[00:00:00.160] - CJ Johnson
Welcome to the Pickleball Therapy Podcast. It is the only podcast dedicated to your pickleball mind, as I. I'm sure you can tell by the voice. This is not your weekly host, Tony Roig. I'm C.J. johnson.

[00:00:18.800] - CJ Johnson
I'm the other half of Better Pickleball. And occasionally I jump on the podcast to share my thoughts on. On the pickleball space, and particularly our pickleball minds. And Tony often reminds me that what we do here is so much bigger than pickleball. And he recently did a beautiful job talking about our sisters in pickleball, an episode he recently recorded.

[00:00:49.320] - CJ Johnson
Now, with everything that's going on in our world right now, I think that sharing lived experiences give us the ability to understand another person through their stories, to really understand their point of view. I may not be able to live in someone else's shoes, but by just hearing what they've gone through, it opens my mind to a way of thinking that was not previously available to me. And after hearing what he shared inside of that episode, I thought it was important for me to share some of my experiences. Now, I've been a professional skier, golfer, and now a pickleball coach. Three different sports, and that's really spanning 50 years.

[00:01:40.850] - CJ Johnson
And there's always been one constant. I have always had to fight just to be seen as an athlete. Now, that's not a complaint. Don't get it as a complaint. That's just the reality of my story.

[00:01:58.700] - CJ Johnson
So when Tony started that episode by mentioning the recent discussion around the US Hockey teams, my reaction wasn't shock or even outrageous. It was more like, yeah, tell me something I don't already know. It wasn't a moment that was a real revelation for me. It was really just a reminder of something that I've been navigating for my entire life. And that's a big part of my story and of who I am today.

[00:02:34.010] - CJ Johnson
My mom, in her senior yearbook, had a quote that she was known for, and it said, ski, and I'll ski with you. Study, and you will study alone. In fact, I talked to her this morning before I shot this episode. She's 83 years old, and she is headed out to the mountain as we speak. So skiing was unnatural for me.

[00:02:53.810] - CJ Johnson
Both my parents skied, and I literally was raised at the mountain. And so I was an excellent skier from a young age. And I was taught how to ride chairlifts. And at the time, I had to ride chairlifts occasionally with. With strangers.

[00:03:08.660] - CJ Johnson
And one of my. This is a recollection that stayed with me forever, is I'd get on the chairlift, often get on the chairlift with a stranger and they would say, how's your day going today, son? Something like that. And it was, I was son. And I remember correcting people with a really sharp little edgy little bite.

[00:03:37.250] - CJ Johnson
And I'd say to the effect I'm a girl, not a boy. And that often silenced the conversation or it was very quiet conversation after that. Not always the best way to deal with it. But at the time I was, I was less than 10 years old when, when this would happen. And I guess the point for me was this is, even as a kid, like just being good at something wasn't enough to be seen correctly.

[00:04:07.340] - CJ Johnson
And, and frankly, that carried through my entire skiing career until finally, like right around age 40, where I got really tired of it. I, I never was concerned when I went out skiing about what I wore. It was I bought a functional jacket, a functional pair of pants. They usually weren't very, if you want to say, if you want to say a feminine look to them. They were just pretty standard looking ski clothing.

[00:04:38.520] - CJ Johnson
But after being called dude repeatedly and, and, and it, and at that point in time, dude definitely meant male gender. After being called dude repeatedly because of how I skied and the clothing that I had on, I made the decision to go and buy some pink clothing. Now I, again, I know that, that both genders, all genders can wear pink, but for me it was a very calculated move to signal that I can ski like crazy and I may not be what you think I am. I just might be a girl. And what really isn't lost on me from those experiences, and of course there were a multitude of others, but is, is that somehow I had to change how I looked to get people to really kind of stop misreading who I was.

[00:05:39.500] - CJ Johnson
And of course those experiences aren't, you know, unique just to the ski hill. I spent the majority of my career as a golf professional. I became a Golf Pro in 1989. And I could share tons and tons of experiences from that. But probably the most, one of the most common ones was whenever I went to play at another golf course, they would always have what's a starter on the first tee?

[00:06:05.730] - CJ Johnson
And the, you know, think of it like a host, a welcoming person. And I remember so many times walking up to the first tee, being greeted by the starter and they direct me to the woman's teeth. You know, the woman's tees are up here and, and at the time you had the woman's, the men's and like the pro tees, that's kind of what they were commonly called at the golf course. And there are the woman's tees, which were. Which were typically shorter.

[00:06:43.200] - CJ Johnson
Now, it was always interesting because I could consistently hit the ball further than the majority of men who were playing the men's, or even some of those who were playing the. The pro or the black tees. So when. When a starter saw me coming up, they automatically made an assumption about my skill level based solely on my gender. And that happened so many, many times.

[00:07:17.380] - CJ Johnson
It was. It was just always feeling like I was being underestimated for how I looked, not for what I brought to the table as an athlete. And that happened both on and off the golf course in my career. I am a member of the Professional Golfers association of America, and I'm a proud member of that. But it's a significantly larger male than female membership.

[00:07:46.500] - CJ Johnson
And at the time, I was playing in our. One of our section tournaments, a section event, and normally there were only about three women in my section of the world. It was the Wisconsin section, and it was not uncommon for me to be the only woman playing in that event. So I went to play in this Monday event, and at the first tee, they told us that there was going to be post round sponsored food and drink. So I played my round of golf and I came in and I got the directions to where the festivities were going to happen.

[00:08:27.910] - CJ Johnson
And I followed the directions and it led to a door with a plaque on it that said men's locker room.

[00:08:40.560] - CJ Johnson
And, and I remember the thought was, did they really? So I went back into the golf shop and I asked for the directions again, just to confirm that I didn't follow them incorrectly. And it wasn't. And it was just a reminder to me that the room just wasn't built with you in mind. And I think that, you know, that might be the quieter, more pervasive version of the problem that Tony was describing inside of the podcast.

[00:09:26.810] - CJ Johnson
So now let me bring that home. I'm going to bring that back into pickleball because. Because it hasn't stopped in pickleball. I mean, I. I hear this from players all the time, and I actually hear it probably more from female players than I do from male players. But it's about the un.

[00:09:44.690] - CJ Johnson
The just receiving mounds of unsolicited advice out on the pickleball court. And even though I'm a pickleball coach widely known for what we've done here at Better Pickleball, I get unsolicited advice, you know, despite having spent tens of thousands of hours developing my skills as a coach over the years, as well as my pickleball knowledge, I get looked at and I still get that unsolicited advice. And here's the thing. Oftentimes that advice comes from players who aren't at my level, which really makes me ask the question, and I've asked this a multitude of times, would Tony get that same advice?

[00:10:41.720] - CJ Johnson
I don't think so. I don't think he gets. We've talked about it. I don't think he gets the same amount of advice, if any, that I get. It's just another thing that the environment is constantly signaling that you don't fully belong.

[00:11:01.130] - CJ Johnson
And that is truly not an accident. And it really adds up.

[00:11:08.850] - CJ Johnson
Now, I want to be really clear. I am not sharing any of these experiences to venture or to point fingers. I'm sharing this because I think pickleball has a real opportunity. And I think that's the door that Tony wanted to crack open in last week's podcast. I mean, pickleball is.

[00:11:36.580] - CJ Johnson
It's a newer sport. It's built by and for all players. And we're still morphing the culture of pickleball. And we have a not just pickleball as a whole. We can choose to create cultures inside of our groups.

[00:12:03.720] - CJ Johnson
We get to choose what that looks like. And I think that when the pickleball community starts to look past what the person looks like and just becomes inviting, that not only opens the door for more pickleball players, that opens the door for us to make some changes inside of our world. Now, last week, Tony ended by saying he hoped that each of us can grow in this area. And I gotta tell you, I feel the same exact way. And I'm gonna add the fact that, that I think just by having this conversation, it's amazing.

[00:13:03.890] - CJ Johnson
I might not have been able to have this conversation 10, even 10 years ago. Because I gotta tell you what, that's what pickleball is doing, and it's doing what it does best. So maybe with everything that's going on in the world right now, a conversation about pickleball might feel really small. But again, as Tony likes to remind me, we have the opportunity to be so much more to other people than just pickleball players. We have the opportunity to influence other players lives.

[00:13:48.930] - CJ Johnson
And I'm going to end this with a saying that has guided my entire coaching career. When I was a young golf pro and I was seeking that PGA membership, I went to a teaching seminar and the pro stepped on the stage and he said the first thing I'm going to tell you is probably the most important thing for you to learn. He said the person is always more important than the golf swing. And I have taken that into my career as a coach to always say the person is more important than whatever the sport is. And hopefully on those days where I'm a really good human being, I take that into my world and say the person is always more important than.

[00:14:42.730] - CJ Johnson
And I fill in the blank. All right. I'm sure that Tony will be back next week with a new episode of the Pickleball Therapy podcast. In the meantime, if you've got some stories that you would like to share, this is going to be on a blog post in betterpickleball.com the comment section is open. Please come over to the comments section and and share your experiences because together I think not only can we make pickleball a better place, I think we can make the world a better place.