilting, for instance). If you carry an eligible Medicare Advantage or Supplement plan and sign up online, Grouper will reimburse your $20 annual EPC dues by sending you a check in the mail.
You will no longer need to fill out a monthly activity tracker, as you did in 2023, to have your dues paid. Instead, you will benefit from our marketing relationship with Grouper. Including a link and a QR code on our website and an occasional reminder of benefits in our newsletter will produce $1,749 for EPC in 2024—and pay your dues.
To find our if your health plan covers this benefit, visit GrouperGroups.com/EvergreenPB. Grouper will reach out within five business days to inform you if your health plan covers this social benefit.
Grouper describes its nationwide mission as promoting “healthy living through activities that foster social connections and shared experiences.” It is by no means limited to pickleball clubs, but extends to all kinds of activities.
Behind the Scenes of the Evergreen Ladder
It mostly happened behind the scenes, but Evergreen Ladder itself has climbed a few rungs as a result of player Todd Landrum “noodling around” with Google scripting.
Kathy Fasold tallies scores as Monte Poague looks on.
To get why it’s a big deal, you have to understand what Evergreen Ladder is. Anyone can play, but it’s not for everyone. It’s competitive, but camaraderie is key. It runs in 10-week cycles, but you don’t have to play every week. Beyond that . . . it’s complicated.
Kathy Fasold started the local ladder in 2017, during Evergreen Pickleball Club’s first year. She, with help from John Dunlop when Kathy is MIA, has run it ever since, through thick and thin, a public health crisis and all kinds of challenging weather. They play at Marshdale during the warm season, and at Wulf the rest of the year.
Up to 32 people of any level can register for indoor Ladder, but Kathy can handle 64 at Marshdale. She starts off each session by announcing perfect scores from the previous week (those who won all their games) and perhaps with a word or two about player injuries or illnesses. Although players rotate in and out from week to week, there is an ongoing sense of community.
There are various types of ladders in pickleball, but Evergreen Ladder is in an individually ranked round-robin format. Those participating are placed in groups of four (or five if odd numbers require it) in order of their position on the ladder each week. Each participant plays three doubles games, pairing with each other person in the group once.
After the scores are tallied for each of the three matches, players may be individually moved up or down the ladder the following week—depending on their performance in those three round-robin games. The ultimate goal is to climb the ladder to the highest rung.
Running Evergreen Ladder got a lot easier recently, Kathy said, after player Todd Landrum offered to create a Google Sheet to tabulate data. Now she enters the week’s scores and the software calculates who goes up, down and stays the same once the weekly entries are closed each Wednesday. It saves her around six to eight hours a week, for which she is very grateful to Todd.
He suggested Google Sheets because it’s free, it's online and it’s shareable. “Creating it just required nailing down how results are actually processed and then writing a bunch of script code to do all the work,” Todd said. “I'm a programmer by trade but hadn't worked with Google scripting before. Took me about 30 hours of noodling around to get it working.”
Todd described that benefits of the new process:
1) All of the programming accomplishes several things that Kathy was doing by hand. It gives her a list of players and she can easily mark who's playing that week. From that, there's a function that automatically creates the "Who's in this week" email that she sends out three times a week.
2) Once she has all the players, there's a function that puts everyone into the groups by ability. She can manually tweak that as needed. There's then a function that pushes the names and groups to a web page where everyone can see what group they are in.
3) After playing, Kathy manually enters the scores into the spreadsheet. A function sorts everyone by their finish, moves the winner up to the next group and the last-place finisher down, bumps people with perfect games up one more spot, moves all the Did Not Plays down one, and removes the people that haven't played in three weeks from the list.
“That's the main benefit of the spreadsheet—all of that ranking and moving around took hours to do and was error prone,” Todd said. “Now it's a click of a button and done in a couple seconds.”
The results and new ranking are pushed out to the web page for everyone to see. “Now that I've seen it in action, we've got more ideas to improve it for the next session,” Todd said.
Todd himself hasn’t been in action at Ladder for seven weeks due to a hamstring injury. He hopes to be back in the next week or two. “Not playing is making me appreciate pickleball more. Don't miss it till it's gone and all of that.”
Players sign up for Evergreen Ladder by emailing Kathy. Contact her by tomorrow (Feb. 7) to play this Thursday or by Feb. 14 to play next week. “The rules require new players to commit to playing at least three out of the 10 games in each session and we can't accept new players after week eight because of that rule,” Kathy said.
Your entry level on the Ladder will be determined by Kathy in consultation with you and according to the Ladder guidelines.
Buchanan Park Planning
Evergreen Park and Recreation District held a community meeting Jan. 25 at Buchanan Rec Center to gather input on park improvements that are on track to include outdoor courts. About 40 people circulated through informational exhibits and had a chance to share input with designers and EPRD staff.
The schematic design and graphic site plan are examples, not drawings of Buchanan park.
People added sticky notes to a relief map of the site to suggest uses.
Play with Grit, Just Don’t Track It In
Despite the maintenance staff’s best efforts, the Wulf gymnasium is a little grittier than we’d like sometimes. That can lead to obviously unwanted slipping and sliding on the courts.. Maybe we can help by not wearing street shoes into the gym, or at least by trying to minimize the dirt and water we deposit.
Marshdale is Clear, for the Moment
John Hach informed TeamReach app users Tuesday that three Marshdale courts were open “until the next snowstorm.” Open might not mean playable, judging by the water on Court 2 (or is it 1?) in his photo. “The biggest issue is the failing court surface,” John posted. “More dead ball bounces than ever!’
The planned improvements to Marshdale this spring/summer are eagerly anticipated, to say the least. And yet another thank-you to the Snow Angels, who worked for hours on Sunday to move heavy snow.
