Subang Jaya’s 28-Hour Pickleball Marathon Raises Over RM20,000 for Community, Leaves Behind Legacy of Relief

A pickleball marathon that ran for a full 28 hours in Subang Jaya has done rather more for the community than crown a few tired winners. By the time the Pickleball Charity Marathon wrapped up, the event had raised over RM20,000 for the local community ambulance service and helped install a life-saving defibrillator that anyone in the neighbourhood can now reach in an emergency.

The Pickleball Charity Marathon, organised through the office of MBSJ councillor Ken Chia alongside MySJClub and Subang Jaya Community Ambulance (SJ Beacon), doubled as the unveiling for a new automated external defibrillator now installed at the SS15 community hall. CPR and AED training sessions ran alongside the marathon itself, giving residents more than just an awareness campaign—they walked away with skills they could actually use.

Selangor’s public health and environment committee chairman, Jamaliah Jamaluddin, attended the event and had plenty of praise for what the community had pulled together. She pointed to the AED installation as proof of genuine initiative — not simply hosting an event, but recognising a real gap and pairing it with the training needed to make the equipment useful. Grassroots efforts like this one, she said, deserve to keep leading the way.

Pickleball Charity Marathon Was More Than the Scoreboard

For Chia, the marathon carries a personal dimension too. He’s dropped 18kg over the past year through playing pickleball, and credits the sport with promoting a healthier lifestyle while pulling the community closer together in the process. That closeness has a practical edge behind it as well—he recalled a player collapsing mid-game at the very hall now fitted with the new AED, needing a community ambulance to get him to hospital. It’s the kind of memory that makes an emergency defibrillator feel less like a nice-to-have and more like something that should have been there already.

SJ Beacon representative Teoh Teik Hoong said this marked the organisation’s first pickleball charity marathon, and that the beneficiary made the event especially meaningful given what’s actually at stake. He’s hoping to expand into other sports in future fundraisers, with good reason: running the ambulance service costs around RM25,000 a month once staff salaries are factored in.

The scale of what that service actually does is worth pausing on. SJ Beacon responds to between 90 and 100 calls a month, operating daily from 8am to 8pm to cover the community’s busiest hours. Teoh noted the service proved especially vital during the Covid-19 pandemic, and said the broader goal remains straightforward—serving Subang Jaya directly while easing pressure on the ambulance services run by the Health Ministry.

Between a defibrillator now sitting ready at SS15 and a fresh round of funding for the ambulances that answer the calls no one wants to make, this particular pickleball tournament will likely be remembered for a great deal more than who won.