- The Reset
- Posts
- Betting on the PPA
Diving Right In…
Please forward this along to any other pickleball addicts you meet and we’ll be eternally grateful!
The Quick Points
🎰 Betting on the PPA. The PPA Tour announced that they are the first pickleball organization available on a sports betting marketplace. They’re starting on FanDuel Sportsbook, where people can bet on games in 10 states and one Canadian province, starting as soon as today with the Vulcan Kansas City Open. It’s a little behind Connor Pardoe’s original timeline, but props to them getting a no doubt big initiative off the ground. The new foray will be done in conjunction with a few new partners. One of them is Genius Sports, a data, technology, and broadcast partner, who will provide data and live video feeds to all participating sports books. The other is with Sportradar, which seems to be focused on making sure players don’t create conflicts of interest during their matches. We don’t have too much new to add from our coverage of Barstool Sports getting involved in pickleball - maybe the Sportsradar partnership makes us incrementally more comfortable on our 2nd point below, but still think there’s a lot of uncertainty around its impact despite it being a nice headline win for PPA. As we noted back in June:
The Good
1. Further professionalizes the sport and draws new money.
2. Brings greater fan awareness, as it opens up the viewership to a new demographic of sports bettors who may otherwise have not followed pickleball.
3. Greater viewership and engagement lead to higher rates of conversion to first-time players.
The Bad
1. We don’t think there’s sufficient on-court infrastructure at the moment to support sports betting. All paddle sports often require a more formal line calling system (e.g. tennis having multiple lines judges + a main chair umpire), as well as a sophisticated way to review calls (e.g. Hawk-Eye). No professional pickleball league has yet to implement a technology to review misjudged line calls, and most calls are already made by the players themselves.
2. Unclear how it impacts the integrity of the sport if the winnings and salaries of professional players don’t keep up with the money to be made from throwing a game. For a sporting brand that brings so much joy to casual and serious players alike, it could be a pretty severe blot on the sport if the professional circuit gets caught up in scandals. As someone who doesn’t follow baseball, this piece provided an interesting historical look into the betting problems that America’s pastime faced in the 1900s that could have dealt a major blow to the sport after a World Series scandal in 1919.
📈 Selkirk on the move. Selkirk is hiring for 10 new roles…e-commerce manager, paid media manager, email marketing manager, graphic designer, etc. Either they have raised some private equity money recently and/or they are really doubling down on direct-to-consumer initiatives.
🍞 Chicken N’ Pickle adds some breading. The company announced a new round of fundraising, where they brought in $10M from about 30 investors. Two of the investors joining the cap table are Kansas City Chiefs star players, Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce.
What’s on our mind
One data point. Everyone, including us, is so quick to share pickleball developments so if it’s out there, we are going to find it. The Pickleball Club at Monroe is a 10-court indoor facility launching in a few weeks in Central Jersey and pre-launch, they have 1,100 members signed up. Membership is a $100 upfront annual fee that grants you 14-day booking reservations and other smaller privileges. That’s a cool $110,000 in cash to get them started.
Also interesting to note they are launching with 10+ leagues. Leagues last 9 sessions and cost $275…$30 per session is higher than anything we’ve seen to date. Good on them. With court density in the Northeast as low as it can be, there is a lot of money to be made year-round.
AMA w/DUPR’s head of analytics. As mentioned on Tuesday, DUPR’s Head of Analytics, Scott Mendelsshon, stopped by the Reddit r/pickleball thread to do an AMA with the community. Here’s a snippet of some of the questions we were curious to ask, and you can find his responses, here.
Jack Sock has a new podcast. It’s called Smashing Rackets and it’s another move from Barstool within pickleball and racquet sports. You will find Jack saying “pickleball will hopefully be my future” in addition to golf pro-ams and media work. Of all the professional tennis pros who have tried their hand in the sport to date, he is by far the most athletic and naturally suited for it. At the Charlotte PPA, he got to the quarterfinals of singles and won gold in mixed with Anna Leigh.
Breaking Ground
The Reset tracks publicly available court construction data to better understand the locations, costs, and development priorities going into projects across the nation. Our tracker can be found here.
Featured Developments:
A new eatertainment concept is coming to Raleigh, as Jaguar Bolera will expand its current bowling bar concept to include 5 pickleball courts (4 indoor // 1 outdoor). This is one of the more amenity-rich eatertainment venues we’ve seen, as the courts will go alongside private karaoke rooms, DIY crafting, 10 lanes of duckpin bowling (basically mini-bowling), and other small games. We’re more optimistic on the management team’s ability to pull off an endeavor like this, as the project is built by Robert Thompson, an entrepreneur who founded Punch Bowl Social - a social bar with locations in Austin, New Orleans, and Portland.
The vacant retail concept continues. This time, Blaze Pickleball in Guilford, CT is moving into a vacant Walmart where they plan to run a pickleball-centric indoor facility. We’re a little concerned with their ability to build community and run successful programming as they are engaged on a short-term lease through May 31, 2024, at which point a Target is expected to move in.
Best of the Rest:
Picklemall announced a new location in a former Toys ‘R’ Us in Vernon Hills, IL.
Pelican Bay Community Park in Naples, FL is undergoing a massive $6M renovation which will bring 20 pickleball courts, 2 clay tennis courts, and a shaded pavilion to the area.
Otttawa, MI is looking to add 12 new pickleball courts at the 8th Avenue Park for an estimated $850k.
The Back Draw
As always, feel free to reach out if you have any inside pickleball news or topics you think we missed and should be covered. You can reply to this email, or set up a time to talk here.
- Ryan & Braxton