Novelty is Neat

The Quick Points

🛫 Points for planes and tour. Southwest Airlines is now the official airline and credit card partner of the PPA Tour. In doing so the top eight pros at the end of the year will receive Companion passes. The right-side life partners of these pros will now travel for free on any flight. Putting appearance fees aside, this may be a more valuable financial perk that anything else out there right now. Also probably makes sense for Southwest to lead this corporate charge relative to other airlines, given their denser flight patterns across some pickleball-heavy locations for the pro-circuit and amateur tourneys (AZ, CA, TX, UT). That said, it takes us longer to say “Southwest Rapid Rewards™ Priority Credit Card from Chase” than to chase down a lob at the baseline.

📝 New teams for Season 2. The Major League Pickleball draft went down at City Pickle in Central Park yesterday. 24 teams across two divisions, Premier and Challenger, formulated what they hope to be a winning combination of two women and two men. The final results are here and for a bit more color, here are two top pros giving their draft grades.

🤤 Brands can’t help themselves (pt. 642). Pickle is the base for which all product and brand marketers can workshop something around. Latest to this craze is Walmart’s Barbie styled collection out online as Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie steal the hearts and minds of everyone across the country in theatres. Keep in mind, this isn’t Walmart’s first foray into dedicated pickleball merch and partnerships, as we talked about at the beginning of June.

🆕 Novelty is neat. The Pickle4 Ball Park Series officially kicked off yesterday at Boston’s iconic Fenway Park. The videos have been awesome to watch, and exactly what you’d expect, with almost all the courts booked regardless of the heat (including Ryan’s brother). Some of the local interviews suggest that part of the draw for patrons was the ability to try out a new sport (pickleball), alongside something that has been a staple for them for decades (baseball). We think this hits on some of the same unique aspects as the PBX League, bringing non-pickleball pro athletes together with fans to play exhibition matches with and against each other.

What’s on our mind

✅ Pickle-Market-Fit. Big bar charts about player participation and the often repeated “fastest growing sport in America” are nice, but hollow representations of just how high the growth and how strong retention is in the sport.

🔎 No lies detected. Every day local reporters in random but pleasant 30,000 population towns can’t ignore the energy it brings to a community. Pickleball is a simple but beautiful local phenomenon that once it gets going, doesn’t stop. It’s the strikingly similar pattern (courts are packed, tennis courts taken over, committees advocating for new courts, interview with young and old about how fun it is, local radio station or fire department hosts first charity tournament) anywhere and everywhere. It resembles a new social network getting started and taking root.

💪 The all-inclusive experience. The St. James Performance Club is joining the ranks of Life Time Fitness and The Bay Club by offering dedicated pickleball facilities to its Reston, VA members. The sport adds another tool to the kit for these premier facilities to attract and keep members on-site for longer durations, more frequently. We think there’s something quite compelling about having the one-stop-shop for people’s fitness needs and pickleball addiction.

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.

Featured Developments:

The Woodlands Township in Houston, TX is opening eight new pickleball courts at Falconwing Park. The new development cost the city ~$650k and adds to the Township’s existing 45 courts (albeit multi-use) in the area. Courts can be reserved for $10/hr, highlighting another way that these projects don’t have to be tax-paying loss-leaders for a city.

New Albany, OH opened a new 16-court public facility at the New Albany Pickleball Complex this week. Unclear the cost of the project, but it’s a very legit public project - permanent nets, side fencing, wind blockers, audience seating, and plenty of courts to host tournaments (as planned by the city). They even have a detailed page laying out the open play rules and the 3 designated king’s courts.