Laurie Balatti Is Using Her Teaching Skills To Grow Pickleball In California’s Central Valley
Balatti, of Los Banos, is a USA Pickleball Ambassador an a major advocate for the sport in her hometown.
By Alex Abrams
Red Line Editorial
After spending 33 years as a teacher in Los Banos, California, Laurie Balatti knows how to stand in front of a roomful of people and keep their attention while showing them something new.
She’s also comfortable with advocating on their behalf.
Balatti didn’t start playing pickleball until she was almost age 68. Instead of taking it easy after retiring from teaching, she has brought the lessons she used in the classroom to the pickleball courts that she has helped get built in Los Banos.
Balatti, now 77, was already trying to grow the sport’s popularity in California’s San Joaquin Valley before she became a USA Pickleball Ambassador four years ago. But she has worked to attract new pickleball players and find more courts for them to play on in her role as an Ambassador.
“When I was teaching, I was a leader in that way, so I just kind of moved from one thing to the other,” Balatti said. “This was a perfect fit for me because when I got people started (in pickleball), it involved teaching. I love that because, whether they’re 60 or whether they’re eight, people are just the same. You can still use the same strategies to encourage new players. My favorite part of the whole thing is getting people started.”
Balatti knows a lot of people around Los Banos from her more than three decades of training teachers and teaching students in elementary school and junior high school. In addition, her husband, Tom, is a lifelong Los Banos resident.
With her husband’s help, Balatti has used her local connections to grow the Los Banos Pickleball Club to the point where it became a nonprofit organization this past spring.
And as pickleball’s popularity has skyrocketed over the past few years, she has tried to spread the word about the sport by giving presentations to everyone from the city council and local rotary club to people attending the annual Los Banos Tomato Festival.
“It’s all a blur of how quickly things have moved and how quickly we’ve grown,” Balatti said. “(Being a USA Pickleball Ambassador) gave me the opportunity to be a spokesperson for our group, and then of course, it made me more motivated because I knew what my job was as an Ambassador.”
Balatti’s persistence has paid off. In the fall, the city will break ground on nine new pickleball courts that are being built at the AG Sports Complex in Los Banos.
“I feel a big sense of pride,” Balatti said of her work as a USA Pickleball Ambassador. “There was never a month that went by that I didn’t contact somebody in local government and connect with them.”
In April 2015, Balatti and her husband were in Roseville, California, when one of her friends took her to watch people play pickleball. She had never seen it before then, and even though she didn’t play a match that day, she said she knew immediately, “That’s my game.”
The following week, Balatti was visiting friends in Palm Desert, California. She told them that she’d play golf with them, but they also needed to take her to play pickleball. She instantly became hooked on it.
“We didn’t know what the heck we were doing because we had nobody to show us,” Balatti said. “So, we went and played with some other friends, and that’s probably about all we knew at the time. But that’s how it started.”
Her advocacy on behalf of pickleball also began soon afterward.
As soon as she returned home from Palm Desert, Balatti and her husband noticed that there were no courts set up for pickleball at their local community center. So, they approached the Los Banos Parks and Recreation Department, explained to its officials what pickleball was and said they’d like to play matches at the community center.
“They ended up buying us some Walmart nets. I didn’t even know the difference. I mean, these were nets that could be raised or lowered for volleyball, badminton, whatever,” Balatti said. “And so, we started playing there. That April, we had maybe 4-6 people, and now we have like 130.”
Balatti has also gotten her three grandchildren involved in pickleball. When they come to Los Banos for a visit, she and her husband put up a net in their backyard and play pickleball with them. They also take them to pickleball courts near their home.
Balatti said she decided to become a USA Pickleball Ambassador after speaking with good friends whom she had met through pickleball. Her friends were USAP Ambassadors as well.
“They said, ‘You’re already doing what Ambassadors do, so why don’t you apply to be an Ambassador?’” Balatti said. “They pretty much encouraged me to do that, so I did.”
Alex Abrams has written about Olympic and Paralympic sports for more than 15 years, including as a reporter for major newspapers in Florida, Arkansas and Oklahoma. He is a freelance contributor to USA Pickleball on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc. Red Line Editorial, Inc.
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