Meet the 90-Year-Old Pickleball Star Player

Liverpool pickleball player Jacolyn Bernardi celebrates her 90th birthday — at a pickleball court, no less

By Mike Costanza

 

Thirteen women came together at a Liverpool fitness center on April 29 to play pickleball, enjoy each other’s company and celebrate a milestone in one member’s life. Jacolyn Bernardi seemed touched that the friends she’d made through pickleball would celebrate her birthday.

“It’s wonderful,” said the Liverpool resident, who turned 90 in May. “They took me under their wing when I started playing with them. I lost a lot of friends just because I’m older, and I started with them and it’s like having a whole new group of friends.”

Bernardi is just one of the women who come together each week to work up a sweat on local pickleball courts. They play outdoors at Cicero’s Skyway Park when the weather allows and indoors at Elevate Fitness Liverpool when it doesn’t. Though all are at least 55 years old, on that Wednesday they formed into foursomes at Elevate Fitness and proceeded to whack the ball back and forth in spirited competition while joshing and encouraging each other.

“What I love about this group is the fun we have laughing, learning from each other and developing lasting friendships,” said Margie McAuliffe, a 63-year-old Cicero resident.

McAuliffe and her friend Sharon Harding decided to take up a new sport after they retired from their teaching jobs with the North Syracuse Central School District. Harding said they found that sport, and more, on Skyway Park’s pickleball courts about eight years ago.

“We just loved the whole, well, the game itself originally, and then we ended up loving the people,” the 68-year-old Cicero resident said.

She and the other women who began playing at that public park came to call themselves the “Skyway Girls.”

Lisa Doherty, an original member of that group, said she’s very competitive in sports but also values the sense of camaraderie she feels with the other women.

“Regardless win, lose, we’re all friends and have a great time,” said the 61-year-old Cicero resident, who was a branch manager for a financial firm that serves used car dealers until she retired.

The group that began meeting at Skyway Park has gained and lost members down through the years, and Bernardi and others in that bunch are not original Skyway Girls. Despite that, the ladies are close. After cancer took Julie Barnes, one of the original Skyway Girls, in May of 2024, the pickleball players raised money to place a memorial bench in her honor at Skyway Park.

Bernardi seemed to fly around the pickleball court that morning in a way that belied her age. She took up pickleball about 10 years ago when she found it difficult to find others to join her on a tennis court.

“Many of my friends gave up tennis because a lot of them had injuries,” the widowed great-grandmother said. “A lot of them retired and moved away, and it was very difficult to get four people to play doubles.”

Bernardi didn’t like pickleball much when she first played it, but eventually grew to enjoy its fast pace, the ease of finding others to join her on the court and the feeling of playing with them.

“There’s all sorts of places where you can play, indoors and outdoors, and when I started, you could just show up,” she said. “I lost a lot of friends, you know, in my 80s, and it was like I made new friends there.”

After downing their pickleball paddles, some of those friends presented Bernardi with a tiara and sash in honor of her upcoming birthday, then treated her to lunch at Il Limone, a restaurant on Route 57, Liverpool. She said the experience made that day “one of the special days of my life.”

“I was overwhelmed with all the attention and affection and gifts that I received,” she said. “I’m so grateful to all the girls for the love they showed me on that day. I hope they know how much I appreciated it.”

Some of the ladies in the pickleball group also play golf and other sports and socialize together. Altogether, it has 14 members.