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High-Rises Leveling Up with Pickleball

Thursday, June 15th, 2023

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Braxton Greco & Ryan Dawidjan
June 15, 2023

Diving Right In…

To our new batch of subscribers this week...if you have a friend who works in pickleball, please share this with them and we’ll be eternally grateful!

The Quick Points

📈 This week in corporate partnerships. As we’ve covered now with Subway and Walmart, Equinox and American Express are the latest to tap into the pickleball craze, offering a joint event in NYC at Arthur Ashe Stadium (where the U.S. Open is played). The Equinox x American Express Platinum Series event hosted tennis and pickleball clinics and open play, with participation from Andy Roddick. Gotham’s interview with Roddick shared some of his latest views on the sport. Some that caught our eye:

  • Roddick didn’t think he would continue playing pickleball going into the ESPN Pickleball Slam tournament, but now plays at least once a week.

  • The nuances of the game keep it exciting and provide new learning opportunities despite his pro tennis background.

  • Thinks the participatory and social nature of the sport are some of its strongest features and what will keep the growth going.

  • Feels that the next jump up for the sport will be to create a compelling TV product that people tune in to watch.

  • Pickleball benefits from its low barrier to entry compared to tennis:

    • Players can easily build makeshift courts in their driveways, streets, parks, etc..

    • The composition of the ball and lower physical demands enable easier entry for young players to start at earlier ages - tennis has attempted to make it easier for young players through the use of depressurized balls (i.e. balls that don’t bounce as much).

💥 NOLA Pickle Fest opens up with a bang. The charity tournament (NOLA Pickleball Fest) being held by Drew Brees’ organization opened registration a week ago today. The Aug 10-13 tournament already has 376 (!) players registered. If every player competes in 2 events, that’s ~$45k+ in registration fees raised for the Brees Foundation, excluding money from spectators, sponsors, and concessions…a pretty impressive move in our opinion for a non-PPA/APP/MnLP amateur tournament. You can read more about the event in our very first issue of The Reset.

👂 More pro pickle pods and gossip. Just when we all (naively) thought there were enough podcasts about pickleball, PPA and MLP player Tyler Loong with his friend and co-host Jimmy have started to make some waves with King of the Court. Candid Q&As, spicy takes from group chats (only delivered by Jimmy), and nuanced perspective on tournament results are providing a good blend of things worth tuning into.

🏡 Let’s stick to home and garden. The Wirecutter has put out their first paddle review and let’s just say we don’t agree. The Pickleball Studio will lead you in far better directions. And if you take our word for it, the best $100 paddle for beginner and intermediate upgrades is the Vatic Prism Flash.

What’s on Our Mind

🏢 All the way up. High-rise complexes are always in search of new ways to draw in residents. Location matters, price matters, design matters, and amenities matter. Especially when you’re paying top prices in growing urban cities. That’s why two new high-rises in Ann Arbor, MI and Atlanta, GA have decided to add pickleball courts to their design plans. We think this is a clever addition to the properties for a variety of reasons:

  1. Improves social & community building - many apartment / condo complexes will spend money on events that try to bring residents together. This is done often to foster community, which leads to better retention rates on leases and higher conversion for renters looking to buy. Playing a highly participatory activity with your neighbors is far more entertaining than making small talk over bagels and coffee.

  2. Promotes an active lifestyle through a highly accessible sport - as we’ve noted many times before, pickleball’s inclusive nature as a sport provides the opportunity for residents of any age or background to participate, particularly for those who may not typically use the building gym. For more active residents, playing a sport fosters greater physical exercise in other domains, which increases the usage rates of on-site amenities like the gym or pool. As with many other property / experience-based businesses, the more valuable, repetitive experiences you can provide to your user (i.e. resident), the greater the retention and ability to upsell them. In this case, it’s fostering longer term tenants at higher price points over time.

  3. Highly unique amenity - for properties with the physical space and budget to add pickleball courts, it provides a differentiated offering that not every building can easily replicate. For developers and property owners that own a portfolio of real estate in a given market, they may also benefit from the scale advantages of rolling out courts across all locations vs. one-off builds to an existing complex.

🌉 Bridging gaps. As part of the State of California’s push to reform their criminal justice system, multiple Department of Corrections locations have now hosted pickleball events to connect correctional officers and inmates with each other, while fostering improvements in the social and mental health of those incarcarated. These events consist of lessons provided by local residents and match-play. They have now held events at San Quentin State Prison, California Medical Facility, and RJ Donovan Correctional Facility, with popularity being so high that there are plans to run additional pickleball days in the future. First, shoutout to Gearbox for donating the equipment to the RJ Donovan Facility to help them put on the event. In our view, this continues to show some of the best that pickleball has to offer. It’s not that pickleball is the answer to everything, but it demonstrates some of the nuanced ways that the sport can act as a bridge to bring so many people with different backgrounds together. When you’re on a court, you’re there to focus and work together with someone else, point by point, to achieve an outcome - with no regard to the differences you and that individual may share. The more of these shared experiences we can foster in our communities, the better the social outcomes - pickleball being just one of hopefully many outlets.

Breaking Ground

The Reset is beginning to track publicly available court construction data to keep track of locations, costs, and development projects across the nation. Our tracker can be found here.

A new entertainment + pickleball facility is opening up in Algonquin, IL, with the construction of a Topgolf Style facility called Pickle Haus. This facility is planned to have 12 indoor courts, three golf simulators, a bar / restaurant, live music, and an outdoor patio. The project is a joint venture between Hubbard Street Group, a real estate development company, and College Park Athletic Club, and they plan for the Algonquin location to be the first of five across Chicago to capture the growing demand in a space-constrained city. The first Pickle Haus will also be taking a page out of other facilities’ books, converting a shuttered furniture store (RIP Dania Furniture) into pickleball. We’re seeing more and more of these playbooks emerge as a lot of these spaces benefit from pre-existing high ceilings, lighting, open floor plans, and concrete floors that are near-ready for pickleball.

Dill Dinkers, an operator of two pickleball fitness facilities in Maryland is expanding their footprint to a third facility in Montgomery County. The company signed a ~30k sq.ft. lease, where they’ll install 11 courts and offer both membership-based offerings, as well as non-member pay-to-play.

The City of Bristol, CT unveiled its newly constructed pickleball facility at Seymour Park this week. Residents pushed the city to convert the existing tennis courts at the park into 4 new pickleball courts. According to the construction quote provided by AstroTurf Corporation, the conversion and implementation of new basketball courts at Seymour cost ~$475k (~$118k per court). Difficult to disaggregate the true cost of the pickleball courts given the basketball construction, but the quote suggests they effectively had to remove the entire tennis court first before re-laying the pickleball court - making the cost higher than the typical resurfacing.

Mountain View, CA gets serious about pickleball. Citing the strong demand for the temporary courts built a few years back, the city council has approved a budget of $156k to research, identify, and design the location of a new public pickleball facility, which they expect to be constructed in 2025. The city has already earmarked a budget of $1M (!!) for the construction of this facility. This will be one of the largest projects we’ve covered so far. We’ll keep y’all posted.

After community members have demonstrated their interest in playing pickleball on the temporary courts in Oakdale Park, the Salina City Council has approved a $444k budget (privately funded through donations) to convert its tennis courts in the park to permanent pickleball courts. TBD how many courts they decide on building.

The City of Greencastle, PA is planning to open six new pickleball courts at the end of July after a proposal was approved to convert two old tennis courts to pickleball. The project is currently over budget by ~$25k, bringing the latest total to $70k.

The City of Mobile, AL cut the ribbon on four new courts this week after converting two existing tennis courts over to pickleball.

Pickle In Pictures

Programming note: We would love to feature where readers are playing and competing. Just reply with a photo of your courts!

  1. City Pickle expands from Central Park to Union Square

  1. The RJ Correctional Facility in San Diego

  1. Live from a rain-delayed Major League Pickleball day one in San Clemente

San Clemente, CA - June 15th

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.

For the guys at The Reset, Ryan will be commentating at MLP San Clemente this weekend (give the matches a listen) and Braxton will be playing in a local Austin tournament (glhf). Hope you can get out on your hometown courts!

- Ryan & Braxton