Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
WINONA LAKE - Like the sport of pickleball itself, it didn’t take long for Project Ebenezer’s Helping Heroes Fest Pickleball Tournament to grow in popularity.
The first year of the tournament in 2024 was a huge success, according to Warsaw Police Department officer Paige Wood, who is the president and co-founder of Project Ebenezer. There were 136 participants playing pickleball, bringing in about 500 people.
This year’s two-day tournament had over 179 participants play, and the expectation was that it would bring in about 1,000 people. There were 60 teams on Saturday alone playing at the Winona Lake Limitless Park courts (and the Gordon Health and Wellness Center due to weather conditions).
“We’ve had great support from the first responder community, coming out, helping to run things. Our whole logistics team is made up of first responders - jailers, dispatchers, police officers, firemen - all coming together from different agencies to help us set it up, put it together and make it happen,” she stated.
This year, they decided to expand and give back and offer stuff for kids to get more of the community involved.
“Because pickleball is a specific community, right? And we want to get more of the community out here to have fun, to show them a different side of us. We’re fun people. We’re not just the people in uniform that show up when you’re having a really bad day. We like to have fun and have good experiences with kids, too. We want to invite everybody out, to come hang out and get to know what we do, get to see our gear, get to do activities with us and just have a little fun,” she said.
Activities included a K9 demonstration, a fireman’s obstacle course, face painting by dispatch, CARES offering hair tinsel and a mini touch-a-truck with some emergency services vehicles. First responders also provided arts and crafts.
Project Ebenezer is a nonprofit. It supports mental health and wellness for the first responders of Kosciusko County, Wood explained.
The organization has been in existence, and received its 501(c)3 status, just a little over two years.
“It’s kind of borne out of my post-traumatic stress experience and the incident that I was involved in on Winona Avenue, and a way for me to give back and to use my story to help other first responders,” Wood said. “I had a lot of people coming forward, sharing experiences that they had been through and things they hadn’t talked about because there’s very much a stigma in the first responder community about mental health. So, it kind of opened the door for people to start having conversations, and I found through those conversations some other people really needed some help but they didn’t feel like they had a safe space to turn and asking for some help, so that’s kind of how Project Ebenezer was born and why we do what we do.”
The pickleball tournament is broken down into skill divisions. In pickleball, 2.5 is the beginner skill level, and then goes up to 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0-plus. Within each of those divisions is Gold, Silver and Bronze. The Heroes Fest tournament had a men’s division, a women’s division and then a mixed division on Sunday.
In one game Saturday, the oldest team signed up played against the youngest team.
Cheryl Brandt, 80, and Teresa Triplett, 69, said they’ve been playing pickleball about two years. They got into it for the camaraderie.
“A lot of stuff retirees do,” Triplett said. She stated playing the youngest team - two girls - was fun.
“Very fun,” Brandt stated. “... They were so enthusiastic, I loved it.”
Triplett said the young girls won 14-12.
“It was a long game. We were well matched,” Triplett said.
Handmade awards were given to the winners. Wood said, “We have a couple different community members that came together. Larry Long and Will Brandt actually cut out pickleball paddles from wood for us. So they cut those out and then our vice president, RJ Nethaway, worked with our partner, Fellowship Missions, in utilizing their different laser engravers, and we laser engraved them, we added some cool wrapping to them, so we actually made pickleball paddles as the awards this year.”
The pickleball tournament has its own unique origin story.
Wood said she was at a training with several members of the prosecutor’s office. As they were sitting in a hot tub, kicking around ideas for fundraisers, the idea of a pickleball tournament came up.
“We all enjoy pickleball. We play pickleball together, so we decided, ‘let’s go for it, let’s try and do a pickleball tournament,’” she recalled.
Looking down the road, if the tournament continues to grow, Wood said it’s a possibility it could expand to other courts around the county.
“We’ve looked at different seasons, as well, doing more than one a year, but we’ve had some people reach out about hosting pickleball tournaments in different areas of the county, exposing it to different organizations, too, and getting them involved as well. So, yeah, there’s definitely potential for growth,” Wood said. “Hopefully, if we keep growing, too, we can incorporate more courts around town and start spreading out a little bit as well, too.”
K21 Health Foundation is the Fest and tournament’s title sponsor this year.
“We have 13 other ‘Felony’ level sponsors. So, obviously, being first responders we had to come up with creative names. Our sponsorship levels are Felony, Misdemeanor and then Warning. And so, we have 13 Felony level sponsorships, we have a Misdemeanor and then we have a slew of Warning level sponsors as well,” Wood said. “Great support from the community, a lot of generosity coming in.”
For anyone who missed the Heroes Fest and pickleball tournament, Wood said Project Ebenezer will be hosting a couple other events throughout the year. Follow their Facebook page or visit their website at https://www.projectebenezer.com/ to learn more.
“We will be hosting another pickleball tournament next year. We’re kind of in now, so we’ve got to keep going with it. I think people would be pretty mad if we stopped at this point. So they check our website and our Facebook to see when it will be coming up next year. Our goal is continue with the kids’ events, too, year after year, to keep that rolling,” Wood stated.
She thanked the community for their support.
“We’ve had a ton of messages come in to our inbox, to our email. We’ve had a lot of private donations come in, as well. And then, a lot of businesses that haven’t necessarily given to the raffle or given monetarily, but they have provided things like the squeegees for the courts for if it rains,” Wood said.
As an example, she said last year Seymour Midwest saw all the rain the tournament had to deal with so they provided better squeegees than the tournament had.
“So, just a huge thank-you for the community for rallying behind us and letting our first responders know that they see us, they care about us and that we have people behind us that are willing to help us on some of our worst days,” Wood stated.
