About Us

If you ever fail, "Fail Forward." To fail is to fall short of success, it doesn't define you. In 2015, I suffered my biggest setbacks, both personally and professionally. I was at my ultimate low and in a very dark place. The fact that I had failed was not what I was sad about; it was letting down the people I loved the most. Yet in the midst of my darkness and despair, something always propelled me to get back up. I had to expunged the sob-story defeatism from my mind and pick up the shattered pieces. While there are things that I can not do like flying through the air by just flapping my arms, most things in life I CAN, but only if I treated failure as a learning experience. As athletes and competitors, we struggle when we lose and it's easy to become discouraged. But like the saying says, "it's not how you fall, but how you get back up." That's the power of the human spirit. I found pickleball in 2016 and fell in love with it immediately. The game has given me a new life, a rebirth you might say. I've been teaching and playing tennis for over 28 years, but when I started playing/teaching pickleball I grew to love it because it has given me and many of us the opportunity to be kids again. Regardless of our age or gender, pickleball has embraced us with open arms. It has given many of us a second chance at sports and in return an opportunity to meet new people and make new friends.

By launching Hai-Lite Sports, I hope to inspire anyone who has gone through a tough time in their life and know that there is always a "NEW MORNING" to look forward to. I created the "RISE-HAI" logo in the image of a phoenix. Rise-Hai not only embodies the phoenix theme of rebirth, it has a profound memory attached to my struggles. This is all about the myth, the legend, and the symbolism surrounding an unforgettable symbol of power, strength, and renewal. This bird burns brightly in a myriad of cultures, with each one having their own spin on the meaning of the phoenix. In order to feel pleasure, we must experience pain. In order to gain wisdom, we must fail. In order to have faith, we must feel doubt. In order to enjoy the light, we must know darkness. In order to renew, the old must perish. In order for us to have redemption, we must fall short. We fall. We rise. We overcome. It is with this conviction that Hai-Lite Sports was born.