The pickleball troll is back.
If you’re like me, you’ve been missing “Doug Wanoy”, who has haunted Facebook groups as what appears to be a way-too-overzealous recreational player with an unusual set of problems.
Doug Wanoy appears to be a gray-haired man from Jersey City, New Jersey, but in real life he’s a 61-year-old pickleball player in Western Pennsylvania named Greg with a wicked sense of humor.
“Doug Wanoy” is a pickleball troll, an invented character whose sole purpose is to get a rise out of people who read his outrageous Facebook posts and fail to see them as satire.
Greg, the man who created Doug Wanoy, told The Pickler in March that was planning to phase out of his hobby as a pickleball troll, which has resulted in him being booted from various pickleball Facebook groups.
And Wanoy did seem to go away. But suddenly, he’s back and in tip-top troll form.
“I had to wait,” he told The Pickler in May. “Too many people were on to me.”
He migrated to youth wrestling sites. But his heart was in pickleball, and he couldn’t help himself.
So, on May 10, “Doug Wanoy” returned after a two-month absence to light up the Pickleball Kitchen Facebook group with this doozy:
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Our group has four courts which need portable nets setup and taken down each night. Each new member is required to attend a two hour training seminar on the net assembly, disassembly and proper storage.
I usually show a video, have a Q and A session, paper test and then evaluate the live assembly, disassembly and storage of each trainee.
After successfully passing the training course each new member is given the combination to the net storage unit padlock and then put on our master schedule for net setup. I usually assign a two member team for one week (Monday, Wednesday, Saturday).
The problem is a certain two member team who insist on working net setup together. These two ladies constantly fail to have the nets ready to go at our 6pm start, nets are not at proper height, nets are not in the proper spots and the nets are improperly stored.
I conducted a routine spotcheck on the net storage unit and noticed that these women mixed net pieces (each net has designated numbers from 1 to 4).
I also watched the video surveillance camera footage and observed that they arrived over seven minutes late and were standing around talking until another member arrived and helped. I spoke to our president who seemed hesitant about suspending them both but we finally agreed to retraining.
I did not show our president the video footage because I want to keep the covert camera a secret at this time. I would appreciate if groups could send me their portable net policies and their training curriculum.
***
Hundreds of the people who read the post left comments, many of them expressing astonishment.
“Wow!!!!” one said. “I don’t even know what to say about this post, except that I’m glad I’m not in your area. I would purposely set them up wrong, then ‘moon’ your camera and find another group.
Another poster wrote:
“This is such an amazing training and quality program you have. I wish everywhere would do this. I have seen the method used elsewhere with great success.
“Please tell me that when you retrain, you withhold food and water, and use bright lights and loud sounds to really sink the message in for those slow learners.”
Others chastised him for his lack of trust in his fellow club members:
“This whole system is bad for the club and pickleball,” one poster wrote. “Get along, work together with standing over responsible retired professionals.”
There were many who did get the joke, and a few who already know of Doug Wanoy and welcomed him back.
“The number of people that think this is a serious post is disturbing,” one poster wrote.
Greg, the man behind Doug Wanoy, said he’s happy to see that being a pickleball troll still elicits spirited reactions.
Will this mean we’ll be seeing more of Doug Wanoy again?
“Probably,” he said. “But these things just gotta come to me.”
