Ching has caught our attention a few times over the years – the first was for posting this awesome how-to article for local players. The second was for appearing in the Pickleball Librarian's video review of PlayTime Scheduler. Ching is part of a great team of admins for Wichita, Kansas – currently our 8th largest region. We asked her a few questions about her experiences.

How long have you been playing pickleball and where did you learn to play?
I’ve been playing for about 3 years now. I first learned of pickleball at the Chicken N Pickle in Kansas City but I didn’t actually learn how to play until I started playing regularly at our local YMCA.

When did you first join PlayTime Scheduler as a regional admin?
I believe I joined in late 2019 when one of my pickleball friends suggested that we use it for our area, but I didn’t have time to add all the locations, so the credit for truly building PlayTime Scheduler up the Wichita area goes out to my friend Mason McCanless. I shared the site with him and he took off running. Nowadays, I just help answer a few questions here and there and approve new locations or make updates to existing ones.

What do you think is the most rewarding part of being a regional admin?

I love the sport so much and I enjoy sharing it with everyone. The most rewarding thing for me is helping people find places to play and connecting new players with the various play groups that I know about. 

What’s the biggest challenge?
In terms of growing the sport, not a big challenge because everyone who tries pickleball for the first time immediately falls in love with it. In terms of getting new players to use PlayTime Scheduler, we do have a challenge of players having a limited understanding of how to use the tool or registering for a free account altogether, so every couple of months or so we post something about PlayTime Scheduler in our local Facebook group (Wichita Pickleball). I also try to write little articles like this one on our ictpickleball.com site to help people get the most out of their PlayTime Scheduler account. However, we still have some "off the grid" players, who either don't play enough or just don't care to create an account on the site, and we just add them as guests to our play sessions.

What advice would you give to a new region considering setting up PlayTime Scheduler?
I think the key is taking the initiative (or having someone like Mason take the initiative) to add all of the existing locations in your area and then scheduling some play times, so people can see how it works. It's important to help the players understand how to use the tool and how it will benefit them, because it's easy to continue to use the same tools (Group Me, text message groups, email groups) that we are more comfortable with; but, once you have a few players regularly using PlayTime Scheduler, the adoption becomes exponential and then the entire community can fully realize the benefits. We started using PlayTime Scheduler with just a handful of players and now we are almost 1200 strong in Wichita, and most of them are very active on the site either creating sessions or joining sessions.