Home court: Ephrata native returns to lead parks department

EPHRATA — Pickleball.

“It’s the fastest growing sport with those over 55,” said Traci Bennett, the director of community services for the City of Ephrata.

It’s why the city converted the tennis courts near Columbia Ridge Elementary School to pickleball courts.

And it’s how Recreation Supervisor Josh Johnson got his job.

Johnson, 22, was a student at Washington State University getting ready to finish a bachelor’s degree in sports management when he needed a three-month internship doing something related to organizing or managing recreational events.

“I had to do an internship, it was a requirement for the BA,” he said. “I looked everywhere and couldn’t find one.”

So he decided to ask Bennett, who oversees the Parks and Recreation Department, about maybe doing that internship in Ephrata — his hometown.

“I grew up right here in Ephrata, I’m a hometown boy,” Johnson said.

The idea appealed to Johnson because he was always interested in “the public and youth” sides of sports management, he said. During his studies at WSU, he spent some time volunteering as the athletic director and sports coordinator for Lincoln Middle School in Pullman, and volunteering at the YMCA in its after-school programs.

Plus, it allowed him to do a three-month internship and live at home.

“And not pay rent,” he said.

But for an internship to be complete, Johnson needed a project.

And that’s where pickleball comes in.

“Many cities are converting tennis courts,” Bennett said. “The ones up at Columbia Ridge were in really rough shape and had a chain-link fence for a net.”

Ephrata has a nice tennis complex at Ephrata High School, Bennett said, so it simply made sense to convert the Columbia Ridge courts to pickleball.

“We already identified it as a project before he came. And that made it the perfect project,” she said.

Pickleball was invented in the mid-1960s on Bainbridge Island by Joel Pritchard, a Puget Sound Republican who would eventually go on to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives and two terms as the state’s lieutenant governor. The game is a combination of tennis and pingpong, played outside on a court smaller than a tennis court, with wooden paddles slightly larger than used in table tennis, and a hollow plastic ball.

With a little money from the city, left over from the dog park project, Johnson went to work last fall remaking the old tennis courts.

“I went up there, did all the manual labor, cleaned up all the leaves,” he said. He cleaned the cracks and applied a special surface coating. “It’s a nice little thing we’ve got up there, so we can do tournaments or lessons or whatever we want to do in the spring or summer.”

Success in the internship, however, did not guarantee Johnson the recreation supervisor job when it came open late last fall, Bennett said. Johnson was one of six people the city interviewed for the position, though in the end, his internship added to his experience and got him the job.

“He had a taste of everything but the pool,” she said. “He knew us and how we did things.”

And now Johnson is helping organize everything from the upcoming Daddy-Daughter Dance on Saturday to this spring’s youth sports leagues and is even looking at expanding the city’s youth soccer alternatives.

Johnson said he never really saw himself working in Ephrata.

“But now that I’m here, I’m glad,” he explained. “I’m familiar with the people, and I get to see people that I grew up knowing, and they see me working for the city, and it’s kind of a cool thing.”

Bennett said that Johnson is a “good fit” with the city’s recreation department, and growing up in Ephrata means he often knows exactly whom to call for volunteers or help on a project.

“The people he knows, that has been priceless,” she said.

“I’m really excited to be here, to see where this takes me. To see what I can learn here,” he said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at [email protected].