MLP Gins Up A New Sponsor

The Quick Points

🍎 Apple applies some data to pickleball. We sometimes joke that brands should get Apple as a key sponsor, with how frequently we’re on the court with people who not only own an Apple Watch, but are sure to track their workout once the game begins. As much as we read about pickleball’s injury potential, we rarely hear people cite the health benefits and the increase in overall levels of physical activity. Well, we finally get some, with the release of Apple’s Heart and Movement Study, which tracked 250,000 pickleball and tennis workouts. Some key points:

• Workouts often last longer for pickleball than tennis (90 vs. 81 minutes, respectively), with the average peak heart rate within 70% of the player’s estimated max heart rate

• Average beats per minute during a pickleball workout was 143 vs. tennis’s 152

• The study also included a voluntary mental health survey (PHQ-2 test), whose results suggested that the odds of having a depressed mood were 60% lower among frequent pickleball players

• Pickleball workouts surpassed tennis workouts for the first time, with Utah being the number one state with the most recorded workouts per capita (go figure with all the courts out there…)

Quick comment from Apple’s Vice President of Health, Sumbul Desai, M.D.:

You can check out ways to be a part of Apple’s future health studies, here.

🕶️ SwingVision’s vision of the future looks brighter. This is on the back of a $6M series A funding round led by Authentic Ventures, with participation from three-time Grand Slam winner Lindsay Davenport, Dropbox director of product Youssef Es-skouri, and Glenn Solomon of GGV Capital. The AI-powered tennis coaching and analytics application is working to bring professional-grade analytics to tennis and pickleball players of any skill. It takes video ported from a smartphone to provide statistics on certain shots, video highlights, and personalized coaching. Management plans to utilize the funding to grow the team, particularly around building tournament-grade officiating (read: line calls) and remote coaching capabilities into the platform.

What’s on our mind

🏆 Picklr partners with pickleball performance. The Picklr announced a partnership with U.S. Sports Camps to run Nike Pickleball Camps at multiple facilities across the country. The pickleball camps will offer three-day experiences to cover the basics of the game and onramp more players to the sport through formalized training programs with one of the biggest names in sports. Feels beneficial to the Picklr on a few levels:

• Standardize one programming model through a third party. While a lot of programming and internal club culture will be guided by on-the-ground decisions from franchisees in their local market, this brings a repeatable model to add to a facility’s current programming offerings across the country.

• The partnership was likely sourced, negotiated, and signed at the Picklr corporate level, adding to their value prop to potential franchisees. It would be a sizeable lift for every franchisee to go out and negotiate programming partnerships like this on their own, never mind having little leverage in the negotiating room on price. By taking this on at the corporate level, this presumably allowed The Picklr to negotiate more favorable rates at scale, while being able to bring U.S. Sports Camps a distribution channel to 100+ facilities in the next 12-24 months. Value accretive actions like this that increase membership and the overall success of the club help win over the minds of prospective franchisees evaluating multiple options, justify the fairly material franchise fees on gross revenue, and give The Picklr a path to increasing the take-rate over the long run.

• Outsources the customer acquisition to a brand that has attracted entry-level player camp participants since 1975 and one that can leverage the household Nike name. This customer acquisition isn’t solely just the one-time (3-day) revenue opportunities, but also the chance to convert some percentage of participants to recurring players, and ideally members. Also keep in mind the positive conversion pickleball can have not only on the direct participant (e.g. the Nike camp player), but also their families who watch them play, and now have a chance to take part with their kids. As we know, not many youth sports can bring the kid onto the field, as well as their parents.

One angle we’ll be curious to observe is what kind of training content Nike & U.S. Sports Camps put together. It still feels early for the training game, as the market seems to lack a go-to source or winner. This is despite existing offerings like Pickleball360 and My Pickleball Coach on the market backed by some of the top pro players, as well as successful independent programs and content from the likes of Kyle Koszuta and Briones (among others).

🍸 Ginning up some sponsors. MLP announced a multi-year partnership agreement with their first gin sponsor, The Botanist Islay Dry Gin. The company is continuing its foray into pickleball, as they’re also an ongoing partner with the racquet sports community, Break the Love. This sponsorship comes a few weeks after the PPA announced a new gin sponsor for the National Championships event in November, with the aptly named Wolf Spirit’s Mr. Pickles Northwest Gin, becoming an official sponsor of the event. It’s interesting to keep in mind that this is different than the PPA’s official gin sponsor, as that would be New Amsterdam’s Stratusphere Gin. Hey, if you can get the sponsors to get involved at the official level on an annual basis and at the individual event level despite the presence of a competitor, more power (and money) to you. By having the PPA and MLP run with their own unique branding and strategy for now, they’re able to go out and win an almost entirely new set of sponsors for each entity. And we imagine now that they’re not direct competitors aiming to put each other out of business, there will be the opportunity to negotiate joint sponsorships with larger, more valuable brands who seek to have placement across both the PPA and MLP events & audiences - particularly if there are some logistical benefits for instances where PPA & MLP events are paired (e.g. MLP Dallas + Nationals). So, for now, we expect to see the doubling up of competitive sponsors across MLP and PPA. Anywhere where there’s a sponsor from one industry backing one of the orgs as the ‘official [XX] sponsor’, we expect the PPA/MLP teams will go out and push a competitor to become the sponsor of the other org at a higher rate.

Breaking Ground

UPDATE: As part of some new work we’re doing, we have a new facilities tracker to go alongside the existing one. This ‘new’ tracker aims to identify all of the private facilities across the country (and not just recently opened). It currently excludes almost all the franchises (e.g. Picklr/ACE). One day we’ll get to including eatertainment facilities and franchises. If you’re a more visual person than a spreadsheet person, you can also check out this interactive map of all the facilities. Let us know if you want to chat or if you have any facilities you know of that we missed (it’s still a work in progress!).

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:

Lincoln Park, in Chicago, IL is getting a new indoor pickleball social club, called Social Pickleball Fun. The facility will offer 9 indoor pickleball courts, an indoor turf field, restaurants, a coffee shop, locker rooms, a sauna, and a variety of social and pickleball programming. They’re also leaning into a few of the tech-enabled elements we’ve seen highlighted in places like Picklemall, as Social Pickleball plans to include instant replay technology throughout the facility, creating unique moments for player interactions and fun engagement with strangers in the club. This is one of the earlier concepts we’ve seen specifically billed as a social club, however, management’s vision seems to be that a little more in-line with a traditional eatertainment model. There’s a decent emphasis on amenities and programming focused on families and young children. While a lucrative customer base, it deviates from the colloquial sense of what many “social clubs” would presumably entail for a slightly older audience. With that said, it gives off a pretty fun and lively Florida-type vibe…especially for a place in Chicago which will inevitably face snow and freezing temperatures.

A new eatertainment concept, The Tipsy Pickle is coming to Charlotte, NC during the summer of 2024 and will bring six pickleball courts, three bars, and an array of food options to a 35k sqft space.

Best of the Rest:

• Cathedral City, CA plans to open a new dog park which will include 4 pickleball courts. The council voted unanimously 4-0 to approve the $400k budget to plan and design the $2.4M project.

• Carlisle, PA opened six pickleball courts at LeTort Park after fundraising efforts by the Carlisle Area Pickleball Association (CAPA).

• Morristown, NJ is converting one tennis court at Lidgerwood Park into three pickleball courts.