Sioux Falls mother of 4 aims to break Guinness pickleball record

By Mick Garry, for Pigeon605

When someone has decided to try to play pickleball for 36 consecutive hours, it’s safe to assume a story of some kind is attached, and it’s probably a pretty good one.

Geneva Olson of Sioux Falls is a 39-year-old mother of four and a former triathlete who is going to be part of a four-person team that will be attempting to break the Guinness Book of World Records for continuous pickleball playing on Saturday in Carrollton, Texas.

The team members, who call themselves the Pickle Breakers, each bring a personal motivation for trying to break a record that now stands at 34 hours and 5 minutes and was set in the United Kingdom.

A love of pickleball would have to be part of it, right? Because, holy cow, that’s a long time to be playing pickleball. But it goes well beyond that for this group, which is led by Chong Kim, a Korean-American athlete, marathoner, gymnastics coach and mental health advocate who recently played pickleball in all 50 states in 45 days to draw attention to mental health care.

“I think the more attention we can bring to this issue, the better,” said Olson, who serves as a director of pickleball at Remedy Pickleball Pub. “I think this is a really cool and unique opportunity to do that.”

Also really cool is how Olson got involved in this project in the first place.

It started with Olson and her husband, Mark, in Missouri watching their daughter’s marching band competition. During an extended break in the event, they decided to play pickleball somewhere.

At the pickleball courts, she was paired with Kim, who was midst his 50-state tour. In their conversation during and after their match, Olson learned of Kim’s mission. Afterward, she began following Kim’s Instagram account and, as he neared the end of his campaign, reached out to send him some encouragement.

She told him about her brother, who took his own life, and explained why Kim’s work meant so much to her.

“I was just trying to tell him, ‘Hey, you’re doing a great job. Keep going!’” Olson said. “A few weeks after he was done with the tour, he called me. He told me he had been inspired by my story and said he had a crazy idea and that I might be the perfect person to join them.”

The crazy idea, of course, was playing pickleball for 36 consecutive hours.

“I guess I was crazy enough to say yes,” Olson said.

There are ground rules for Guinness World Record consideration that must be followed. In this case, that means keeping the same partner for all 36 hours. Every hour, the teams are permitted a five-minute break, though it is permissible to save the breaks for later if everybody is doing OK.

If they want to play for three consecutive hours, for instance, they can then take a 15-minute break, but the breaks can happen only on the hour. Breaking up an hour with a short break is not permitted.

In addition, pickleball players usually switch sides of the court after each game, but for this event, they can switch sides only after they take a break.

The group also includes Jaret Petras, a pickleball coach and former Division I soccer player, and Laura Maala, an endurance athlete who is now a nursing student in North Dakota.

“It’s probably going to get a little monotonous after awhile,” Olson said. “The mental side is probably going to be our biggest challenge. We’re going to have to work at staying engaged and not getting too bored. We’ve come up with some strategies on navigating that, so we’ll see how it goes.”

There are not a lot of people out there to ask for advice about playing pickleball for one whole day and half of another. For this reason, they’ve done their best to try to anticipate some of the challenges that might not be readily apparent.

“One of the great things about this is that it has to be a team effort,” Olson said. “We all have different ideas and strategies to bring to the table. We’re going to have to be really good communicators with one another to be able to say ‘Hey, I really need a break at this moment.’ Or, ‘I’m doing great, let’s keep going.’”

Via her work with the Remedy Pickleball Pub, Olson could count herself as one of the community’s leaders in encouraging participation in this sport. It wasn’t always that way, though.

“It was Amazon Prime Day, and they had these pickleball paddles that were really cheap,” she said. “I have four daughters at home so I thought it might be really fun.”

The paddles sat in the garage for a whole year before they actually used them. Then one day, they took paddles to the gym with them and eventually got in a game.

“They were older women, and they totally kicked our butts,” Olson said. “It was really humbling, but it was so fun at the same time. I really got hooked after that.”

So have many others.

“My absolute favorite thing about this sport is that it is multigenerational,” Olson said. “It’s the only sport I know where young and old can compete together and you don’t know who is going to win. It appeals universally to all ages, all genders and socioeconomic statuses. It’s just a really cool connector of people.”

The event is in partnership with Taylor’s Gift Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide organ and tissue donor families with free grief support after the loss of a loved one. Olson’s team will begin playing at 6 a.m. Saturday at Pickler Universe in Carrollton and continue on until Sunday evening.

Livestreaming of Olson and the matches – and the opportunity to donate to the cause – are available at taylorsgift.org/pickleball.