Two weeks into World Pickleball Magazine’s Road to the English Open series, the journey is already moving beyond anticipation and into something more demanding: injuries, pressure, family support, tactical flaws and the quiet cost of amateur ambition.
At 8:17 on a Saturday morning, Dave “Thomo” Thompson was standing in his kitchen making beans on toast before driving to the Premier Pickleball League trials in Basingstoke.
His youngest son was still asleep upstairs. His ankle was already wrapped before breakfast. Painkillers had been packed beside the car keys. He was trying not to make too much noise.
He was not expecting to get drafted.
“I’m not here to get in. I’m here to test myself.”
That sentence probably captures the reality of this entire project better than anything else said so far.
Because two weeks into World Pickleball Magazine’s Road to the English Open series, the tournament itself still sits somewhere in the distance. August remains abstract. The NEC remains imaginary.
And yet, for almost everybody involved, the English Open has already started quietly reorganising ordinary life.
It appears in motorway drives and swollen knees. In alarm clocks and hotel bookings. In compression boots beside the sofa. In wives agreeing to another weekend away. In children being left asleep upstairs while somebody heads out before dawn chasing one more session, one more tournament, one more sign that improvement is happening.
Nobody in this series is training full-time.
But increasingly, pickleball is occupying full-time emotional space.
For Zoe Ashbridge, the week began with 7am drills and ended in Leeds after a five-hour round trip for a tournament she could not stop thinking about.
“I was going to bed so excited.”
Her husband drove. They stayed in a hotel for two nights. She stepped into the 3.5 category alongside Marta, a partner she had barely played with before.
The matches were tight. Brutally tight. Games decided 11-10. Semi-finals slipping away by single points. No medals. No breakthrough moment. No dramatic ending.
And yet the weekend still felt important.
“We just played our absolute hearts out.”
That sentence lingers because it says something important about this stage of the journey. Success is no longer only about medals now. Sometimes it is simply about proving you belong in tougher environments.
A year ago, Laura Yeomans says she would have laughed at the idea of attending Premier Pickleball League tryouts. This week she left them disappointed with parts of her performance before slowly realising something else mattered more.
“I didn’t feel particularly out of place.”
That thought stayed with her longer than the results themselves.
Elsewhere, Hari Bollineni sat with a silver medal and frustration after losing a final alongside his English Open partner Jack.
Not because they had been overwhelmed.
Because he could see exactly what was happening tactically and still could not solve it quickly enough in the moment.
“That was frustrating, but motivating.”
The tournament is no longer abstract now. It has started living inside details.
Third-shot drops.
Backhand dinks.
Kitchen patience.
Transition resets.
Volley speed.
Tiny technical moments are beginning to carry emotional weight because every player involved now understands what waits for them in Birmingham.
And perhaps the most striking thing about Week Two is how openly people are discussing weakness.
Julie Vickerman won gold at last year’s English Nationals and still talks honestly about serve nerves.
“Despite the fact I won gold last year, I still consistently suffer with nerves with my serve.”
So she spent two hours drilling it this week.
Not glamorous training either. Repetition. Routine. Muscle memory. Trying to create something stable enough to survive pressure.
Stephen Hargreaves is fighting his own technical battle. Coming from squash, his instincts still pull him relentlessly towards the backhand side.
“I just want to backhand everything.”
Simon Heaps, meanwhile, speaks about pickleball with the cold honesty of somebody who spent decades in elite sport.
“Good opponents will find you out. Don’t hide behind your good shots.”
At 70 years old, the former England and Great Britain table tennis international is preparing simultaneously for wheelchair competition and over-70s doubles. His training now involves specific tournament balls, grip changes, chair movement drills and learning how to move backwards quickly enough to survive lobs.
Then, almost immediately after discussing “marginal gains”, he admitted he nearly fell out of his wheelchair because he forgot to tighten a bolt properly.
That balance is what makes these stories feel real.
Nobody here sounds like an athlete inside a motivational advert.
They sound like people trying to improve while carrying the messiness of ordinary life with them.
And increasingly, the closer the English Open gets, the more every player seems to discover a conversation with their own body.
Kath Knowles had been progressing well with her hamstring recovery until she stepped back onto court and felt it “ping” almost immediately.
Karen Farnhill is managing tennis elbow, thyroid problems, IBS and ongoing back pain while also helping care for her elderly mother.
Stephen is balancing night shifts at Amazon involving up to 50,000 steps before still trying to find energy for training sessions afterwards.
Simon jokes that his best friend currently is “Ibuprofen”.
Sarah Reading spent part of the week convinced she might be losing her eyesight after blurred vision and floating shapes began affecting both daily life and matches.
“The thing I feared most was not being able to play pickleball.”
The eventual diagnosis was dry eye syndrome rather than anything more serious, but the fear itself revealed something much bigger underneath this entire project.
For almost everybody involved, pickleball has stopped being “just a hobby”.
It has become structure.
Routine.
Friendship.
Identity.
Relief.
Purpose.
Stephen perhaps explained it most honestly of all.
“Since finding pickleball, I’m a happier person.”
Not a richer person. Not a more successful person. Simply happier.
That line probably says more about the growth of pickleball than participation statistics ever could.
Because again and again throughout this project, people keep describing the sport less as an activity and more as something that quietly changed the shape of their lives.
Emily Williams is balancing nursing placements, Welsh League competition, club responsibilities and her son’s GCSE revision timetable while still building a competition prep environment for players in Anglesey.
Thomo is now discussing whether reducing his work hours might allow him to coach more.
Sarah talks about her “pickleball family”.
Zoe says tournament weekends feel like spending time with people who simply understand each other.
And underneath almost every update sits another recurring truth emerging from this series:
Nobody arrives at the NEC alone.
Wives drive motorway journeys.
Partners absorb the time commitment.
Friends rescue tournament entries at the last minute.
Clubs organise practice groups.
Coaches stay behind after sessions.
Communities quietly hold all of this together.
When Zoe lost her mixed doubles partner before Leeds, one message into the pickleball world solved the problem within hours. When Sarah panicked about her eyesight, somebody inside the sport immediately connected her with a specialist.
Again and again, these stories keep returning to the same thing:
People.
That may ultimately become the defining theme of this entire Road to the English Open project.
Not medals.
Not rankings.
Not even winning.
Just the discovery that somewhere between league nights, sore knees, motorway service stations and early-morning drill sessions, this sport has started meaning far more to these players than they ever expected.
By the time August arrives, some of them will leave Birmingham with medals around their necks.
Others will not.
But already, weeks before anybody walks into the NEC, something important has changed.
If you’re following how the global game is shifting week by week, the World Pickleball Report breaks this down every day in our morning briefing.
For a clearer view of where the sport is heading each month, you can download the latest free issue of World Pickleball Magazine.
Chris Beaumont
Founder and Editor-in-ChiefChris Beaumont is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of World Pickleball Magazine. Chris follows the global game closely, reporting on the latest news, developments, stories and tournaments from all five continents. He also hosts the World Pickleball Podcast, interviewing people at…
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