 Henry Simons and I am the Assistant City Manager of Operations of course for the City of Columbia and we would like to welcome you and thank you for your presence on today as we celebrate the grand opening and ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Pickball course here at Southeast Park as well as what we have done at Willam Park as well. Thank you to our Mayor, Daniel Rickerman, our City Council members present. Councilman DeVall is with us. Thank you all so much for being here as well. Also want to acknowledge Councilman Taylor in his absence. He represents this district and he could not be here with us today but I wanted to acknowledge him as well. Just all of our Council members are always supportive of the Parks and Recreation Initiative so we are very grateful for all of their support even though all of them could not be here today. We're very thankful for their support. Also want to acknowledge our City Manager Theresa Wilson for her continuous leadership and guidance on our initiatives in Parks and Recreation. Today is a great day for the City of Columbia so logistically we have converted two tennis courts into four pickleball courts here at Southeast Park and we have converted one tennis court at Willam Park into two pickleball courts. The response to this decision has been well received by the pickleball community which is you all. Thank you all so much. In fact there have been regularly scheduled play during the week and the evenings and weekends already so thank you all for your continuous participation. So really quickly in some of our research pickleball participation grew by 21.3 percent between 2019 and 2020 prompting the economists to declare it is the fastest growing sport in America. Therefore the demand for the sport is growing with the cities building new facilities and replacing tennis courts strategically. In fact our goal within the City of Columbia will be to incorporate pickleball courts strategically into our master plan for additional opportunities around the city. Yeah absolutely. In addition pickleball proves overall health regardless of your age it is a wonderful game and we know that regular exercise help to maintain a healthy lifestyle. So again thank you all so much for your advocacy of the sport. I want to make some acknowledgment and then we're going to have our mayor come up and make some remarks along with Councilman Duvall as well. Just again I want to collectively thank our mayor and our entire City Council for their support. Also want to acknowledge our City of Columbia Parks and Recreation Leadership Team and staff led by our Director of Recreation Mr. Randy Davis. Thank you all so much Randy Davis, Todd Martin our project manager Karen Kucific who is our ranger leader in the back back there Kerry Rich our superintendent. All of our Parks and Recreation staff they do a lot of work behind the scenes and we could not do what we do without their aggressive activity and thought process and getting things done. So we thank them so much for their continuous vision for the Parks and Recreation department. Special thanks, special thanks to John Weagrath who is here with us today. Thank you John so much for your advocacy of the sport. Hal Van Nissen as well Hal. Thank you so much for your continuous support of the sport. Also want to think I don't think I think it's Marion Keller here. I didn't see Marion. Marion, there you are. Marion Keller who is the US APA ambassador and has been very supportive of our initiative as well and also want to thank Pat Trusdale who's the South District ambassador for South Carolina. So thank you so much Pat. This could not be done without our Mayor who is with us today. He has been an advocate for the Parks and Recreation department. He has been on City Council for years and as the Mayor he continues to support not only the Parks and Recreation initiatives but all the things that we're doing for the City of Columbia and as he has stated we are open. We're open for business and we're open for investments and so we will have our Mayor come and provide some remarks at this time. Mr. Mayor. Well I have to tell you this might be an incredible day in Columbia because I have been in every corner of this community today. I started off this morning at Columbia Country Club doing a welcoming for the Providence Home Golf Tournament that they were doing to raise money and help with awareness on tackling homelessness and addiction downtown. Yes ma'am it is it's a great one. Then I had the opportunity to push a new new fire truck into the firehouse out at Wood Creek Farms in that area where it really needed that investment and then I got to join a parade at a pre-kindergarten program of kids celebrating the week of young child and how important it is to invest in children at that age and making sure that they're getting the proper education and so forth so they have an opportunity and then I get to come out to Southeast Park and we get to celebrate something that's been going on for quite a while. We've been talking about pickleball forever and Howard probably has been the loudest of all folks on council about making it happen but I have to tell you pickleball is an incredible sport. It is so much fun I like it better than tennis it's much more social in my opinion and it gets very competitive especially when you're playing against your spouse at times so but what a great I'm glad that we're making investments around our community it has really become a draw and has really gotten people back out and together so we're excited to be here you know we can't really do the golden shovel here so I made arrangements to that Mr. DeVall could take the golden paddle here and get the first serve out at the appropriate time so with that Mr. DeVall I'm going to yield the microphone to you and hand off the golden paddle. Thank you Mayor Rickerman. This has been a long couple of years since we met out here on the courts to talk about pickleball and the council has just gotten so tired of me bringing it up at every council meeting that we finally got four courts at least and it is as the mayor likes to say we're open for pickleball. I do think that this is just the start of a big trend in the city of Columbia and I'm counting on all of you that play the sport to bring all your friends and get more people playing so that it pushes us to get more courts for you to play on. I was talking to my friend my new friend here a few minutes ago about Camden and the professional sport that they're going to have coming in there to demonstrate pickleball and the facility three million dollar facility they they have in Camden it's going to be a great thing but we're going to have a facility someday like the Camden facility that will bring in regional tournaments and national tournaments the capital city and in the state of South Carolina needs to be at least equal to the city of Camden a few miles down the road. It's a great day for pickleball in the city of Columbia and thank you for Mayor Rickerman's support of this and I want to echo all the things that Henry said a few minutes ago about our wonderful support from the city manager on down through everybody that works in the parks and recreation and all the other facilities that we have around the city of Columbia that's all I have to say Mayor I appreciate the this I'm going to learn how to play pickleball I'm going to wear my shorts next time so we can have a little little game what I was asking questions that I used to play a lot of tennis he gave me a lesson he gave me a lesson on the rules and it's very similar to tennis so I think I could pick it up very quickly I just wasn't prepared today thank you so thank you all so much for your presence and participation thank you so much Pat for your comments and your passion about the game we are we will continue to work to spread pickleball around the city of Columbia so we are grateful that you are all here at this time we're going to transition into our official ribbon cutting so we want a few of you to to participate with our mayor and our city council members councilman Duvall as we do that and then we'll take some interview questions after after we're all done with that so thank you all so much for your presence we certainly appreciate you being here today