‘Speakin’ with Deakin’

Steve Deakin, a multi-medal winning professional player and PCO’s 2020 Ambassador,  has successfully competed with and against the best players in the sport, and is ranked as Canada’s top male pickleball player. ‘“Speakin’ with Deakin” invites you to submit your questions to communications@pickleballcanada.org - Steve is waiting to hear from you! 

Steve, can you provide us with your input as to how the Canadian Pickleball system can get more elite, young athletes playing and excelling in pickleball early on in their lives?

It’s been said that pickleball in Canada is about 5 years behind the U.S. in its development.  Where this really shows is at the Junior level.  Some of that may be due to our lack of year-round outdoor weather play and some of it is due to the lack of indoor facilities dedicated to pickleball.  Both these things make it tough to get a steady play plan together and start to harvest young talent.

In Canada we tend to battle the winter season with indoor recreational facilities that can’t accommodate or keep up with the growing demand.  So, in other words, our focus is right now on getting provinces, cities and municipalities to build us dedicated playing space.  Once we can achieve that, then we can reach out to the kids and start to develop junior talent.

Tennis Canada was always very involved with youth development, but they have had decades of programs, where PCO is still working on developing some of the basic tournament structures to be put in place and then to have a rating system that will make sense for competition.  

I would like to see small junior competitions added to some of the Provincial and National tournaments eventually and maybe with some provincial high performance coaching, that talent could be unearthed.  I was one of those kids in tennis, so I know that they are out there.  With a little more visibility, it will happen.

I have yet to meet someone, anyone…. that doesn’t love the game once they have tried it.