Bouchard Takes A Swing At Pickleball

The Quick Points

🇦🇺 MLP down unda. MLP announced a partnership today with Pacific Pickleball League (PPL), the first and official professional pickleball league in Australia. This represents MLP’s first-ever international expansion, and MLP Australia events will feature the MLP format, with the first one starting this weekend at the inaugural Major League Pickleball Australia event on Saturday, September 9th in Brisbane, Australia.

👑 The King of the courts continues its march forward. This would usually show up in Breaking Ground, but a pretty cool move by Life Time Fitness so we wanted to call it out here. As the country’s largest single owner of courts (~600), Life Time Fitness put its money where its mouth is on being “all-in” on pickleball with the announcement of its first ground-up pickleball location in the U.S. Life Time’s current competitive advantage is its ability to quickly and relatively cheaply convert existing tennis and basketball courts to pickleball. The company has converted nearly 15% of its tennis courts and 33% of its basketball courts to deploy 500 courts and grow unique pickleball participants by 673% from Jan’22 - Jun’23. Management believes what would take a competitor 10 years and $500M to build 500 courts, they were able to do in 1-year for $25M. This 25k sqft complex only furthers their commitment and gets Life Time 15 courts closers to reaching their 1,000+ court goal by the end of 2024, with a construction pace of 5 new permanent courts per week. They currently have 60 permanent courts across 12 clubs in Minnesota and cite 250k people having played on their MN courts this year. It’s truly an impressive case study the scale that Life Time has been able to reach in bringing pickleball to people through a private club model - and one that isn’t necessarily ‘cheap’ by most peoples’ standards. From their CEO, Bahram Akradi,

🏢 Job opportunities. Pickleball Canada is looking for an executive director. CourtReserve is one of the leading operating systems for racquet clubs and they are hiring for several roles including customer success and product management.

🏀 More professional teams in on pickleball. The Atlanta Hawks are the latest to offer a free paddle to those that buy tickets to select home games. Feels like a simple win-win to jump onto the marketing bandwagon and offer casual fans a fun reason to book.

What’s on our mind

🎾 Genie Bouchard to take a swing at pickleball. You know it’s a headline that’s making a splash when we’ve been getting texts throughout the day from people who barely follow tennis or pickleball asking us if we’ve seen the news of Genie Bouchard getting into pickleball. The 29-year-old Bouchard is a former world #5 ranked player and Wimbledon finalist who signed a fairly large contract with the PPA Tour today, and will be joining former world #8 ranked Jack Sock from the tennis world in pickleball. Our initial thoughts:

After a week of some tough losses on talent to MLP (which we covered in more depth here), this feels like a notable win for the PPA. In our view, one could mistakenly scoff at PPA having to fish in other sports’ ponds to find talent these days after the massive pickleball land grab, however, this is a different type of talent acquisition entirely. It’s not throwing money at women’s college tennis players who have never picked up a paddle. Genie Bouchard is an established name in tennis with a preexisting following to which she can bring exposure to pickleball and the PPA. If part of the revenue equation for the pro organizations is broadcasting rights, then a necessary input is going to be driving increased viewership and anyone with star power + a following helps move you in this direction. We have little doubt that the PPA paid up to make it compelling enough to effectively retire from tennis, so there is some risk that the lack of financial incentive could mute her willingness to get her fans engaged, however, we think this is unlikely. Like the PBX league to some degree, many of these athletes are fiercely competitive and see this as a challenge to become high-caliber players in a new sport. We’re of the mind that this dynamic will push these athletes to bring their existing fanbase along on this journey.

A big question mark
How long will it take Genie Bouchard to pick up pickleball. She’s no doubt an incredible athlete whose racquet skills should translate, but it’s no guarantee, as there have been a host of tennis players who have taken a swing and a miss at pickleball professionally (see: Noah Rubin). Though, we do think her shift to committing full-time to pickleball, and the likely lucrative contract will bring the level of focus and training needed to make her competitive on the Tour on a relatively short timeline.

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:
Columbus, GA is developing a massive pickleball complex through a public-private partnership to bring 25-30 outdoor courts (13 covered) to the park at the Columbus Waters Works Uptown Water Resources Facility. The facility will be owned and operated by a nonprofit, the Columbus Pickleball Association (CPA). The project is estimated to cost about $8M.

Bristol, TN approved the development of a new pickleball complex, which will be located next to the existing Bristol Sportsplex building. The location will include 13 courts, 12 normal courts and 1 stadium court. The facility will also provide restrooms, an office, and covered areas. The Sportsplex building already includes indoor courts, so this outdoor build will be in addition to the existing offering to residents. The total project will cost ~$3M.

Best of the Rest:

• Loves Park, IL is getting a new private facility with Victory Pickleball. The $3M renovation will host 16 indoor courts, an arcade, and food & bev. Unclear if true eatertainment or a blend of the two.

• Grafton, NJ opened 2 new courts in Red Hawk Park.