Initial Recap: MLP vs PPA Showdown

The Quick Points

🎾 Sock clocks out of tennis. Jack Sock officially announced his retirement from the professional tennis circuit to turn full-time to the PPA tour. Sock will cap off his tennis career with a final showing in the U.S. Open in men’s doubles with John Isner, after a successful career that brought him as high as No. 8 in the world in 2017, and netted him $11.9M in career tennis earnings. He has seen himself as a kind of bridge between the tennis community and pickleball community given his love of both and strong belief in their coexistence. It’ll be exciting to see where he can take his pro-pickleball career with full-time dedication to the sport.

🤝 Selkirk helping tennis bring into the fold. Selkirk Sport signed a 3-year agreement with the United States Professional Tennis Association (USPTA) to manufacture the official pickleball and pickleball net of the USPTA. We can respect the USPTA making moves to accept how pickleball can be complementary and not adversarial to tennis, despite all the headlines.

⚡️ CELSIUS gets energized. The popular energy drink brand partnered with YouTube celebrity and huge pickleball aficionado, David Dobrik, as they hosted a charity tournament with a $50k check to the charity of the winner’s choosing. Celebrities such as Tyler Cameron, Olivia Culpo, and Taylor Lautner have all been getting more involved in the game personally and bring a different feeling to pickleball given their influence on general pop culture.

✅ Prepping for the U.S. Open with…Pickleball. Leading into the U.S. Open week, the Miami Pickleball Club partnered with the Lotte New York Palace for their annual “Lotte Palace Invitational” event. As we’d expect, some of the biggest names in tennis took to the pickleball court to play each other, including Carlos Alcaraz (1st time playing pickleball), Venus Williams, Holger Rune, and Ons Jabeur. During an interview, world #5 Ons Jabeur commented on pickleball, “It’s a great sport…there are a lot of hands in it, and I like that. [Having the best hands and angles in tennis] That helps a lot for sure, that helps me be ready to make crazy shots and I’ve tried [pickleball] once, so I think this sport fits really well”.

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What’s on our mind

⚔️ MLP vs PPA. The pro pickleball world has been on their phones for five days straight trying to piece together a big shake-up. tl;dr An awaited merger between the Tour (PPA) and team-based league (MLP) is a no-go. Last week MLP moved quickly to secure exclusive multi-year contracts with top talent and rising professionals. Their stealthy actions started an arms race with PPA to secure the most talented and marketable players over the coming years.

It caught almost all players, PPA leadership, and the vast majority of MLP owners by surprise. The APP and PPA both had full tournaments in progress which made things extra spicy. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were mad scrambles with exploding offers, negotiating tactics, and each professional organization posting on their respective social media about new signings.

At this moment MLP has signed far more players (80+) building a robust depth chart of men and women. They have the high-end star power of Riley Newman, Tyson McGuffin, Anna Bright, and James Ignatowich. The PPA doubled down on legacy and elite talent with the likes of Ben Johns, Anna Leigh-Waters, Callie Smith, Catherine Parenteau, and Jack Sock.

We will have more thoughts from a business angle on Thursday but here’s a rundown of where this developing situation stands.

What we know:

• Time kills all deals. There will be two sides to the story as to why the merger agreement dating back to November 2022 was never finalized.

• MLP and PPA have always had real cultural and DNA differences….ranging from strategy (team format vs individual tour) to player spotlights to leadership.

• Players and their bank accounts are the real winners here. Hard to make the case that MLP owners, PPA Tour, or fans are winning in any significant short-term ways.

• Low-mid-level pros are signing contracts worth $100-200k per year with benefits, travel, etc included. High-level names could be seeing multi-year contracts worth $750k-$1M+ a year.

• Conservatively MLP has taken on $12M of yearly player salary expenses and it is likely north of $15M.

• Vibe Pickleball (PPA’s team-base format) is slated to come back with four teams.

What we don’t know:

• Are PPA players going to show up to MLP Atlanta in 4 weeks? Are they even allowed to?

• Will MLP re-draft prior to Atlanta? What happens to the 4 expansion teams that are PPA “owned” as a result of the November merger? Will MLP still use season 2 as performance data to drive 2024 promotion / relegation?

• Are signed MLP players going to appear at PPA events for the rest of 2023?

• If and when will a lawsuit or settlement emerge between the two organizations?

• The frequently cited English Premier League free-agent structure for MLP in 2024 carries so many additional questions. There are immediate concerns around fairness and production value for three slated MLP events.

What this means:

• Players have real numbers they can peg to their worth. Any future merger or competing organization now has to work with real market data. Tennis players and rising athletic junior pickleballers have concrete numbers to be attracted to.

• There is no excuse for 120+ pro players not to be truly full-time. MLP’s move has served as a forcing function to up-level the game overall. The players have the resources and time to fully invest in strategy, on-court fitness, and health.

• Fans lose out. You won’t see the very best playing the best like you did during the last season of MLP. Unless it makes 15+ super successful bets on fast-rising emerging talent, the PPA Tour Sunday results are going to be even more of the same. Ben and ALW 👑 

• MLP has an exciting talent advantage right now. That is now coupled with some very important business concerns around revenue generation, the magical TV deals all sports leagues rely on, and meaningfully growing viewership.

Undoubtedly more to come…

🤣 Lol. That’s all we have to say about our tech friend Nikhil offering this custom pickleball to his healthcare newsletter subscribers. It references the now memed UBS study on rising costs from all the boomer pickleball explosion. (HT Scott for this find)

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:

Taktika Padel has partnered with the University of the Pacific to bring the first pickleball and padel complex to an American college campus. The facility will host 8 pickleball courts and 4 padel courts, alongside a suite of technology like video cameras for live streaming. This is a solid step in our opinion for bringing the sport into the mainstream of college campuses. We could see a world where it follows a similar trajectory to America’s broader adoption of the sport, where it gains mass popularity among the student body before being fully integrated into the collegiate sports program. We remain optimistic that a future growth catalyst for the sport broadly, and particularly at the professional level, will be the emergence of scholarships to college teams. With scholarships will come a pipeline pre-college for training & coaching systems, and post-college as players look to try their skills out on the pro-circuit. College rankings, competition, and infrastructure will also assist pro teams as they professionalize their scouting & drafting processes. This is a relatively small, but exciting development for what it could mean at other college campuses.

The Villages is a massive age-restricted living community in central Florida, and they are getting a huge pickleball facility adjacent to their living center in Wildwood City. The Pen-A-Ckle Pickleball Pavillion will boast, 70…yes, 70, courts, 21k sqft of retail space, 10k sqft of restaurant space, 5k sqft of office space, and a 120-room hotel. Honestly not even sure if this is eatertainment, a giant fitness facility, or a combination of everything with all the additional development going on…but we do know we want to give it a look when it’s completed.

Best of the Rest:

• Henrico County, VA began construction on a high price tag pickleball complex at Pouncey Tract Park. The location will be home to 2 championship courts, 10 standard courts, covered spectator seating, and 103 parking spots.

• Jackson County, MI opened up a new complex in Cascades Fall Park, which provides players with 8 courts, benches, and tables for a cost of $600k.

• Penfield, NY’s Shadow Pines property is back in development, with a new recreation area that will provide 10 pickleball courts, a playground picnic area, and restrooms. The development will cost ~$1.2M.