Celebrities, tunes, outdoor sport, fundraising and grown dudes dressed as food: these are some of Katy Perry’s favorite things, and she brought them all together over the weekend for the first annual Light Up The Court Pickleball Tournament.
Perry hosted the tourney Sunday (Oct. 22) at Montecito Club in her hometown of Santa Barbara, CA, with a slew of high-profile pickleball players including Meghan Trainor, Rob Lowe, Kate Hudson and her partner Orlando Bloom.
“My mom brought (maybe even forced) her love for pickleball upon our family,” she writes on Instagram, “and now we’ve decided to use those pickle powers for good.”
All proceeds benefited Firework Foundation, founded in 2019 by Perry and her sister Angela Lerche, with a mission to empower children from underserved communities by “igniting their inner light through the arts.”
For the record, Eric Geeb and Brett Williams took the championship title, while Perry got her game on for a mic’d exhibition in which she and Federico Staksrud took on Bloom and Maggie Brascia. Team Katy took them out 13-11.
Celsius sponsored the VIP Players Lawn, while Stanley, The Pick, Malk Milk, CRBN and Selkirk were among the sponsoring brands for the debut event, produced by Ngoc Nguyen (Nguyen Strategies).
Money raised will go towards “scholarships, more camps, and programming to bring the arts to kids from underserved communities,” Perry explains.
The pop superstar is currently in her sixth consecutive season as a judge on American Idol and, simultaneously, performing her Las Vegas residency, PLAY.
In 2011, she became the first woman, and second artist overall following Michael Jackson, to land five No. 1s on the Billboard Hot 100 from an album. That album, Teenage Dream, is one of her three leaders on the Billboard 200 chart. All told, she has scored nine leaders on the Billboard Hot 100 and she was the first artist in RIAA history to earn three RIAA Diamond Song Awards – for three of those No. 1s, “Firework,” “Dark Horse” and “Roar.”
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