Ex-NFLer begins journey to pickleball stardom in Northern Colorado

LOVELAND — There is a familiar playbook for former professional football players when they retire from the NFL. Some remain on the field, shifting to the sidelines to become coaches. Some move into the broadcast booth, or lend their names to car dealerships and steakhouses. Some spend their post-playing years perfecting their golf swings. While others — well, one specific player, at least — move to Northern Colorado and decide to try to become pickleball stars.

Rodney Adams, a former wide receiver, chose that latter, less-traveled path.

Adams grew up in Florida and headed north in 2013 after being recruited to play football at the University of Toledo in Ohio.

During freshman season at Toledo, Adams’ mother was killed in a car accident. Wanting to be closer to home, Adams was granted a hardship waiver — this before the era of the transfer portal — and was allowed to transfer to the University of South Florida. 

At USF, his performance “exploded to another level for me because I was playing for something bigger than myself,” Adams said. After tallying nearly 2,000 receiving yards and more than 1,000 kick-return yards in college, he was drafted in the fifth round by the Minnesota Vikings.

“In Minnesota, I made the 53-man roster, but I was sitting behind some dogs,” including star wideouts Stefon Diggs, Adam Thielen and Jarius Wright. He said he was mostly used as a “gadget player” and eventually moved to the practice squad, before moving on from Minnesota in the off season. 

After stints with the Indianapolis Colts, Chicago Bears and New York Jets, Adams left the NFL in 2022 and returned home to Florida.

About two years ago, “I was just decompressing from football, and my wife, who is from Fort Collins, was pregnant with our second daughter and she wanted to move closer to home.”

Adams was game. “I’m big on Christmas, and I’ve always wanted to live somewhere with snow and with all of the seasons. I’m a big fan of Christmas movies, and it seems like a lot of them take place in Colorado.”

While pickleball has been popular for years in Adams’ home state of Florida, he didn’t pick up the sport until landing in Colorado.

Coincidentally, Kyle Yates, a Pickleball Hall of Fame member and now one of Adams’ coaches, is also a Florida native transplanted to the Centennial State.

In the 2000s and 2010s, when Yates was a teen and had just begun playing pickleball competitively, “it was really for seniors,” he said. “It was kind of known as a grandparents’ sport back then. … I wouldn’t even tell my friends I would play. Early on, I was kind of embarrassed, and then when they saw me playing on TV,” that sheepishness morphed into pride.

In the midst of a successful professional career, Yates moved west with the goal of making pickleball as popular in the Rocky Mountains as it is in the Sunbelt.

“I always loved visiting Colorado, and then when I had an opportunity to help pickleball grow here, I thought it was a really neat opportunity because Florida is pretty saturated already with facilities,” he said. “… So I just felt a lot more useful in Colorado than in Florida, where I’d already been coaching and training and teaching.”

In addition to coaching, Yates got involved with The Picklr, a growing chain of pickleball venues, where he serves as one of Colorado and Wyoming’s area franchise developers. That’s where he linked up with Adams.

Adams discovered pickleball when he was watching a video on social media about Formula One racing. After the video was over, a random clip began playing automatically — this one about pickleball.

“Something in my soul told me, ‘That’s it! I should go into pickleball!’”
Adams began reaching out to Northern Colorado pickleball accounts on social media and eventually connected with Eli Steiner, a coach with The Picklr. “From there, it just exploded,” Adams said of his passion and dedication to learning his new sport.

“There’s no 50%, there’s no 25%, there’s no 10% with me. Anything and everything that I do, I go all in because that’s how I was raised, that’s how I’m programmed. I don’t care if it was a baking contest, I’m giving it 100%.”

Once his mind was made up, Adams began working out regularly with coaches from The Picklr with a singular goal in mind: becoming a professional athlete again — this armed with a paddle rather than shoulder pads. 

“Most athletes are going to have some things in common where they just have that kind of grit and determination and know how to work hard and figure things out,” Yates said. “I think any high-level athlete has to have that in them.”

He continued: “Even though pickleball seems pretty easy, there are a lot of little nuances and details. It makes a very complicated sport. … Rodney is one of those guys where he’s definitely starting pretty much from scratch as far as racquet sports.” But “he has pro aspirations,” which requires an entirely different level of dedication than simply learning the basics and becoming a serviceable pickleball player.

“He’s having to kind of learn certain swing mechanics and things that most other racquet-sport players would have already developed way younger,” Yates said of Adams. “But he’s an athlete, he’s got the right attitude. He works hard, so it takes a guy like that to be able to pull it off.”

Adams began working with coaches Rikk Shimizu and Vyki Shimizu toward his goal of learning the skills he’ll need to turn pro. “The practicing that we’re doing every single day, the drills that we’re doing every single day, they’re teaching me how I was being taught in the NFL.”

Adams has been grinding for the past three or so months in hopes of making his competitive pickleball debut this summer at the 2025 Rocky Mountain Championships in Littleton.

“I’m not jumping into something to lose, that’s why we’re practicing every single day,” he said.

The Picklr Loveland co-owner Leslie Arnold said Adams’ coaches have been “very deliberate” in his training, not immediately throwing him into competitive tournament situations that could “teach him bad habits and some things that you would need to wind back later down the road.”

As Adams’ skills grow, so does the business where he trains. The Picklr has existing locations in Cheyenne, Loveland and Thornton, with facilities opening soon in Aurora and Denver. The company plans to break ground in the next few weeks on a facility in Fort Collins.

“We have it mapped out for a potential for 15 to 20 franchise locations across the state,” Yates said.

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