Thaddea Lock never expected she would become England’s number one female pickleballer, nor that the sport she tried on a whim would earn her an invite to Hollywood star Jamie Foxx’s Super Bowl party.
The former tennis pro’s trajectory to the top of her game is the product of a “why not?” attitude that has so far served the 37-year-old almost impossibly well.
This weekend, the Bristolian is set to represent England in the inaugural European Pickleball Team Championships, as a sport that counts LeBron James, Tom Brady and Michael Phelps among its investors continues to make inroads in the UK.
“I kind of stumbled into (pickleball),” Lock told the PA news agency. “I was on holiday in Kansas with some friends, their daughter (Katie Swan) is a professional tennis player.
“Katie’s mom had been telling me for a while that I had to play pickleball with their friend Lucy, and I’d never heard of it, but I was just, like, OK.
“I did three sessions, very casual but super fun. And then when I was coming home, Lucy said to me, ‘you should keep playing’.
“I emailed a club (who asked), ‘what level are you?’. I didn’t know anything, so I messaged Lucy and she said, ‘say you’re a 5.0′.
“They (replied), ‘if you’re a 5.0, you’re going to be the best female player in the country’. And then they asked, ‘Lucy, who you were playing with, who is that?’.
“I said, ‘Lucy Kovalova, do you know her?’ and they said, ‘yeah, she’s the best female player in the world.’”
Lock, once ranked 300th in the world as a junior tennis player and 900th on the WTA tour, studied in the United States on an athletic scholarship then returned to the UK where she coached and, eventually, began working for the LTA.
She was also, for a time, the hitting partner for Alfie Hewett – another opportunity that happened rather by chance, after the two met at a wheelchair tennis event.
Just before she was set to accompany the Paralympic champion to the Australian Open, Lock was rushed to hospital, diagnosed with glandular fever, hepatitis and jaundice.
Lock could barely get out of bed for the next two months, and even when she began to feel better started to realise: “I couldn’t go back to tennis. It was just way too intense.”
So she turned back to pickleball – a paddle sport that combines elements of badminton, tennis and table tennis.
Even with lingering glandular fever, she won the triple crown – the women’s singles, doubles and mixed doubles – at her first tournament in 2019, then did the same at the English open a month later before the Covid-19 pandemic hit just as the game was starting to make inroads in the UK.
According to Pickleball England data, the estimated number of players in England has grown from about 2,000 at the end of 2019 to 35,000 as of this year to date, while the number of venues in that period has also increased by 94 to 637.
Lock said: “I think, as a country, England are probably the furthest ahead of all the countries in Europe, and once it’s easier for the general public, the sport will just grow and grow.
“I hope the kind of money at the top end doesn’t destroy what the sport brings to people, that it keeps its friendly atmosphere.”
Lock believes she is the only person in the country without a full-time job outside of pickleball.
The sport is believed to be the fastest-growing in the United States, where celebrities like Super Bowl-winning Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, tennis pro Naomi Osaka and actor Eva Longoria are among the myriad celebrity investors in professional Major League Pickleball.
Foxx – who has three pickleball courts at his house in LA – was filming in London and needed someone to play with. Enter Lock, who last September quit her job to go full time in the booming sport.
Halfway through the session, Foxx – who turned up to the “back courts in the middle of nowhere” with just his manager – then extended an invite to the Super Bowl party at the house he was renting in London that night.
Lock added: “He invited these eight strangers that he’d never met before. There’s not many situations where you can do something like that with Jamie Foxx.
“We could have been anyone, but he trusted us, and I think pickleball kind of allowed that to happen.”