Florida man arrested after pickleball dispute escalates to fight involving slow cooker
Pickleball players will argue about almost anything: Line calls, foot faults, whose paddle goes in the stack next.
A dispute in a Southwest Florida 55+ community has added event formats to the list. And, allegedly, the dispute involved a slow cooker.
Steven DeMaio, 73, of Ave Maria was arrested Oct. 21 after being accused of shoving a woman during a disagreement at a pickleball event, according to the Gulf Coast News, which cited a Collier County Sheriff’s Office arrest report.
The woman told deputies the argument broke out Oct. 3 at a pickleball event at the Oasis Club in the Del Webb community. According to the report, DeMaio arrived with paperwork laying out the format he wanted to use, and he was upset when it got shot down.
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When the woman turned away from him, the report says, DeMaio pushed her from behind and she fell into a witness standing nearby. He then picked up a slow cooker and came at her in a way the report described as aggressive.
When deputies made contact with DeMaio on Oct. 21, he admitted to grabbing the slow cooker, according to the report, but denied other parts of the woman’s account.
The Oasis Club at Del Webb Naples, a 55+ community in Ave Maria, has 12 pickleball courts and a resident-only club for players of all levels, according to the Ave Maria community website.
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Meanwhile, on the other side of the state, another Florida pickleball fight just wrapped up in court. Anthony Sapienza, 64, was ruled guilty of misdemeanor battery on Oct. 15 as part of a plea deal stemming from a February brawl at the Spruce Creek Fly-In near Port Orange, the Daytona Beach News-Journal reported. He was sentenced to 12 months of probation and an eight-hour anger management course, and he is barred from the Spruce Creek Fly-In courts.
Under the deal, prosecutors dropped two felony counts of battery on a person 65 or older and reduced an aggravated battery charge to the misdemeanor. That fight, according to Sapienza’s own court filing, started with a comment about a player stepping in the kitchen.