Pink-Out Pickleball | Photos by Alex Roberts | The Wright State Guardian
On Oct. 2, Counseling and Wellness Service worked with Campus Recreation to put on Pink Out Pickleball for the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer movement. Pink Out Pickleball was held, where teams competed in hourly tournaments as they donated energy and money to the fight against cancer.
Purpose
Katie Meyer is a graduate student in public health and a graduate assistant at CWS. She was heavily involved in the running of the Pink Out Pickleball Tournament.
“We are looking to do a couple of things with this event. One is to build our team for the Making Strides event,” Meyer stated.
She explained that their goal was to get a hundred team members to represent Wright State University, and they have reached that already. She explained that everyone is excited to have reached this goal so quickly in the first year of doing this event.
“We’re looking to raise some money for breast cancer that we can contribute to the American Cancer Society, and then we’re just looking to kind of build momentum for the walk [and] for years to come,” Meyer said.
At the time of the interview, Meyer said they were a little over halfway to their goal of $2,500 raised for this cause. She explained that the events and fundraising have all exceeded her expectations.
The event also had cornhole, food trucks and a “skill builder” section, where people could bounce a pickleball on a racket.
Meyer and CWS did a lot of the planning and marketing for the event but said that they could not have done the pickleball aspect of things without Campus Recreation.
Event
Evelyn Oktavec is the graduate assistant for Campus Recreation and helped out with the event.
Oktavec explained that a lot of the people who sign up for these events already know a lot about pickleball and its rules, but they encourage everyone to sign up.
“We always tell people, if you don’t know, that’s okay. Come out, try something new! We always are willing to teach you beforehand. Or kind of explain the rules,” Oktavec said. “Most of the time with these types of events, everyone that kind of participates, even if it’s your opponent, they are more helpful than trying to beat you.”
Participants were excited about the game, facing off and having fun. They would retrieve each others’ balls and toss them over to each other across the net, chuckling before starting the next round.
Braden Grant, a senior financial services major, and Ayden Davis, a freshman exercise science major, are both basketball players for WSU. They both came to the Pink Out Pickleball for the activity and the cause.
“It was fun,” Davis exclaimed. “[I’ve] always loved supporting the battle against cancer. So that was a plus, too.”
“It definitely made the twenty bucks easy to pay, and [the] donations as well,” said Grant.
WSU’s first-ever Pink Out Pickleball tournament was a great success, seeing more traffic than the staff expected. People in attendance had a good time with a fun activity for an important cause.
