After a year of planning, we held the USAPA Mid-Atlantic Regional tournament last weekend at the Myrtle Beach Sports Center.  The event was a huge success! We had an 25% increase of participants over last year.  Our final number was 520 players.  This means we had about 300 matches per day, all with referees.  I heard many players tell us that this is one of the best tournaments they have been to. 

We had the first ever USAPA Regional with wheelchair division including two events; Doubles and Singles.  I will say that the wheelchair participants were thrilled to compete in such an event.   There have been wheelchair demonstrations before but not events that counted.  Our Gold Medal winners qualified for pre-registration for the 2020 Nationals just like all the other events. 

A huge thanks to many folks to help make this happen.  We had a Tournament Core Team that met over the past year to plan the event;  Sharon MacKenzie - USAPA Mid-Atlantic Regional DIrector; Laura Paterson - USAPA Secretary and Referee Coordinator; Michele Boswell - Player Gifts; Kristen Meyer - Managing Picleballtournaments.com;  Sue Miller - Club Secretary; Scott Jobes - Sponsors; Michele Smith - Vendor/Food Trucks; Emily Taylor - Club VP; Jeff Haynes - Club Treasurer and myself. 

There were other key folks that contributed a lot during the year.  Steve Boswell - Court layout/taping; Audrey Connery - Raffle/Door prizes; Terri Loving - Volunteer coordinator/social. 

And when the time came to run the event, we had over 50 volunteers step up and help us setup the venue and run the event all three days.  It takes a lot of these folks to make an event this big to be successful.  A HUGE THANKS TO ALL!