Prices & Deadlines
All prices in CAD $
Additional Mandatory Membership Fees
Pickleball BC - $7.50/year
Pickleball Canada - $10.00/year
Looking Ahead to the Fall
Your Board members have been busy planning the fall and winter VRPA programs. Huge shout out to Rhea Athey for all her work on this. Tessa Graham has also been instrumental in bringing a whole new suite of programs being offered in partnership with UVIC's CARSA facility.
Get ready for three different levels of women, men and mixed DUPR leagues at CARSA. (3-3.49, 3.5-3.99 and 4+). Men’s and women’s DUPR leagues will be Monday during the day; Mixed doubles will be Wednesday during the day. We’re also rolling out three MLP leagues – you put together your own team of four at DUPR 14, 16 or 18. These will be Thursdays during the day. Full details will be on the CARSA website (https://vikesrec.ca/pickleball).
More information will follow but we wanted to give you a heads up that registration will open August 18 through the CARSA website. We’re also moving the very popular Cedar Hill school evening social play to CARSA and will now have up to 8 courts – 4 dedicated to 3.49 and under and 4 at 3.5+.
Pearkes, First Metropolitan, and VPC Locations
We’ve streamlined our instructional offerings with 3.0+ instruction at Pearkes and 3.00 under at First Met. We are no longer offering programs at Christ Church Cathedral and we’ve move King of Court (originally at Pearkes) to the Victoria Pickleball Centre.
The right people in the right place: Signing up at your current level of play
We’re piloting a new “initiative” for the higher level instructional classes to better ensure that participants are signing up in classes that best fit their current level of play. We have received many comments and frustration from members about participants “inaccurately” signing up for instructional classes. Most notably, members are sometimes “over-rating” their skill level and registering for instructional classes that are above their current skill level.
I want to take a moment to emphasize that it is tough to figure out what level of play you are at. There are three general categories: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. They are roughly equivalent to up to 3.0 (learning to play); 3.0-3.9 (intermediate); and 4.0 + (advanced). There are two main approaches to identifying levels of play: performance-based (tournaments, leagues, DUPR) and skill-based. For myself, I use DUPR (180+ games in my account right now) to give one sense of where I fit. Another marker is what level do you sign up for if you enter a tournament: I sign up for 4.0 events. Another way to get a sense of where you fit is to observe the other people you play with and identify people who are stronger than you and then see what level they play at (in other classes, in tournaments). Another approach to identifying your level is by skill set. If you consult the Pickleball Canada Skills Self Assessment Chart (https://pickleballcanada.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Pickleball-Canada-Skills-Self-Assessment-Chart.pdf) you can identify what level you are at based on specific criteria related to playing. It is important to realize that most people are good at some criteria (a 4.0+ serve!) but may be at a much lower level for some other criteria (consistently hits a soft drop shot).
Because rating is so tricky/complicated, we’re trying something new. Signup for 3.5+ instructional classes will be with a two step process:
- declare your interest first (declaring does not guarantee a spot)
- VRPA will review the list and choose the first 8 members that are the best fit for that particular class and skill level
- VRPA programmer will communicate to those players identified to finalize their registration and pay
- VRPA programmer will communicate to the other players not identified to offer potential other offerings
We know this is not a perfect solution and there are bound to be some bumps along the ways so we invite your feedback so that we may adapt in the future as necessary. Feedback can be sent to vrpavicepresident@gmail.com.
One Dynamic Universal Pickleball Rating (DUPR)
Once DUPR is utilized more and is reliable (it currently has 8 million matches in the system), VRPA can rely on that measure more. The VRPA Board recently passed a resolution that in order to play in VRPA sponsored tournaments (e.g. Christmas, Victoria Classic and Berwick Women’s) a player can only have ONE DUPR account. So we’re giving you lots of notice that if you are one of those people with multiple DUPR accounts, delete or merge them or you will not be able to participate in our tournaments.
Limits on Program Enrollment; Requirement to be VRPA Member
We will also be enforcing the limit of one instruction and one non-instructional program per person in order to reach as many people as possible. Please help us by not “over registering” as it costs us time and money for the VRPA programmer to “de-register” you!
We will also be requiring that all participants in our programs be members. You can find your member number on the Pickleball Canada website: https://pickleballcanada.org
I will send out more information about the various programs we have planned in the coming weeks along with deadlines and how to register. Enjoy the summer and the weather!
Roger Graves
President, VRPA