Dumaguete pickleball clinic draws 200 young trainees as grassroots grows

Dumaguete has turned a simple summer clinic into something much bigger: a public pipeline for pickleball. The city’s annual Sports Clinic, held at Pantawan People’s Park for children ages 6 to 16, has drawn at least 200 registered young trainees for pickleball alone, a sharp jump from 18 in 2024 and 45 in 2025. For other Asian secondary cities looking for a faster route into the sport, the question is no longer whether pickleball can grow. It is how Dumaguete built a system that made it feel easy to start.

The formula is bluntly practical. The clinic is free, city-backed, and open to families that might never pay for private court time. The City Sports and Youth Development Office, led by Ike Xavier Villaflores, runs the program with Nestlé Philippines Milo, and the sports lineup extends beyond pickleball to 16 events in all. At the official opening, hundreds of children, parents and guardians filled Pantawan People’s Park, a sign that the city has made youth sports part of everyday civic life, not an occasional showcase.

Much of the sport’s momentum still comes from volunteers who saw an opening before the city fully understood what it had. Bernabe Bustillo said he first noticed pickleball when he saw doctors and nurses playing in Guihulngan during a 2023 ultra-marathon event, then pushed to bring it to Dumaguete. Along with his wife Grace Bustillo, he helped found the Dumaguete Pickleball Club, described as the first pickleball club in Negros Oriental, and organized the city’s first local tournament in January 2024. That matters because the clinic does not stand alone. It feeds a club, and the club feeds the clinic.

The wider growth has been just as rapid. MetroPost reported the first pickleball tournament in Negros Oriental in June, followed by a Dumaguete tournament in September 2024 through the NOrSports-PlanOut Sports & Fitness Festival. By late 2025, the city had more than 100 pickleball courts, including five outdoor public courts in Quezon Park. The Philippine Pickleball Federation says it began as PPSA on April 15, 2019 and later became the country’s recognized national sports association for pickleball, giving local programs a national ladder to climb. Rappler previously reported that pickleball arrived in the Philippines in 2016 and that 123 clubs had already formed nationwide by early 2025.

Dumaguete’s rise shows why grassroots sport expands fastest when access, coaching and public space move together. The city is not just teaching a game. It is building habit, identity and a youth pathway that could make pickleball one of the Philippines’ most durable civic sports stories.