MLP Mixup...again

The Quick Points

🥇 Eyes on 2032. The International Olympic Committee submitted five sports to the Executive Board to vote on for inclusion in the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Those sports were baseball/softball, cricket, flag football, lacrosse, and squash. The notable exception to many was pickleball, which means it won’t come back around for consideration until 2032. Yes, this comes as a shock to many in America witnessing its explosion in popularity, but in our mind, serves as a great opportunity and incentive to really get the sport out there in the minds and hands of countries globally. We all know how accessible, inclusive, and addicting it can be for so many, so it should have the ability to meet the men’s & women’s participation thresholds if an earnest effort is made to bring the sport internationally. While it may be finding its way to every corner of America, let’s keep in mind that the Olympic Charter requires that a sport be widely practiced by men in at least 75 countries and women in 40 countries across a minimum of 3 continents. If we’re being honest, we still have a ways to go, but if we believe in pickleball’s first-principles power & benefits, we should be optimistic that it’s just a function of time and effort before it’s included. Would have been fun to see it live in LA, but guess we’ll have to live with Australia.

🧾 We can’t keep track. Pickleball nights for everyone! Insert: Oprah’s favorite things gif: The Philadelphia 76ers are scheduled to have a pickleball night on January 16th. Interesting to note that this paddle collaboration is being done with Volair. The Philadelphia Flyers will be joining them in the craze with a night of their own later in the spring with an awesome-looking “Gritty” paddle…quite the convenient pun.

Volair CEO Ryan Cohen tells us this is the first of many in the NBA and other pro sports we should expect to see. Cohen’s ticket brokering experience certainly seems to be coming into play here.

÷ A new ratio? There’s an art and science of knowing how many members a pickleball club can support per court (typically ~80-100 but local conditions and playing patterns apply). Maybe there’s a new formula in the making for how many courts your new apartment complex should have. A new 390-unit building is slated to be built northeast of downtown Dallas and will have SIX courts. Crossing our fingers for our fellow Texans that they are concrete and not plastic tile Sport Court… The building is aptly named The Railside Lofts and Courts. That’s 65 units per court. That’s a very healthy new baseline 🙂 Interesting to also note that Bouldin Acres will have a restaurant at the site. It will mark its third location and first outside of Austin. They recently opened up their north eatertainment location.

🎉🏓 Sure, why not Mike Ditka appreciation and pickleball? To mark the famous NFL head coach, Mike Ditka’s, 84th birthday tomorrow, the Naples Pickleball Center will host a celebration to honor his football legacy. In a fun ode to Ditka, players will be given paddles and faux mustaches (signature Ditka look). Honestly, it’s a little unclear if Ditka is a pickleball player, will be in attendance (he is a Naples resident), or how Naples football fandom and pickleball overlap, but it’s another signal that pickleball continues to establish itself as one of the premier group activities for any occasion, with almost any base of participants.

What’s on our mind

🔁 MLP Mixup. We didn’t have yet another round of MLP/PPA shakeups on our bingo card for the rest of the year, but probably should have been expected at this point. As a quick recap, the PPA<>MLP de-merger and subsequent battle for talent gave MLP some leverage over PPA in terms of the roster of players it could field exclusively for events. However, with this land grab for talent, the working capital commitments put MLP in a precarious financial position that forced them back to the negotiating table and into a revised merger with the PPA (read the two linked articles above for a more in-depth background on what’s been playing out over the past few months).

The Tour Wars, as they were dubbed, led to a complicated new merger, and the latest news is that several leaders at MLP have stepped away. Steve Kuhn is no longer on the board of MLP or the new combined organization. Steve’s resignation allegedly comes with two personal requests - 1) the opportunity to split off and run DUPR and 2) indemnification from legal liability. It is an unfortunate development given how much vision and life Steve brought to MLP and the sport as a whole. He was one of pickleball’s strongest advocates and evangelists, nevertheless, complicated business situations can be tough to navigate in a way that comes out with everyone a winner. MLP CEO Julio DePietro resigned last week. Mellie Price, Al Tylis, and Doug Ulman have also resigned from the MLP board. This week has also seemed like MLP is struggling to get out in front of comms with the recent moves & departures, allowing the news to shape itself as opposed to owning the messaging and future for MLP. And while they’re technically now partners who need to figure out their futures together, the PPA doesn’t seem to be lending MLP much of a hand in crafting the narrative and vision going forward.

These past few months have put pro pickleball further in the spotlight with even greater expectations of performance. The fighting between the leagues wasn’t inherently bad on its face. Reasonable people can make various business cases in support of a merger (e.g. greater talent consolidation) or in support of the two leagues fighting it out on their own (e.g. higher incentive to create economically viable and compelling pro products). However, the time to debate the merits of both seems to have passed and it’s time for execution and performance. Further mudslinging and score-keeping are distracting to the combined entity’s future, and every tournament that passes without new iteration and experimentation in favor of friction and bickering is a day closer to the irrelevance of professional pickleball. Both organizations have respectably held different visions on which format is more compelling for viewers and players, yet have had successes and shortcomings on their own. PPA’s operational discipline seems to have created economically viable events with muted player and fan affinity to the brand. MLP’s creative vision seems to have created a compelling format that stirs up energy and excitement among fans and players alike, yet has allegedly struggled to make the unit economics work meaningfully to date. Both seem to have complementary skill sets that can help each other in a new combined entity if the two kids semi-forced into the same sandbox can eventually play nice.

“Just give it more time” will always be an easy back-pocket refrain for any advocate of any industry who can’t articulate what needs to be attempted to build a viable foundational business model. It certainly is early, but to date, neither org seems to have it all figured out. Pre-Tour Wars, the answer wasn’t just to throw more money at one org to get it to scale. Neither org was able to consistently convert premium-priced paddle-buying, tournament-playing addicted amateurs into avid fans of the highest level of the sport. Neither took impressively bold or creative experiments at digital production to better entertain new audiences. Neither made this sport appear particularly cool culturally outside the bubble of ~30k avid livestream viewers.

While MLP sees the departure of a visionary founder and no doubt some internal reorganization, having two key figureheads, in Steve Kuhn and Tom Dundon, consistently at odds over their diametrically opposed visions for professional pickleball created greater uncertainty over the odds of a mutually agreed upon deal getting done and the ability to execute on future plans with minimal friction. We can debate endlessly the strengths and weaknesses that come with the latest shakeup, but what’s done is done and there’s now some incremental stability that should enable both orgs to get to focusing on building a compelling offering. The time for players, owners, tour executives, and agents to acknowledge that the sport is a long way from where we all believe it can be in terms of economic and cultural impact is now, and with the start of a new chapter, it’s time for both professional organizations to get to doing the hard thing. Perhaps overly simplistically, it’ll either work, or it won’t, but we’ll only have clarity on which routes see more success if people get to experimenting. A failure to launch and dying at the hands of irrelevancy is the worst of all worlds.

It should be all hands on deck to ensure this increasingly athletic, fast, and fun sport crosses the chasm.

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:

A new indoor facility, Legacy Pickleball Club, is coming to Ballston, NY. The club will offer 8 indoor courts and 15-20 outdoor courts. They also expect to build a pro shop and players’ lounge which will have food, beer, and wine.

Best of the Rest:

• The Haverhill High School campus in Haverhill, MA is building a $4.2M indoor tennis and pickleball complex which will host 2 tennis courts and 4 lined pickleball courts. Feels pricey, or like we’re missing something tbh.

• Siesta Beach in Sarasota, FL opened six new dedicated pickleball courts…FL pickleball strikes again.