PBX's Peak Celebrity Activation

The Quick Points

💭 Dreamin’ about pickleball. The massive annual conference held by Salesforce, Dreamforce, is hosting a series of pickleball games as one of its activities during the multi-day event. The event will be held on Wednesday for conference participants who sign up and get placed on a team.

🏟️ Plop down a court. We have been waiting for someone to do this. Pickleball is an amazing way to have fun and settle scores. A premier college tailgating events company is hiring a manager to create the playbook for parking lot pickleball. This has felt like a no-brainer and we have seen MLB teams like the Marlins continually have a court outside their stadium. We expect a lot of Saturday beer-in-hand matches.

🧢 Big names throw their hat in the ring. Camp Pickle, Chicken N Pickle, and more are vying to earn a private-public partnership with the city of Boca Raton to operate a new racquet facility. It’s a fascinating look into detailed pitches for what can and should exist to serve a large community. Camp Pickle has a wealth of hospitality experience but doesn’t have their own concept up and running yet. Chicken N Pickle has to be a frontrunner given their operating experience of many units since 2016. But then again, the YMCA may even be most aligned with this type of entity. We’ll keep ya posted.

🔢 Quick numbers. As we’ve covered for quite a while now, it’s no secret the opportunity pickleball is bringing to retailers like Walmart, fashion brands like Staud & Skechers, shoe companies, ecommerce businesses, and somewhat adjacent markets like hotels, among many others. This piece in the Washington Post reiterates much of what we’ve published, but a few additional data points:

• Last twelve months (LTM) Paddle sales topped $340M (+15% y/y) in June

• LTM Paddle volumes exceeded 3.9M paddles in June vs. 1.1M as of LTM June 2020

• Implied Average Selling Price per paddle of $87.18

• Tennis shoe sales exceeded $44M (+21% y/y) in June

What’s on our mind

💡 PBX is peak celebrity activation. Some assorted PBX thoughts after reading a recent piece in Forbes.

• PBX creates the most direct incentive for celebrity athletes to activate their base by getting the celebrity directly involved in the activity itself and not just the financial stakes; We’d think money would do it, but maybe there’s something more alluring to the competitive spirit of these athletes compared to relatively small dollars for them.

• On the surface, this seems like lower-hanging fruit for MLP given our discussion around the opportunity for celebrity activations last week, but need to give this some more consideration as to what actually draws out these celebrities.

• PBX apparently raised $5M to fund operations and recruit player talent.

• Might be a stretch, but golf viewership for the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am (where other athletes / celebrities play) is often in or near the top 5 highest viewed PGA events each year; Suggests there’s some draw that these non-golf athletes bring to the viewership stats for golf, potentially bringing in another demo; Presents a unique opportunity for PBX and MLP to tap into these pools of talent.

• The premise of fantasy camps / dream weekends (bringing pros & amateurs together) has been popularized in baseball in years past, and could be an interesting meeting between local MLP teams and the respective PBX players that either live in, or used to play on pro teams in, the same geo; Interesting way to connect fans <> pickleball pros <> former pros.

• TBD if PBX enters the fray between MLP / PPA, as one of their first events is supposed to be ready for the USA Pickleball National Championship this year, which is in collaboration with the PPA.

🔇 A quieter tour war roar. MLP won the battle for talent. The professional pickleball landscape has been re-shapen, and this week, things are a bit quieter. Now we are left with quite a few open questions.

• Is PPA’s team-based format, Vibe, actually going to come to life?

• This weekend is PPA Cincinnati. How many newly signed MLP players will be there playing?

• MLP Atlanta is a go for September 21st in Atlanta but how many PPA-signed players can and will attend? We expect MLP owners to vote this week on how to proceed (re-draft, re-shuffle, etc). It’s a tricky situation to handle as it’s a perfect storm of financial incentives, ego, feelings of fairness, and performance goals in a promotion/relegation world.

👀 Something that caught our eye. Tonight two MLP teams will be having an exhibition game before the Cubs game in Chicago. The full rosters of the Chicago Slice and Bay Area Breakers will be there and that includes world #1 Ben Johns. Ben has not signed a new agreement with MLP and we can’t be sure what is behind his decision to participate. It could be as simple as honoring his word to be there, lucrative incentives for these player exhibitions like the Pickle4 Ballpark, and/or he could be keeping the tour relationship warm for a near-midterm decision.

 😂 The LinkedIn inspo content hasn’t stopped.

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:
Most have heard of City Pickle in NYC taking over Central Park with $100+/hr court rental times that see pretty high utilization. City Pickle is bringing the pop-up court concept to Dilworth Park now in Philadelphia, PA, albeit on a much smaller scale. The two outdoor courts will be available to rent until Oct.21st and cost $40/hr.

Dartmouth, MA is getting a new indoor complex, from the facility Pickleball & More. The 30k sqft facility will hold 9 cushioned courts as well as a cafe and space for events / birthdays. The facility won’t charge to become a member, and will offer court reservations alongside open play and clinics.

Best of the Rest:

• Marco Island, near Naples, FL, is looking to replace its current Racquet Center with a massive pickleball complex. Over the course of two phases, one of the proposals would convert the existing 6 tennis courts to 22 pickleball courts. They’d also build an 81-space parking lot and clubhouse. The massive project would run an estimated $4.8M across the two phases.

• Braxton’s hometown of Long Beach, CA is finally coming around to meet the pickleball demand of the city. The Parks & Rec dept. has finally agreed to build 8 new public courts at DeForest Park and 8 at Veterans Park. We’d like to think the city officials read The Reset, but they’re making a good move to find public land that is not in the vicinity of homes and already has ample parking. Every time Braxton goes home, there are long lines at the parks of people waiting to play and almost no private facilities. Excited to check these new ones out once they’re open!