Past News
NEWLY RESURFACED TENNIS COURTS AT BEULAH PARK BY CRYSTAL LAKE BEACH
If you’re looking for a tennis court with a smooth as ice surface in Benzie County, bring your tennis racket & tennis balls to the Village Park in Beulah, where you’ll find a beautifully resurfaced tennis court ready for play. The high, surrounding fence keeps those errantly hit balls from leaving the court. You’ll also have the opportunity to see the new Pickleball Court that is directly adjacent to the tennis court. AND, don’t forget that you can come to Beulah by boat and tie up at the Beulah Day Dock at no charge. Why not bring a picnic to enjoy before or after you game to enjoy in the shade under the beautiful park trees or at the Beulah Beach on Crystal Lake.
PICKLEBALL ANYONE?!
It’s one of the fastest growing sports activities in the US. And YOU can play this fantastic game right in the Village Park in Beulah, where a great pickleball court stands waiting for you. It’s adjacent to the recently re-surfaced tennis court by Beulah Beach on Crystal Lake.
WHAT IS PICKLEBALL?
Quoted from Wikipedia:
OVERVIEW: The sport is played on a court with the same dimensions as a doubles badminton court. The net is similar to a tennis net, but is mounted two inches lower. The game is played with a hard paddle and a polymer smaller version of a wiffle ball. Pickleball is similar to tennis, but with differences. A pickleball ball typically moves at one-third of the average speed of a tennis ball and the court is just under one-third of the total area of a tennis court.
Originally invented as a backyard pastime, pickleball is now an organized sport represented by national and international governing bodies. The United States Pickleball Association estimates there are more than 100,000 active pickleball players in that country. In Canada, where the game is still relatively new, there are more than 5,000 players in four provinces: British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec and Ontario. Meanwhile new organizations like the Singapore Pickleball Association and the All India Pickleball Association are bringing the game to Asia. Central Florida hosts over 108 courts in The Villages, a popular retirement community located near Orlando, Florida. In Davie, located in South Florida, there are five Pickleball courts on a converted hockey rink. In Oakland Park, Florida two Pickleball courts were placed on a converted hockey rink. Holiday Park in Fort Lauderdale has four Pickleball courts in their Hockey Rink.
The game started during the summer of 1965 on Bainbridge Island, Washington at the home of then State Representative Joel Pritchard (who, in 1970, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for the State of Washington). He and two of his friends, Bill Bell and Barney McCallum, returned from golf and found their families bored one Saturday afternoon. They attempted to set up badminton but no one could find the shuttlecock. They improvised with a whiffle ball, lowered the badminton net, and fabricated paddles of plywood from a nearby shed.
HISTORY: The unusual name of the game originated with Joan Pritchard, who said it reminded her of the “Pickle Boat in crew where oarsmen were chosen from the leftovers of other boats.”The popular story told today is that it was named after the family dog. Joan corrected this story in interviews but the story persists. As the story is told, the whiffle ball belonged to the dog. Whenever an errant shot happened, Pickles would run and try to get the ball and hide it. They named the game for their dog’s ball, “Pickles’ Ball”, then it became Pickleball. The truth is the Pritchard family didn’t get the dog until 1967, so actually, the dog was named after the sport.
THE COURT: The pickleball court is similar to a doubles badminton court. The actual size of the court is 20×44 feet for both doubles and singles. The net is hung at 36 inches on the ends, and 34 inches in the middle. The court is striped like a tennis court, with no alleys; but the outer courts, and not the inner courts, are divided in half by service lines. The inner courts are non-volley zones and extend 7 feet from the net on either side.
THE PLAY : The ball is served underhand from behind the baseline, diagonally to the opponent’s service zone. Points are scored by the serving side only and occur when the opponent faults (fails to return the ball, hits ball out of bounds, steps into the ‘kitchen’ area [the first seven feet from the net, also known as the non-volley zone] in the act of volleying the ball, etc.). A player may enter the non-volley zone to play a ball that bounces, and may stay there to play balls that bounce. The player must exit the non-volley zone before playing a volley. The first side scoring 11 points and leading by at least two points wins.
The return of service must be allowed to bounce by the server (the server and partner in doubles play); i.e. cannot be volleyed. Consequently, the server or server and partner usually stay at the baseline until the first return has been hit back and bounced once.
In doubles play, at the start of the game, the serving side gets only one fault before their side is out, and the opponents begin their serve. After this, each side gets 2 faults (one with each team member serving) before their serve is finished. Thus, each side is always one serve ahead or behind, or tied.
In singles play, each side gets only one fault before a side out and the opponent then serves. The server’s score will always be even (0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10…) when serving from the right side, and odd (1, 3, 5, 7, 9…) when serving from the left side (singles play only).
“WAITING FOR THE MORNING TRAIN” : Authored in 1972 by Bruce Catton, award winning Pulitizer Prize author of “A Stillness at Appomattox: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy”
A Must Read For All Who Love Beulah & Appreciate Its History
An Excerpt from Chapter 3: In the Morning at The Junction, where Bruce Catton speaks of his walking trips to Beulah to swim, etc.
“Whatever we did in Beulah, we always went to Terp’s place (Terp’s Waterfront Pavilion & Boat Livery built on Beulah Beach in 1900). Anyone who wanted to go fishing could get a boat from Terp, and if he needed bait Terp would sell him a bucket full of minnows. In a shed somewhere Terp had a gasoline tank, to service the summer people who came in by launch. He also sold cigars and cigarets, and against the wall by the soda fountain there were two slot machines. They seemed singularly innocent, and it never occurred to the authorities to proceed against them as gambling devices. In later years, when I read that Chicago gangsters had taken control of the slot machine trade, I found it hard to believe; surely there could not be important money in this business of getting people to risk a few pennies now and then? I understood at last the ways of the Chicago speakeasies were not at all the ways of Terp’s pavilion.
If we were in funds, which was not often the case, we bought ice cream sodas, or pop; if we were not, there was always something to see. There was steady coming and going out on the dock. The summer people who had cottages at various places around the lake relied on the launch rather than the automobile to come to town and do their marketing. The automobile age had not yet reached northern Michigan, and the road that went around the lake was nothing but a track through the sand and an automobile that tried to follow it was almost always certain to get stuck; so the cottager who wanted to go to the grocery or the drug store came down the lake by boat and tied up at Terp’s dock. Terp himself owned two launches, open boats with canopies overhead, and side curtains that could be let down if it rained. Anyone who wanted to give a picnic party somewhere on the beach could hire one of these, and Terp had regular twice-a-day schedule to the far end of the lake. There were more or less regular stops at different cottage colonies along the way, the round trip took about two hours, and as regular commercial carriers operating on fixed schedules these boats were periodically examined by Federal steamboat inspectors, each vehicle had a formal certificate tacked up near the steering wheel, and these were good to look at. They made the whole business seem important.
For all that there was so much coming and going by water, the lake was quiet. The day of the outboard motor had not yet arrived, and all of the power boats on the lake were displacement hulls, not planing craft; there was no loud whining of high speed engines, and the painful process of evolution had not yet brought forth the water skier. People went from cottage to town and back by boat because that was the only way to do it, and it was pleasant to go loafing along on that clear lake with the peaceful hills all around it. Nobody was in a hurry and nobody could go fast if he had been in a hurry. Instead of detracting from the general peace the powerboats somehow emphasized it.”