Award-Winning Float In Covina Christmas Parade Dedicated To Pickleball

By Stephen Hunt
Red Line Editorial

Clemence Neflas has a fairly traditional pickleball origin story.

A former tennis player, he was looking for a new activity to lean into after retiring at age 55 in 2021. By the following March he’d discovered pickleball, and now the longtime Boeing manager plays four or five times a week around his home in Covina, California.

Despite his relatively recent conversion, Neflas doesn’t hesitate to share his love of pickleball with others. If he isn’t giving lessons to beginners on the game’s basics, the USA Pickleball Ambassador is encouraging others to continue playing.

It’s that spirit of wanting to grow the game that led him and fellow picklers in Covina — which is just east of Los Angeles — to take that love of the sport to the next level by designing and building a pickleball-themed float for the 73rd Annual Covina Christmas Parade on Dec. 7.

Not only did they design and build the float, which elicited oohs and aahs from the festive crowd at the parade, but they also earned a second-place award in the adult/family category, an impressive achievement for a bunch of first timers.

“It’s an awesome thing because it was our first-ever entry into the parade, and here we are with a second-place award,” Neflas said. “The most amazing thing was during the entire route, we had people saying, ‘Oh, look, it’s pickleball.’ I thought it was a great opportunity to highlight the sport and be able to showcase it in front of the community.”

An additional positive from the float, besides the award, was that Neflas and his fellow picklers continue receiving inquiries from people wanting to join their pickleball group and start playing.

What was his inspiration for the float? Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

After seeing fellow avid picklers participate in other parades, Neflas decided he wanted to follow suit — but go the extra mile.

“I said let’s take it to the next level,” he said. “Let’s have a float with a net behind the float and have people dinking during the entire route.”

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