scarecrow, no more!
Today marks both a happy and sad day. The Pumpkin Pickler’s day has ended, capping off a tremendously successful experience for the community and Plymouth Pickleball.
A few months ago, we applied to win a lottery spot for Plymouth Pickleball to decorate a scarecrow. The Pumpkin Pickler brought a lot of smiles to those strolling the scarecrows in the park during the farmers’ market, after dinner, or enjoying an ice cream from Dairy King. As we brought our families to the park, we sneaked to The Pumpkin Pickler to see and hear people’s reactions.
What were people saying about The Pumpkin Pickler?
We often heard people say, “PICKLEBALL! Did you know that it’s the fastest-growing sport in the US!” Or they might comment and say something like, “Did you see Tom Brady and Lebron James just bought Major League Professional pickleball teams?”
We also saw some interaction on Instagram with people posting with The Pumpkin Pickler.
When we host sessions, we ask players, “how did you hear about us?” I recall one session where at least seven people replied, saying they saw our scarecrow in the park! Session after session, new players, would introduce themselves and immediately say that they loved our scarecrow.
We’re sad to see The Pumpkin Pickler go!
It was a sad day this week when we had to take The Pumpkin Pickler down because we had a lot of fun building it and seeing it bring a lot of joy to our community.
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Our kids loved to visit our scarecrow to check on it, and they often told people walking by that it was theirs.
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This is my son, CJ, saying his goodbye to his buddy, The Pumpkin Pickler.
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What did we learn?
We learned a lot about building a scarecrow that needs to last through the elements, rain, wind, and angsty teenagers. Luckily, our scarecrow didn’t feel any unfortunate attacks from vandals like some of the other scarecrows did, but if we did, we think The Pumpkin Pickler would have survived. Why? Zip-ties! We made a good design decision and used a bucket full of zip-ties to fasten The Pumpkin Pickler to its skeleton and post.
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We also learned that the sun is mighty, bleaching the pumpkin-head and the clothes the scarecrow was wearing. So we will have to think of a new solution for next year’s scarecrow with some UV protection.
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One more pro tip. If you use a QR code for your scarecrow advertisement, ensure it has built-in tracking. We know people used our QR code because we saw people snapping a picture of it, but we forgot to set up tracking, so we didn’t know how effective it was. Oops! We’ll get that fixed for next year.
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Until Next Year!
The Pumpkin Pickler was a big success for us to help reach our local community and expose them to pickleball. We are blown away by the excitement and love for The Pumpkin Pickler, and we can’t wait until next year to do it again. Hopefully, we will win a spot.
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You might be asking, “Will Plymouth Pickleball have a Christmas tree this Winter?” Unfortunately, no, not this year. We are not designing a Christmas tree this year because we are already at capacity with our player community.
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We need to figure out how to scale our operation before we continue to market Plymouth Pickleball. Next year we plan to reapply for the scarecrow, and we also hope to win a lottery spot for the Christmas tree, but not this year.
As always, thanks for playing with Plymouth Pickleball!
Plymouth Pickleball doesn’t happen without the players and the community. Thank you for your support as we grow Plymouth Pickleball, and bring this sport to the residents of Plymouth, Michigan!
Thanks for playing with us, and we’ll see you on the court!
If you have any questions or feedback, please email us as info@plymouthpickleball.com
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