Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello to our awesome listeners, Kevin Huff here with the Sweet Labs podcast. I recently got a chance to interview Riley Watkins, one of the owners and founders of Pickleball Club magazine. And after getting his permission to record the session and potentially use it as a podcast, which we're going to do here, I hit record. So we're going to listen in on that conversation unedited, starting really right after I got his permission to hit record. Here we go, everybody.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: I'm not like, you know, pro level or anything. I mean, I'm competitive to a point when it, you know, the priority goes downhill when I have other stuff to do. But the, you know, I, I don't know if I. You were able to look at our website or anything before, but we.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: No, swamped. I'm sorry. I would have loved to have done that.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Right. No, it's okay. At your leisure. But we, we pretty much just focus on the business side of things. So all the clubs, the facilities. So like, Chris is a natural story for us because he owns and runs those. It's actually two locations now, or I think maybe he said he's opening up the next one this month, something like that. There's one that's their main facility and then one on the west side of the city, I believe.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: Yeah, the. The main facility is for us just inside of the 465 Circle, and it's in the Indianapolis Pickleball Club.
And then the second one, I'm not sure exactly where it's going to be located. I haven't seen anything on the map yet.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Okay, yeah, yeah, tell us about. I just can't remember where it is.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: But yeah, and then indie Pickleball Club, which is different than Indianapolis Pickleball Club.
More of a. Just group of people that are members of a nonprofit. They house out of Indianapolis Pickleball Club to make it extra confusing. So.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, he had to explain that to us.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:02:00] Speaker B: It sounded like. And this is going to be kind of part of our story with him. It sounded like kind of cool. He. He was a part of that, you know, like that. That community for a while before they launched that club and kind of made it a lot easier to launch the club. Kind of an interesting model. A lot, A lot of people go the other way. Right. Like they build the community afterwards. Yeah, interesting.
[00:02:25] Speaker A: Yeah. We just to kind of give you our really fast story and I'm recording this in case we end up wanting to use some of it on a podcast later on. We can also schedule time to do that, but I'M with Riley Watkins. Riley. It's Pickleball Club magazine. Is that the official title? Okay, what's the website?
[00:02:45] Speaker B: Pickleball club mag.com.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: Pretty simple.
So my wife and I, again, the short, fast version is we were on a cruise ship. We couldn't dock one day, it was too windy. And she was like, hey, they're doing something called pickleball upstairs. You want to try it out? And I was like, sure, I'm game for whatever, dude. The moment I grabbed paddle and hit that ball, I was like, I'm. I'm in. You know, and it was awesome. We're. We're rocking and the wind's blowing. I don't care. I don't know any different.
We did that. What you're talking about. We came back home, there was one group of people playing. I say, this would love an elderly group that was retired playing at some church. I didn't. I didn't know anything about them.
We built our own group of people playing, and the next thing you know, in seven years later, you know, 1200 people have come through our church to play pickleball. Literally 1200 waivers signed. It's crazy.
So I get that whole build the community thing first, you know.
[00:03:42] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the. What's the facility look like? Is it. How many courses it.
[00:03:48] Speaker A: So great question. It's a basketball court. It was a basketball court that had. It was tile, like from 19. Literally 1979. Tile corners chipping off of pieces here and there. Again, we were playing pickleball and we had no other facilities, so we were happy. And during COVID 2020, so we'd already been playing for two years at this point in time, the church was like, hey, we'll shut down during COVID for a bit. Let's just redo the gym floor. We'll redo it for pickleball because you guys have got a good following and a good group of people coming through here. We are literally playing six days a week there. And so we've got that. I can never remember the name of it. Everyone wants to call it rubber. It's not rubber. It's some polyurethane coated, you know, painted, soft type surface. I call it a flex floor, but we've got three quarts and obviously, you know, removable nets because we have other events that happen in the gym. But yeah, three courts there. It's great.
[00:04:40] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[00:04:40] Speaker A: About eight or nine feet apart between them. So there's, there's plenty of room.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: Okay, yeah. Ask. Do you have you said six days a week. That's. That's a lot.
[00:04:49] Speaker A: All but Sunday. Yeah. Monday night leagues, Tuesday night open play, Wednesday night leagues, Thursday night leagues, Friday morning private play, Saturday morning open play. And the two open plays are like, you know, two point whatever to three point whatever, and three point whatever to four point whatever. Yeah.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: Interesting. Okay. Do you have a vision of moving into a dedicated space or do you want to keep that?
[00:05:12] Speaker A: So that's a great question.
We've been saving money because we charge for the leagues. We don't charge to play open play. It's been totally free since day one. We do charge for the leagues. We got balls to buy and nuts to buy and whatever else. We do free beginners classes every quarter so that we don't charge for that either. But we want to supply them. Right. So we often give away paddles or balls or whatever.
But all that excess funds, we give some to the church, of course, out of gratitude. They ask for nothing, which is great, but we give some anyway. But we've saved probably 60% of the revenues that come in, and we've been saving it because the church has given us. There's an upper level parking lot that, you know, this is. This is how I think about pickleball. When I see it, I go, oh, that holds 28 courts. Like, that's. That's my vision. Right. But they said we can use whatever we want from it to put quartz in. Well, it's asphalt needs some repair, blah, blah, blah. We just haven't done it yet. Then the city goes, hey, pickleball's a big deal. And they give us 16 courts. So there's not really the same need anymore. So we're literally shifting our mindset to, we'll keep playing indoors. It's our only indoor space during the winter.
Well, there's one other one in town, but it has a cost to it. And then we will do more youth programming. So it's kind of our big shift. But we were going to do exactly what you're saying. We were going to build, like an outdoor court, have some covering, potentially put heater in and everything. And now we're shifting our plan.
[00:06:30] Speaker B: Okay, that's really cool. So how did the podcast start?
[00:06:37] Speaker A: Well, I probably.
I've wanted to do one for a while. I. I'm in a podcast studio. I own a podcast studio. So I do podcasts for work all the time. Nothing public. They're all private, like, you know, stuff that employees at Comcast might get or other companies might get our customers. But I Have the equipment. I have all the gear. Four. Four seats here. Four sets of headphones and mics like this. And it's. I've got a road, you know, over here. I'm sitting here mix mastering if I want to. Well, my wife and I, she finally got into pickleball as a player. She was a martial artist. Then she started to work for Pickle Play. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that app or not, but it's a pretty popular app. And now that she works for Pickle Play, she's like, you know what? We should probably do a pickleball podcast. And I'm like, heck, yeah. So it's almost date night. We started in April a year ago. We're almost at our 40th episode. We'll hit a year here in April, and we don't see any reason to stop.
[00:07:29] Speaker B: That's cool.
[00:07:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:07:31] Speaker B: So did you guys, like, when you.
When you first started, did you have a vision for kind of what you wanted it to be? And is that vision what came to fruition?
[00:07:42] Speaker A: Great question.
[00:07:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:43] Speaker A: I didn't expect to get interviewed. I love this. This is a great questions.
Yes. I have a lot of perspectives and potentially what you might just call opinions on pickleball, I've done my best to get very engaged. I'm engaged with the pros. I'm engaged with the tours. I'm engaged with the referees and the usap, and not at a deep level necessarily, but I'm just. I'm in. I want to be in with all those groups so that I know people can talk to people, can learn from them, whatever, and hopefully influence them. I think I have a lot of really good ideas.
So it started as a part of it, I think, was just me helping my wife get further educated on pickleball, but potentially stuff that other people would want to learn. What's weird about the rules? What's up with, you know, paddles? Just kind of stuff that you hear on the streets all the time. Right.
And that turned into a. A list of things that we heard from other people. Hey, can you talk about this? Can you talk about that? So we added those into our lists. That grew into a. Let's start to expand now into who can we have as guests. That's really been our bigger push this last couple months.
You know, I know you just mentioned you're not huge in the pro world, but, you know Zayn Navratill. You know the name Zayn Navtool?
[00:08:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:52] Speaker A: All right. Zane's. Zane's A buddy of mine, so we had him on the podcast in November or no December.
We had Hugh and Sophie on who, who own built and own Reveling Paddles, Reveling Sports. We had Jojo and Low on who have this really cool, you know, like, apparel brand. We had Brent Pass on who's kind of known nationally for being one of the leaders and thinking about how courts get built in the backyard. So, like, we're talking about apparel pros, courts. Like, we're trying to really cover everything pickleball.
And that's one of the reasons I really want to talk to you because we haven't talked to anyone on the media side yet. And I was like, I'd love to hear what, you know, Riley and those guys are doing at Pickleball Club magazine, you know, to hear what their, what their ideas and thoughts are on who they're targeting. And. But you said it's a business resource magazine. So this is for really like club owners.
[00:09:42] Speaker B: Yeah. So it's club owners or operators, people that, people in that, you know, decision making realm, you know, there are lots of different positions. So it's, it could be CEO, it could be a gm, it could be. Oh, kind of depends on the size. Right. So like somewhere like, you know, if there's, if it's a franchise, you know, the, the CEO might read it, but also the, the, the folks at the, that, you know, the franchisees might read it as well.
[00:10:13] Speaker A: Right.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: Like, so if you have. Bill Dinkers was on one of our covers.
[00:10:17] Speaker A: Okay. Yep. Right.
[00:10:19] Speaker B: So we interviewed Will and Denise Richards. Very cool, very cool folks. And so like, they would read it, but also the people that by their franchises would also be interested because the, the content is really like how to run a successful club. Okay. How to, how to, how to be good at running a pickleball place.
And so it's a very, it's a very niche thing. Right. It's a just business about pickleball. But there's a lot of variety, surprisingly a lot of variety in our readership because everyone wants to capitalize on, on pickleball. Right. So you have places like that formerly just did tennis or padel or racquetball, and they add quartz, they add pickleball as an offering. But there comes like a new kind of flavor with pickleball. Right. Not to, not, not to be overly punny, but, you know, there's a, there's a, there's a new, you know, kind of flavor to that community.
[00:11:22] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:11:23] Speaker B: And so it's, it's a unique thing that, you know, a lot of them are not familiar with.
And then you have the other variety, you know, kind of you have all ends of the spectrum between your entertainment type folks.
[00:11:36] Speaker A: Yeah, the chicken and pickles guys and.
[00:11:38] Speaker B: And there's actually quite a lot of.
I don't want to call them copycats, but similar type vibe, but not the name brand chicken and pickle that are popping up.
[00:11:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:51] Speaker B: And then you have the places that are just. They're completely focused on pickleball. There's nothing else there. There's not. They don't even offer a hot dog or a beer. You know, like, there's nothing, nothing. You know, they. They barely offer Gatorades. Right.
So it's interesting. You meet a lot of different types of, of club owners or, or club operators.
But that's kind of what we do is we, we interview them, we tell their stories, or we might go in with a specific idea of, hey, we need to learn more about how do you. How do you make your front desk welcoming. And we'll, we'll literally look for clubs that do that well and then ask them about how they got that.
And so we publish, you know, kind of different levels of things. So we'll do web stuff more often. Right. It's a little bit more like.
[00:12:46] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:12:47] Speaker B: I say web, like it's short form, you know, very short articles or short clips, smaller videos. And then once every other month, so bimonthly, we do a long form, which is a deep dive on some of these clubs that if you really want to know how they came to be from start to finish and how they're successful. You want to read that? I love it. Watch the videos, watch the full interviews, that kind of thing. So that's kind of what we do.
[00:13:16] Speaker A: Man, I love it. So I haven't looked at the mag yet. I did just pull up the website, so I see like a bunch of screenshots of the past issues and the current issue.
I'm assuming you guys go ahead.
[00:13:30] Speaker B: Oh, sorry. Yeah. Each one of those is linked to that past issue.
[00:13:34] Speaker A: Super.
[00:13:34] Speaker B: So if you click on them, you can see all, all of them.
[00:13:37] Speaker A: But I'm assuming your typical advertisers are like the Brent Poses of the world. The, the, the lighting people, the quartz people, the ball machine people, the whatever.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: Yeah. Actually, it's funny you mentioned Zane. He's. He's on two of our ads right now.
He's. I think he's.
I don't know if it's sponsored by or. Or maybe he's just affiliated with Har. True. Okay. And Lobster Sports? Same. Yep, same company. But he's on both of their ads right now.
[00:14:06] Speaker A: Yeah, he promotes the lobster all the time on his, on his podcast.
And Har True. Why am I drawing a blank? Is that the Theragun?
[00:14:15] Speaker B: No, Har True is a. They're a court company.
[00:14:18] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:14:20] Speaker B: They do all kinds of flexible courts, like, kind of like what you're talking about. You probably would recognize that if you saw it.
[00:14:27] Speaker A: Yep, totally understand. Okay, super cool. I love it. I'm gonna have to, I'm have to get one of these. So. Full disclosure, my wife and I, well, she used to work at a pickleball facility, a racket and other wise sports club that had, you know, tennis, pickleball, weights, you know, biking, all that stuff.
And a good friend of ours is working on building out a place not too horribly far from here with some indoor courts. So we're pretty dialed into the people you're targeting.
I'm running a tournament in two weeks. It'll probably be the biggest in Indiana this year, maybe second biggest this year.
There's 505 registrations currently. Just to give you an idea of size wise, it's legit.
And the guy that I'm running it for, he's got a facility with multiple courts that gets run by that team down there. So this, you know, this is pretty cool for me because I'm thinking about them in my mind, you know, as you're going through this stuff like, oh, I wonder if I should flip this, flip this magazine over them. And now is it subscription based today, totally free for them and advertising supported? How's that work?
[00:15:36] Speaker B: Yep, that's exactly right. Okay, so we pretty much are advertisers supported the thing that we launched two weeks ago, we did a Patreon thing. So being in podcasting, you probably know what that is, but I've had to kind of explain it to a lot of people. It's.
[00:15:53] Speaker A: Go ahead. My listeners may not know.
[00:15:55] Speaker B: Okay, so Patreon is basically, it's a content platform for content creators where there's a paywall. You gotta, you know, basically have a membership to join and you get, you know, this behind the scenes kind of content. And what we personally put on there is we put the, we put full length video interviews and then we also do what we call a club success profile, which is like real time data from clubs about like how much they spend on things, how they hire. It's very in depth. So we do these reports like once a month. About on these clubs, Chris Sears is actually one of the ones that we have done it on. And it's really interesting. This is like the top thing that when we pulled different club owners that they wanted, which was like data about other. What are, what are other clubs doing? How much are they spending on marketing, you know, what kind of sales strategy do they have, you know, how many employees do they have, how many coaches?
All that, all that data is, is on that Patreon platform that people pay. It's 15 bucks a month to have access to that.
[00:17:13] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:17:14] Speaker B: And then we do, you know, we do some community kind of stuff where they can talk to each other and discussion questions, things like that too.
[00:17:24] Speaker A: Shoot. I had a question for you. Oh. When you think about data, because you kind of mentioned some things that, that clicked and made me think, you know, of the world of data. How many this, how many that, how many the other do you have?
Do you guys have a relationship with any data companies or do you have a place where you're able to pull data or scrape data to, to provide better insight for your readers?
[00:17:44] Speaker B: Yeah, it's. It's really difficult.
[00:17:46] Speaker A: That's what I'm finding.
[00:17:48] Speaker B: Yep. There aren't really many companies that have that. So when we first started, we thought it would be easy enough to get a list of folks that we could send the magazine to.
Little did we know that it was going to be way harder than we thought.
And so, yeah, we have basically compiled our list over the years. We launched technically in 2023. August of 23 was our first article published.
But before that, we had spent time kind of building this list.
It's now up to about 12,000 people that are receiving it that are on our list, our subscriber list.
[00:18:32] Speaker A: And that's pretty awesome, by the way. Congrats on that.
[00:18:35] Speaker B: Thank you. I appreciate that.
It's, you know, there's, there's lots of, like I said, lots of different types of people on there, but I have not really found a good place to get all that data in one place. The closest thing that I can say would be something like dealing with one of the court management, slash, software folks like, so, like facility allies. When we work with Court Reserve, we worked with them before, things like that. They have, they work with a ton of clubs at a time.
[00:19:13] Speaker A: Yeah. Pickle plays got a lot of that data.
[00:19:15] Speaker B: Yeah. So, you know, obviously we, we would, we like them as advertisers.
[00:19:21] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:22] Speaker B: They're exactly what our clients are looking for, our readers are looking for. So, yeah, that's that's not a great answer to question, but.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: No, actually, I was hoping for more, but it's exactly kind of what I expected. It's what we've run into as well.
It's still hard to find because for being 50 years old or 60 years old now, we're still such a new.
Still such a new niche, almost feeling sport, because. Okay, yeah, so there's whatever between 4 and 40 million. Again, speaking of the data, who knows, right? You know, playing pickleball right now, but no one's really been capturing that data this whole time.
[00:20:03] Speaker B: Right.
[00:20:03] Speaker A: So it's tough to get a hold of.
[00:20:05] Speaker B: It is. Yeah.
[00:20:06] Speaker A: What's your. What's your biggest goal over there at Pickleball Club Mag? What? Like, you know, you hit. You hit this certain milestone and go, dang, we did it, babe. Like, what's. What's that look like?
[00:20:17] Speaker B: Good question.
I would probably say brother instead of babe. My. My brother and I were the ones who.
[00:20:24] Speaker A: No problem. I was just taking a wild guess. I had no idea.
[00:20:29] Speaker B: Yeah, so my brother Brady and I were the ones who started.
[00:20:32] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:20:33] Speaker B: We would probably answer that question by saying that if we feel like we hit a point where when we call a club and we say, hey, we. We're writing for Pickleball Club Mag and they already know who we are, that would be a really big milestone for us right now. That's few and far between. You know, we're calling people and they're like, oh, I've never heard of you. You know, whatever, and.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: Or they probably think you're Pickleball magazine too, don't they?
[00:21:05] Speaker B: They could. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Some of them do.
[00:21:09] Speaker A: Also. Also not popular. Yeah, because Pickleball magazine's been around a long time, and it's also not popular. And it should be, but it's not. Yeah. Okay, interesting.
[00:21:17] Speaker B: But it's also a niche thing. So it's, you know, if. If our niche thing, the business of pickleball and our platforms are known by the industry, by people that we call. I think that would be a big milestone for us.
[00:21:33] Speaker A: Wow.
I have a couple more questions for you, if that's cool.
Yeah, I would love to hear. Do you have, like, a Pickleball walk on song?
[00:21:44] Speaker B: Oh, man, I don't have one now, but if I had to pick one, maybe some Credence Clearwater Revival.
[00:21:53] Speaker A: Oh, a little ccr. All right.
[00:21:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:57] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:21:58] Speaker B: Really, really nice.
[00:22:00] Speaker A: Okay, interesting. How about to, like, if you got to get yourself psyched up for a tournament, do you have. Do you have a groove you like to listen to any particular band that you're, like, cranking.
[00:22:11] Speaker B: I'm nothing super particular. I do like.
[00:22:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:16] Speaker B: I'm a big Chris Stapleton guy. I like. I like his music, but is that. Not exactly.
[00:22:21] Speaker A: Is that country?
[00:22:23] Speaker B: It's. Yeah, it's.
[00:22:24] Speaker A: So it's probably pop country.
[00:22:25] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, sure. More pop country.
[00:22:28] Speaker A: I'd say I can listen to pop country, but I don't dig most normal country. That's just. I grew up in Kansas. I should like it. All my friends and family do. I don't.
[00:22:36] Speaker B: Well, growing up in Georgia, there's a lot of country. I don't like that. A lot of people around here that. They really like it. Chris Stapleton's pretty different, though.
[00:22:47] Speaker A: Maybe a lot of people don't know that Atlanta is a huge. Like a Nashville, huge music scene. You got some good stuff down there.
[00:22:56] Speaker B: You do? Yeah, it's. It's mad. Yeah.
[00:22:59] Speaker A: Huh? That's awesome. What's your favorite shot in pickleball?
[00:23:04] Speaker B: Favorite hit around the pin. Gotta be. Yeah, like that. I mean, you. You.
[00:23:10] Speaker A: It's so satisfying sliding around the post and whipping that thing onto their court and feeling pretty good about it.
[00:23:15] Speaker B: Yeah, it's. I mean, it's a winner so many times.
[00:23:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:19] Speaker B: You feel. You feel good about. If you get one of those in.
[00:23:22] Speaker A: Yeah. My cheap answer is, anyone that wins the rally for me. But my. My true answer is, you know, I think I like that scorpion. When you're squatting at the net and that paddle's above your head, and you just. It's. It's. It's net high and bam. Smack it right back at him.
I kind of like that shot.
[00:23:41] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good one.
[00:23:42] Speaker A: They're all fun, though. It's a fun game.
[00:23:44] Speaker B: It's a very fun game. It's very.
It's. It's fun because you can invite anybody out to play.
[00:23:53] Speaker A: Yep. Right.
[00:23:54] Speaker B: And they're gonna have fun immediately.
[00:23:56] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:23:57] Speaker B: Which is just very unique. I love that about pickleball.
[00:24:00] Speaker A: It's a mainstream word today. I heard it at lunch.
Several elderly ladies were sitting behind me, and they were like, our friend so and so is into pickleball, and she's lost, like, ten pounds, and they're chatting about pickleball, and I'm like, yeah. Like, it used to be what we called the fun game with the funny name, but now it's just a fun game because it's becoming a normal word now. So people don't think of pickleball as often as a funny name anymore.
[00:24:24] Speaker B: That's Right. Ironically, I don't like pickles. I don't like to eat pickles. And my wife makes fun of me because I started a business that has pickle in there.
[00:24:34] Speaker A: Yeah, the name Pickle in it. Right. Well, I guess that happens.
I played a lot in Augusta.
[00:24:41] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:24:42] Speaker A: There's some really fun people down there and I had a client there. So I spent, you know, a week there, a week there, a week there. Every time I travel, spend another week there and I got to know them pretty well. And man, that's a great scene down. I mean it's, no, not close to your home, but, but Georgia's got some really good pickleball going on.
[00:24:59] Speaker B: Yeah, they do. That's where my sister in law's from, Augusta.
[00:25:02] Speaker A: Very cool.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: So I have some connections down there. We'll I visit down there some.
[00:25:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:09] Speaker B: You know, hopefully would love to go to the Masters. I keep applying, haven't gotten there yet.
[00:25:16] Speaker A: I, I, I didn't know that it's as high security as it is super high security. And I, I didn't expect, you know, to drive all around everywhere, but I kind of wanted to like drive up and see the clubhouse. So I, I pulled onto the property and you know, within 20ft there's a guard gate and they're like, turn around. I mean they wouldn't even like, what are you doing here? They were just like, turn around. I must not have had the magic thing on the, on the mirror or whatever it was that whatever I had on gave away that I was in a rental and I was not from town, from around town. So they sent me packing.
But yeah, anyway, back to pickleball. Where do you think since you, since you released a business magazine and I won't restrict you to clubs, I want to, I want to tap your brain as deep as I can here. Where do you think the next big, big opportunity is in pickle ball?
[00:26:03] Speaker B: That's a good question.
I guess. Depends on what you mean by opportunity. The.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: Well, if you're going to start a business from scratch or, or if you're going to disrupt something that's already in pickle ball, like what would those things be?
[00:26:18] Speaker B: I do think that there's, there's probably an opportunity for clubs of smaller size that are, are in, in more iterations, more locations.
So for instance, there's not an indoor pickleball club within, I think the closest one is maybe 20, 25 miles away from me. And so, and I'm, we live in a very highly populated area, so I think that's a Huge missed opportunity. I think there could be. There could be lots of smaller clubs that just focus on pickleball. There may be six courts indoors, you know, down, down in the south during the summer, no one's playing outside unless it's the morning or evening. Right. So it's.
I think there's an opportunity there for, for smaller clubs in, in highly populated areas. Doesn't have to be this massive facility, you know, inside of a shopping, you know, center or something like that. I think that would be really cool. And, you know, I think people could do really well doing that if they didn't have a lot of overhead.
[00:27:27] Speaker A: Do you have any Picklers near you yet?
[00:27:29] Speaker B: No.
[00:27:30] Speaker A: They'll be there. They're opening like 500 locations nationwide. So I was just curious. Yeah, we just had two grand openings in the last two months here in Indiana. And one of them is where I have this tournament at the March 1st and 2nd dates. So 19 fully dedicated courts. Pure pickleball. Should be awesome.
[00:27:47] Speaker B: Yeah, that sounds great.
[00:27:49] Speaker A: So I have another question, and I'm going to use. Go back to the indie pickleball club and the Indianapolis Pickleball Club. Kind of weird thing. So indie pickleball club being again, just a group of people. Right. Let's forget that they kind of home out of a facility because they didn't for the first six or seven years.
Do you see this? Maybe way too early, but do you see the potential for some of those clubs to like, merge and become a real, you know, like a real large entity and a real financially viable, you know, force to reckon with?
Because there's a club for this town and a club like where I live. Right. Every town's got their club. And I get. While that small community might be still important to have, you know, maybe the Anderson Pickleball Club never disappears or the Madison County Pickleball association never disappears. But I'm kind of wondering, do you see that? Do you see anything at the grassroots level for an opportunity from a business perspective?
[00:28:46] Speaker B: Yes, I do. So similar to what happened with Chris at Indianapolis Pickleball Club, where he, where he started earlier, he was just part of that, Right?
[00:28:57] Speaker A: Right.
[00:28:58] Speaker B: Non profit.
[00:28:59] Speaker A: Yep. Right.
[00:29:01] Speaker B: Similar to that. There was one club that I talked to in Miami, very similar story.
They, they kind of just had a group of people. They started like a. A group chat, basically, which is similar to what Chris did. There was just a group chat. There ended up being a thousand people, something like that on these group chats. And it's like, clearly there's like a desire in that area. And so I think, yes, there's. There's some. Some opportunity there for.
For people who want to open clubs to go find those places that already exist. You know, there's. There's no reason to try to build something, a new community, when there's a community of a thousand people that want to play.
[00:29:47] Speaker A: Right.
[00:29:48] Speaker B: Might as well. Might as well capitalize on those. Those things that already exist.
[00:29:51] Speaker A: Tap into those.
Sort of. In the same vein, that's what Pickler is doing. They're finding buildings that already exist. Rather than building from scratch, they're moving into, like, a bunch of empty marsh buildings. And I don't know if you had marsh where you were, but, you know, like a Piggly Wiggly or a Kroger or whatever kind of grocery store you had, it was a grocery store chain.
So out here, wherever they go, if there's an empty marsh, very likely they're. They're looking at it. To turn it around and put a pickleball, you know, facility inside of it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. I like it.
[00:30:20] Speaker B: What?
[00:30:20] Speaker A: Have I not asked you that I should have, man?
[00:30:25] Speaker B: Nothing, really. I mean, I'm curious about, like, your show, actually, if you wouldn't mind telling me, like, tell me about, like. Like, you've said you had a couple of people on, but have you had club owners on that have been really interesting? Anybody I should talk to?
[00:30:41] Speaker A: Oh, great question.
Our pickleball podcast is called Sweet Lobs.
Anyone listening to this? If, again, if this ends up on the podcast, we record tonight. So I'm gonna tell my wife that I talked to you, and she might be like, let's just use that. I don't know. Or she might be like, I want to meet him. So we'll do another one. Um, but it's called Sweet Lobs, just in case you want to look it up. It's on Spotify and all the other, you know, Apple, all the other normals. Um, as I'm just kind of mentally going through the list in my head, Steve Cage, he's a possibility. He's the guy that I'm working on running this tournament for, who owns a facility that has four courts in it. He uses it to help fund the local humane society, which is pretty cool.
I mean, yeah, John Hurley. Oh, yeah, I would talk to John Hurley. He'd be very interesting. When I talked to. He's one of the owners of a place called 247 Dink.
And their. Their model is a technology model over a pickleball play model. So I don't want to give away too much of his stuff to you. But you'll. But you'll want to ask him about, like, think top golf with pickleball. So you. You can look at a screen and that screen might say, hit a ball on this part of the court, on the other side. So then you hit the ball and it gives you a score based on if you did it.
[00:32:00] Speaker B: Right.
[00:32:00] Speaker A: Wrong, whatever.
He'd be good.
You know, Rick Woodskin would probably be a good guy to talk to. He's that. He's that senior pro that runs the national pickleball league. But he also has multiple facilities he's involved in. He has his own facilities and then he's involved with third shot sports.
Third shot. I think that's what they're called. Not Mark Renison's Canadian company, third shot. But these guys are people that are building pickleball courts indoors. They started in, I want to say Denver. Anyway, they're opening a place up here in Indianapolis as well. And I could connect you to any of those if you need me to.
[00:32:38] Speaker B: Happily, I'll look them up.
[00:32:40] Speaker A: Yeah, those are the first ones that come to mind around here. But if I think of anyone else, I'll certainly connect you.
[00:32:46] Speaker B: Well, if there's ever any interesting club owners or operators or. Or people that you know are. Are in the business of running a facility.
[00:32:56] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:32:57] Speaker B: I would love to talk to them.
[00:32:58] Speaker A: So that's definitely John. It's definitely Rick. It's definitely Steve. Like, those three for sure are. Like I said, if I think of anyone else, I will. John will be the interesting one for you because his model is different.
[00:33:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:33:12] Speaker B: I'm visiting.
First weekend in March, I'm visiting a place called 247 Pickleball Club. I believe it's in the middle of South Carolina.
[00:33:23] Speaker A: Oh.
[00:33:24] Speaker B: Model is not necessarily like topgolf, but their model is technology based in that is there's nobody manning the facility.
[00:33:35] Speaker A: Yeah. Key fob into her or whatever.
[00:33:37] Speaker B: In and out.
[00:33:38] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:33:38] Speaker B: That they have people constantly in there.
[00:33:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:33:42] Speaker B: Beyond.
[00:33:43] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:33:43] Speaker B: And they haven't had any sort of security issues.
So anyway, I'm really interested to check that out.
[00:33:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:33:50] Speaker B: See what they have going on and see if that's a legitimate form of.
[00:33:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:33:56] Speaker B: You know, pickleball or. I don't know.
[00:33:58] Speaker A: We've had one here for about three to four years at this point called Go west. And it's the same thing. It's. It's only a couple chords, but, you know, you reserve it online. When you reserve it, it tells your key fob. You're allowed to get in at that point in time. You can't get in otherwise, boom, you pop in, boom, you pop out. Everything's on camera. No problems with security. Like you said, nobody's there managing it.
[00:34:21] Speaker B: That's interesting.
[00:34:21] Speaker A: I mean, you know, that might work. It's certainly labor costs are suddenly expensive so that if you can cut labor costs, that's a pretty smart business idea.
[00:34:29] Speaker B: Yeah, very, very true, very true.
Well, let me ask you one more question.
[00:34:34] Speaker A: Hit me.
[00:34:35] Speaker B: Who would be like your dream guest on your podcast?
[00:34:39] Speaker A: Funny thing is it was probably Zane. I. He's such a great guy, but. So let's say I've checked that box. Who else would I want on here?
Probably someone like Annalee. I, I'd love to tap her brain and see, you know, she's an animal on the court. I think she's got some really great understanding of the game and strategy. I would like to see what her business mind is for as young as she is. I have a feeling she might have a pretty good business mind. But I don't really hear anyone asking her those types of questions.
But I'd love to hear what, you know, I'd love to hear what the, what the, you know, Generation Z thinks, you know, is the next big thing in pickleball. Because I don't, I can't think like her. Right. I don't think like an 18 year old or whatever age she is.
[00:35:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, very true. Yeah, she would be good.
You know, like I said, I. Not hugely involved in the pro game, but there are certain people, like you said, I think they would probably have a handle on the sport as a whole. Yeah, I think that would be, that could be really influential. One of the things I've, I've wondered and I've, I've been asking people about when I interview them about their club is I always ask do you have higher level players playing here? And you know, they're pretty quick to mention who plays there. Right?
[00:36:04] Speaker A: Sure. It's good marketing and you want those people there because they attract other people.
[00:36:10] Speaker B: That's kind of what I was wondering about.
[00:36:12] Speaker A: No question.
[00:36:13] Speaker B: That a, Is that a strategy maybe?
[00:36:15] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:36:16] Speaker B: To go and get somebody like that and you know, maybe even build it around, you know, where someone lives or I don't know, like that. That could be a. Especially with some of these teams that are forming or I heard about a club that's opening up specifically to target collegiate teams.
[00:36:38] Speaker A: Absolutely smart.
[00:36:39] Speaker B: You know, those people will be well known names, you know, eventually.
So things like that. I Think I think that side of things for that could be a connection from the club side to the pro game. That I think would be really interesting.
You know, you, of course people would want to come see someone who they see on tv.
You know that that's an automatic draw.
[00:37:04] Speaker A: Yeah. I think there's, you know, this is a great question because from a business perspective, a. Like I said, I'd like to tap Anna Lee, but there are some other ones. For instance, Ken Herman, I think is a really brilliant businessman and he runs the app.
Ray J, who's like the marketing/sales VP, President, Director, whatever for Pro XR.
They also bought Pickle or they bought a controlling interest. I believe in Paddle Tech and Onyx. I think maybe not Onyx. I kind of remember who it was anyway. I think those kind of guys would be sharp. Some of those guys leading the way. Maybe Tom Dundon. I'm not a Connor Pardo fan who runs the ppa.
I mean, I think he's sharp, I think he's doing some good things, but it's just not my. Not my flavor, if you will.
[00:37:53] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:37:54] Speaker A: But he would probably be a really good guest. You know what I'm saying?
[00:37:57] Speaker B: Yeah, that's true.
[00:37:59] Speaker A: I wouldn't mind having. Just so from the opposite perspective, I wouldn't mind having like the president of the USAP or maybe the entire board on so I could just grill them with questions about what they're doing to make things better. Yeah, that'd be kind of fun.
How about you? Who's your. Who's your, like, preferred guest? If you could pick anyone right now.
[00:38:15] Speaker B: Man, I'd love to. I'd love to. To interview.
I don't know who this person is, but I'd love to interview the CEO of Chicken and Pickle. That would be a fascinating one.
[00:38:28] Speaker A: We're going to have them on as a guest in the next month or so. And it's. Her name is Lindsay and she basically is in charge of like marketing and stuff for all the chicken pickles. She's not the CEO, but she's one of the top dogs.
[00:38:40] Speaker B: I may have talked to Lindsay in the past.
[00:38:41] Speaker A: Yeah, she's great articles on them.
[00:38:44] Speaker B: But yeah, everyone I talk to there is very cool.
[00:38:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:48] Speaker B: So I, I like their vibe and I think that would be a. That would be a really interesting conversation. Yeah, they see the sport differently than a lot of people do because they.
[00:38:59] Speaker A: Have like the food element and they were trailblazer.
Nobody was doing what they did when they first came out and they got all the press and it was really smart. And they've got like 14 locations now, so. Yeah, my wife actually just signed them to a deal with Pickle Play. So they're now using Pickle Play at all their locations.
[00:39:18] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:39:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it's really cool what they're doing. And I don't know if you've been to a chicken and Pickle because they're not really that far east yet.
But their food is ridiculous. Like, their chicken is solid.
I know you don't like pickles, but they actually brine it in pickle juice for a day before they cook it.
[00:39:37] Speaker B: Well, I like. We like Chick Fil A. Which.
[00:39:39] Speaker A: Okay. Okay. Yeah, same thing. Oh, yeah, There you go. So I'll.
[00:39:42] Speaker B: I'll eat Chick Fil A like.
[00:39:43] Speaker A: Okay, that's fair. All right.
[00:39:47] Speaker B: Are you. Are you going into any events this year?
[00:39:51] Speaker A: Yeah, I will not whenever possible. I'm not going to miss Beer City. Beer City Open is amazing. It's a PPA MLP event.
It's considered the mid season MLP tournament. And it's in, you know, Beer City, Michigan, which is Grand Rapids, Michigan. Andrea Riminzi. Coop. Andrea Coop, or AKA just Coop, runs it along with another dude. And it's a. It's just a party. It's phenomenal. There were 1100 players last year. It was a week long.
You get to, you know, run into everybody. You see all the pros. It's just cool. Cool event. So that one for sure. Yes.
Pickle Palooza. I'm interested in seeing what that's like once. I missed it this last year when they started it back up. So maybe I'll go this year to that and then I'll hit one or two PPA events for sure. One or two App events for sure. Like I did Miami last year in App, and I actually was part of the team that rolled out the nets. I mean, the courts, we. It wasn't pick a roll. It was the other brand.
But yeah, we rolled out and built the nets in the entire facility. We built like 24 or 26 courts or something crazy like that. It was fun. That was a cool experience for me. That's kind of what I meant earlier when I'm like, I'm trying to stay involved in all these different things. No one's going to hire me again to build courts. I didn't do a bad job. It wasn't. I didn't own it. I just was part of the team. But I want to do that. Like, I want to experience it once so I can say I'VE done it.
I want that extra knowledge. So if there's anything like that, I'll try and weasel my way into something like that. This year, we did some really cool stuff. This is a little bit of a tangent, but we were written up in Pickleball magazine, and it's probably almost seven years ago at this point.
We think. We don't know. We were the first ever to do what people now call glow in the dark pickleball.
It's semantics, but glow in the dark is that stuff that when you put it under a light and turn off the lights, it glows.
But glow in the dark pickleball is really black lights with a bunch of neon colors that rock in the black lights.
And that's really what everyone's talking about when they say glow in the dark pickleball. And we did a black light event at our church, like, literally seven years ago. And so cool. And we wrote about it on Facebook, and Pickleball magazine reached out to us. They were like, we've never heard of this before, and can we interview you? And so they interviewed us and wrote up a whole article on it. And, like, I like that kind of stuff. I like to figure out what's next. We created a pickleball card game, but not like these games you see on advertised these days. Our card game is played on the pickleball court with your paddle and ball. So maybe you're. What's a really good example.
So Dave Weinbach, right? He's a senior pro. Well, we created a card called the Dave Wind Back. Well, it's a superpower. You had any. Any point in time during the rally or during one game. You could use your superpower one time. So if you didn't like the way a rally ended, you could wind back the rally and play it over, but you can only do it once. So, like, we. We like to get creative that way and come up with other stuff. We've only played a couple of times because it was weird and it really wasn't.
I don't know. It just didn't catch on, which is fine with me. But, like, we like that kind of stuff. So I'm always looking for the next cool, fun, tricky, interesting way to teach pickleball or to test pickleball or to play pickleball or.
I'm not bored with the regular game to 11, though. I love the heck out of it. I just like to also explore.
[00:43:10] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:43:11] Speaker A: So if I hear someone doing something cool in Canada, I'm gonna be like, hey, can I Come up there, eh?
So, yeah.
[00:43:18] Speaker B: For some Tim Hortons. Yeah.
[00:43:20] Speaker A: Yeah, right. No, spoken by a man who knows Canada very well.
[00:43:26] Speaker B: The. The event that I'm. I'm looking at is picklecon.
[00:43:32] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:43:33] Speaker B: They're offering a.
A little bit more for the owners this year, a little bit more on the business side.
[00:43:39] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:43:40] Speaker B: And so that's going to be interesting.
[00:43:42] Speaker A: Was that. That was, I think, in Miami last year at the same time as the tournament I was at.
[00:43:46] Speaker B: That. That one's different. That one's called.
[00:43:49] Speaker A: There was. You're right. There was one, though, was picklecon in Kansas City.
[00:43:52] Speaker B: Kansas City, yeah.
[00:43:53] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah, that's what I think of a Spicapalooza, because that was what it was first called. But yes, Pickle Con. That's the one I want to go to.
[00:43:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that. Picklecon's cool. I went last year. We got. We got some good interviews there.
But I think this year, like, I think after some feedback, they are probably gonna do a little bit more specific things for the industry, which will be kind of fun.
[00:44:19] Speaker A: Okay, you're right. I think the one we went to was like, the World Racket something. Yeah, yeah. That one in Miami.
[00:44:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:44:29] Speaker A: Picklecon's the one I was thinking of. That would be a fun one to go to, I think.
[00:44:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:44:34] Speaker A: Huh. Man, you've been awesome to talk to.
[00:44:38] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I appreciate talking to you, Kevin. I, you know, I appreciate your insights and things. I'll probably email you if I have, you know, people that I run into. That would be a good connection.
[00:44:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I'll do the same. When I run into club owners, I'll ask them if it's okay to connect you, and I'm sure they won't mind. I'll turn them on automatically to your website and the free magazines. They might as well be accessing that already.
[00:44:58] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
[00:44:59] Speaker A: And cool. Well, so I'm just going to keep this official in case we really do use this. At the end of every podcast, we always say that we're ahead of the game. Tell your friends that and tell them that you are, too. And then we close out with this music.
