Help Keep Pickleball in Lemon Grove

My name is Juliet DeAmicis, and I’m one of the organizers of the Lemon Grove Pickleball and Social group. A free, volunteer-led pickleball group that brings community members together every week.

Starting a sport can be intimidating for people, so our club works as an initiation, all while building relationships and getting people active. Through members' contributions, we’ve gathered pickleball paddles and equipment to give newcomers an approachable introduction to pickleball. When someone signs up, we introduce them to everyone and offer them a free lesson.

But now, we need your help.

Our courts are makeshift and rely heavily on volunteers bringing the nets and equipment to allow access to play. Because this isn’t sustainable in the long term, we’re asking our friends, family, local business, and connections to help us ensure that Pickleball can continue despite what life might bring by helping us build permanent courts.

At this stage in our growth, we need to paint lines and install new nets, which have fallen into disrepair.

The courts will not only help our club but will directly impact the middle schoolers at Lemon Grove Middle School during the week. Currently, they’re using a tennis court with faded lines and dangerous infrastructure covered in rust.

If you don’t know Lemon Grove, it’s an underserved area in San Diego. The city can hardly afford to run itself, which means there’s little room for investment in recreation or the health of our youth, seniors, or families. Covid closed our senior center, and our recreation building has been shut to the public for 12 years. This leaves many people severely lacking the resources to live a healthy life.

We realize as a community that if we want to speed up the change, we’d like to see, we need to do it ourselves and call upon our friends to help us make something beautiful.

Through pickleball, we make connections, learn about problems, and communicate the possibilities for change. It’s become a flywheel for making a difference where we live, and it’s important to us that it continues. 

So, please consider donating for us to hire some locals to install courts and build some nets. Even a small donation will make a massive difference for Lemon Grove and everyone in it. Just let us see your name on that list, even if it’s as tiny as $5!

If donating is still tricky at this time, try telling one person in your life about this page and why this cause is important to you. Many donations come from unexpected places, so you never know if your words helped move our cause forward.

Thank you all for taking the time to read this far. It means a lot to the people involved in making this project a reality, and you’ll be creating a whole lot of joy with your contribution.

Want more Lemon Grove Pickleball? Come out and join us to get to know us directly! We meet every Saturday at 9:30 am at the Lemon Grove Recreation Center on the tennis courts.

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Keep on dinking!

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All money will go toward building courts. Anything we raise over that will be put directly into recreation equipment and programs through N.E.O.