Pickleball Magazine 2-6 Courtesy of PickleballTournaments | Page 22

PLAYER PROFILE
JAMIE
BUNCH
ELLIOTT
FALLING HEAD
OVER HEELS FOR
PICKLEBALL
W
hen fellow pickleballers
say they meet “the
most interesting
people” playing
pickleball, they’re not kidding.
Take Jamie Bunch Elliott as a prime
example. Elliott has been playing
pickleball since the late 1980s, when
she and her husband discovered
it during a high school reunion in
Washington state. An avid racquetball
player, Elliott loved the sport, but was
introduced to it in its nascent stage,
when it was more of a novelty.
“One of my husband’s friends had
a pickleball court at his home—
complete with wooden paddles—and
we played it there for the first time
and really enjoyed it,” she said.
Elliott enjoyed it so much that in
1995, when she was contracted by
20
Angel Fire, NM, officials to help with
the building of a new community
center in the town she now called
home, she purchased pickleball
equipment as part of the recreation
package.
“They had a net: big, yellow, plastic
bases that you could fill with sand or
water; and nets that were attached
to PVC pipes that fit into the bases,”
Elliott said of the gear you could
purchase back then. However, despite
her best efforts to push the sport,
pickleball just couldn’t get traction in
Angel Fire, a resort town of around
1,000 people known primarily for its
golfing, skiing and 8,500-foot base
elevation.
“I tried to get it going in 1996-97,
but it really didn’t go anywhere. We
didn’t get any interest. It wasn’t until
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about six years ago that we really got
it going in Angel Fire.”
But, if life taught Elliott anything,
it was that determination will win
in the end. It’s a lesson she’d first
learned when her career as a flight
attendant ended prematurely due to
an airline bankruptcy.
“I’d been with Braniff Airlines
for almost 20 years when they
filed bankruptcy in 1982. When
they dissolved, I signed on with an
agency doing commercials and some
modeling,” Elliott said. “I was on one
film, and this guy on the crew said
there was a stunt group, and they
brought me in under their wings. I
became the first home-based Texas
stuntwoman, got my SAG card in
1985, and worked on a lot of very
good films that were shot in Texas.”