In Search Of Excellence - Ben Johns: The Greatest Pickleball Player Of All Time | E83

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

Welcome to another episode of In Search of Excellence! Our amazing guest is Ben Johns, the greatest pickleball player of all time. He has been the No.1 player in the world in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles for most of the last 3 years.On the business side, Ben is a co-founder of Pickleball Getaways, a vacation travel company that arranges pickleball vacations to Mexico, Portugal, Croatia, and other sunny locations. He is also the co-founder of Pickleball 360, an online instructional video subscription service that gives lessons on how to become a better pickleball player. 00:00 IntroductionWho is Ben Johns? 01:59 Ben’s backgroundSupportive, inspiring parents and 6 siblingsEncouraged to follow their own passion 04:15 Homeschooling of 7 kidsMom used online resources and textbooksKids worked at their own pacePersonal responsibilitySocial aspects of homeschoolingThey pursued their interests, and social stuff happened naturally 08:59 Sports Ben played as a kidPlayed baseball, tennis, table tennis, golfVery eye-hand oriented sports 10:32 Ben's college experienceSwitched majors from Business to Material Science and EngineeringHow Innovators Think course by Professor Mark WellmanAdvice to people who don’t know what they want to doExpose yourself to different things, experiment, research 17:24 Developing and innovating a new pickleball racketGenuinely interested in how to make paddles betterBeing genuine creates an opportunity in almost any area 19:27 Optimism and fear of failureOptimism is important, but also confidence and work ethicsDo your utmost and put 100% of your effortIf you fail, learn from it 22:56 Ben’s first business venturePickleball had the stigma of an old person's sportWanted to make it more exciting 24:04 What is pickleball?A combination of tennis and ping-pong on a badminton-sized courtVery easy to learn and very easy to play 27:19 The professional pickleballThe history of pickleball associationsThe TPA and APPThe merging of 2 leagues 32:25 The ownership and worth of pickleball teamsThe worth of major pickleball teamsTeams are part of venture capital groupsWho are the owners? 35:44 How do teams make money?A revenue modelThe vision is to make it like an NBA NFL type of leagueNo major TV contract but a rapidly growing fan basePickleball has fanatically engaged fans - a golden nugget for any investor 40:39 Pickleball statisticsIts popularity is growing among different groupsIt has a great social component 45:43 The start of Ben’s professional careerFirst professional tournament – US Open in 2016Won the US Open in 2017Making money and covering expensesSponsors:Sandee | Bliss: BeachesWant to Connect? Reach out to us online!Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

I mean, there's a ton of things that make pickleball what it is. The first thing I'd say is it is extremely easy to play it as a casual player, to be somebody that is not, you know, super invested in playing the sport regularly. And of course, there's a ton of those people too that get obsessed with it and do play it extremely regularly, like every day, regularly. But you can, you know, not play for months, come back to it and just be like, oh yeah, I can pick this up. I was just genuinely interested in something.

And I feel like whenever you're genuinely interested in something, if you pursue it, you are naturally going to find some good things because you're so genuine about it. Welcome to In Search of Excellence, where we meet entrepreneurs, CEOs, entertainers, athletes, motivational speakers, and trailblazers of excellence with incredible stories from all walks of life. My name is Randall Kaplan. I'm a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and a host of In Search of Excellence, which I started to motivate and inspire us to achieve excellence in all areas of our lives. My guest today is Ben Johns. Ben is considered to be the greatest pickleball player of all time.

He has been the number one player in the world in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles for most of the last three years. His dominance includes a 108-match winning streak in singles, over 80 PPA titles, 15 of which were triple crowns, the most of any male pickleball player in the history of the sport, which happens when a player wins singles, men's doubles, male pickleball player in the history of the sport, which happens when a player wins singles, men's doubles, and mixed doubles all in the same tournament. And he is also the first pickleball player to win 100 tournaments.

On the business side, Ben is a co-founder of Pickleball Getaways, a vacation travel company that arranges pickleball vacations to Mexico, Portugal, Croatia, and other sunny locations. And he is also the co-founder of Pickleball360, an online instructional video subscription service that gives lessons on how to become a better pickleball player. Ben, welcome to In Search of Excellence. Thanks for being here. Thanks a lot for having me. Quite the intro. So you were born and raised in Laytonsville, Maryland, a small town, which as of the 2020

sentence has a whopping population of 572 people. Your dad, Mark, is a software engineer and owns his own business. And your mom, Heather, is a primary school teacher. You're the middle of seven children, and there are 23 years separating your youngest and all the siblings. Can you tell us about the influence your parents had and your siblings had on you, as well as what it was like being homeschooled until you went to college? Yeah, sure. Family was definitely pretty instrumental in pretty much everything I've done, really. My mom homeschooled, yeah, all the kids up through high school, which obviously homeschooling

six kids through high school is no easy feat. So I call her a saint. She's incredible. And my dad, as a software developer, engineer, designer, after he quit his job when I was like seven or eight, he was just doing his own thing, entrepreneur style from there on out, basically. So he was always at home. So basically, we always had two parents around and we were at home a lot.

So we were definitely a very tight knit family. And I think they were definitely able to help guide us along, you know, the good paths and support us in whatever the kids wanted to do because they were around so much and were pretty, pretty hands-on. So I'd say, you know, they were absolutely incredible. And what I always emphasize with them is they never pushed their kids to, to do any, anything in particular. It was more just like, Hey, let's find out what you like, what you enjoy. And if you want to do it, we'll support you in whatever you do. Um, so like my older brother played pro tennis, they supported him with that. Uh, my younger sister's a concert

pianist. She's in a grad school for that now. Um, so really whenever we had a passion for, they were always there for. And mine turned out to be a little bit later in life with Pickleball, but they were happy to support the variety of things I did as a kid. I was much more into doing a lot of different things than any one thing very much. But yeah, you really can't emphasize enough how much they inspired all their kids

to be good at whatever it is that they were doing. You know, if you're going to do something, do it well, was their philosophy and kind of everything they did to enable that. I've always wondered this. For kids that are homeschooled, how does the parent or parents or mom and dad know the lesson plan in order to keep up with the other kids at school are learning? And the second part of that question is, it's very hard for someone in high school to

be in a classroom of someone in kindergarten, for example. That's why I think we have first grade, second grade, third grade through high school. So how does that work? Are you all in the same room? Is she giving a lesson plan? Where are you getting that from? And how do you know you're keeping even or on track with those in public or private school? Uh, yeah, there were, um, definitely a lot of online resources. And I think my mom was really good about picking and choosing between online resources and textbooks and, you know, all the resources that are out there, which are really quite incredible. There's a ton of stuff. And what I really liked about homeschooling is within the classroom, you know, you're on a very, um,

defined track of, you know, the speed of how much you're progressing in any given subject. And with homeschooling, you don't really have to do that because you're all basically having your own personal track. It's because you're not the same age as anybody else around you. You're on your own track. And therefore, you can slow down or speed up on any given thing that you're doing. Like, for instance, when I was a freshman, I had done all the math that would be required in all of high school. So my mom had me years ahead in mathematics. But if any one of us needed to slow down on something or we weren't enjoying something as much yet and she wanted to kind of wait for us to develop into it, then she could do that. She had kind of the liberty to do that. So she wasn't really pinned down by any predefined like, hey, this is how we do things. It was more just kind of up to her.

And yeah, there was not really an official classroom. I think more than almost anything else, I think my parents emphasize being independent. And it seemed that at least to me in hindsight, by the time we were a freshman in high school or anything, she didn't really need to be super hands-on with anything. She's like, here's the work you got to do, get it done on your own time. You don't need to be in the room. You can do it outside if you want. I don't care. Just get it done. I think they emphasize personal responsibility enough to where none of us were shirking that responsibility. We understood it was important and we would put it on upon ourselves to actually get it done and

get it done well. Um, so I, I really liked that part of it. It emphasized, uh, some personal responsibility to where when you got to college, it was like, Oh, I've already done this before. This is the same thing. Um, it definitely emphasized independence and, uh, just kind of taking care of things yourself and doing them well. When you're homeschooled, how do you keep up in the social aspect where you don't have a lot of friends around? I think one of the great experiences of going to school is meeting people. You make lifelong friends at every step of the way. I still have one friend from kindergarten, a couple from second and third grade, eighth grade, high school, et cetera, et cetera. So were you around kids your own age and how did you interact and how did you make up for

the lack of daily social camaraderie with kids your own age? Yeah, I definitely feel like that's something that's often kind of purported about homeschooling and you can certainly do a number of different ways. And I feel like some probably do miss out on that for us personally. One helps being in a big family or around, you know, five other, other kids all the time. And, uh, I think it's great to be around both older and younger kids, not just kids your own age, because it exemplifies a lot of things that are very productive. Uh, but of course, actual kind of social exposure outside the family. Uh, most of us, at least the boys played a ton of sports. So sports were kind of one of the main outlets and the girls did any number of different things. There's tons of activities you can do

outside of, you know, school that exposes you to the kids. I mean, every day, if you want, it can be the same thing if you want that level of social exposure. Um, so, so that was definitely one thing. And yeah, I'd say I never really thought about it that much as a kid, looking back on it, I was very happy with the amount of time we did kind of spend socially, just because I felt like we also had much more time to spend on pursuing actual kind of things that we wanted to enjoy, which, you know, some would say as a kid, it's more important, important to enjoy social things than, you know, be great at something. But I'd say you can certainly do both. And I'd lean more towards, you know, pursue something and get really good at it or multiple things if you want.

And the social stuff will just kind of happen naturally. But I felt like that's kind of what most of us did. And I certainly appreciated the opportunity to spend more time on the things I wanted to spend on. You were very active a kid. You played a lot of sports. Can you tell us what your hobbies were and go through them and how they prepared you for your future incredible pickleball career? Yeah, I was definitely a kid that wanted variety so i played a lot of things um i've played definitely every sport with a racket uh but growing up i pretty much did what my older

brother did he was six years older so whatever he played i played um he we were kind of a baseball family initially so i played baseball from the ages of like 6 to 16 but i was swinging bats and throwing balls uh as soon as I could walk, basically. Um, so that was probably the first one. Uh, my brother found tennis when he was 14. So I was seven, almost eight. Um, and I played, you know, as much as he did and he kind of got obsessed with it. So, uh, early on, I was playing a ton of tennis as well. Uh, at the same time, we, uh, we like table tennis or ping pong, as we like to call it. My dad got us a table in the basement, so we spent a ton of time on that, almost equally with tennis.

So I'd say those two were the first racket sports we were exposed to. And then more so for myself and less so my brother, I played a decent amount of golf as a kid too, which I really enjoyed. So those, I'd say, were the four kind of primary sports that I really got into. And at various times, more one or a couple were more emphasized than others. Each of which requires tremendous hand-eye coordination. If you're going to be good at something. For sure.

They were very eye hand oriented, which is all the base guy, like I hand coordination sports a lot. So let those were my, so let's get to college. You went to university of Maryland, Terrapins and college park. Tell us about how you switched majors and why you switched majors. And from there, let's talk about one class that you took and the huge influence it's had and has had on your life. Sure. Yeah, that's a good question. Um, so I spent my freshman year in the business school, which is kind of purported to be one of the best things about the university of Maryland is their business school. But kind of what I realized a little bit into it is it's not

that any of my classes were bad. It's not that I had distaste for anything that I was doing, but I felt like it was definitely emphasized in that school that it wasn't what you know, but who, you know? Um, and while I knew that was definitely true to a certain extent, I realized that in school I wanted to be learning the what's like, I wanted to know, you know, more things. Cause I was like, I'm already meeting a ton of great people in pickleball. I can go into business if I want without necessarily learning directly about like a business degree. Uh, not that, you know, I, I definitely respect people that get those degrees cause you can do a number of things with them, but I felt like I wanted something a little more concrete and, um, I guess engineering appealed to me in that it was

definitely very much about what you know, and, uh, you were learning some, some hard stuff and some, some very intellectually stimulating stuff that I would really struggle with. So I kind of wanted to struggle, I guess. And after that first year, I was like, I need something that really pushes me. And, um, uh, one class that really impacted me was, I remember as a, it was an honor seminar called how innovators think, uh, my professor was Mark Wellman. And there was a, a, a project in there called the personal creativity reflection, which was a number of things. But the gist of it that impacted me was I, for some reason in it was looking at other, other majors. And I came across an engineering that I didn't even know existed. It was called material science and engineering, which is not a typical engineering that, you know,

you don't, you think of like civil or mechanical or whatever. So I had no idea this even existed. And when I saw it, I definitely looked into it a lot more, which was part of that project. And I kind of realized like, hey, this is the one I've been looking for because I had looked at other other engineering. Even when I was going in as a freshman, I was like, none of these really seem to hit the right spot with me. Um, but seeing that one, which I didn't know was a thing, uh, I kind of did realize that that is what I did enjoy. Um, and kind of just from that project and that class, that was what made me, um, change majors along with kind of realizing that I wanted something a little more harder and finite. Isn't that amazing? We have one class with one professor

who can change the trajectory of our career and our life. I had one down core when I took econ as a sophomore in high school, which was a new class. And it just lit me up. I was entrepreneurial already. I had the gene, but part of that class was reading stories about other successful business people and how they created their companies. And I always thought, gosh, this is so great. This is something that I want to do. When you went into college, did you have a goal of,

hey, I'm going to go, you're in the business school. I want to go work on Wall Street. I want a marketing job. I think so many students, and I have an intern program each summer of 36 amazing students from around the country. It's a teaching internship. It's a 12-week program. And one of the issues that they're most concerned about in our program is they have tremendous anxiety about what they're going to do in their life. Some think they want to go into investment banking. We talk about it. I have founders of investment banks, CEOs come in. And after I talk to them about it and these leaders in the field talk about it, around a third of the third don't really want to go into it. And I think

around two thirds don't know what they want to do. Did you know what you wanted to do? And what's your advice to all the students out there? And not only a student, but a lot of people in the workforce, especially when they're in the first stages of their career, have the same anxiety. What's your advice to them when people really don't know what they want to do? Yeah, you know, that's a great question. Because I feel like numbers don't lie, right? There's a lot of people in that boat that don't really know what they want to do. And I was definitely one of those in business school. Like, I liked people. I liked business. I knew I would like to work for myself, start my own businesses, what that would translate to, like what I should be studying, what I should start with. I really didn't know where to start, what to do, what I really wanted to do. I knew none of those things. Um, and I'd say, you know, of course, classes certainly help you, um, in college, but I would say what helped me was getting a variety of things that didn't really apply to

whatever it was I was doing. Like basically I didn't pin myself down and year one to like, okay, I'm doing this and I'm all in on this. Cause if I didn't actually know what I wanted to do, I needed to expose myself to more things. Um, and of course, the more you expose yourself to the better of an idea you're going to get. Uh, and that's not just classes. I'd say, you know, expose yourself to hands-on things that, uh, impact you in, in some way that you're not used to, right? The more you can expose yourself to things you're not used to, the better it is. And that can be classes, that can be sports, that can be ventures. It can be people like it's, it's just so many things. Um, so meet people, take different classes, do different things, definitely get some hands-on experience in,

in many different facets of, you know, careers. Uh, I feel like in general, that's something colleges offer, but they don't really push on students is like, Hey, you know, i feel like in general that's something colleges offer but they don't really push on students is like hey you know let's do an apprenticeship with this career over here go talk to this professor he's in a unique field like you kind of have to take it on yourself in college like the resources are there but you have to go find them so i'd say definitely try to do that as somebody entering college and even for ones outside. I mean, if you don't like what you're doing, I mean, I'd say unless you're doing it for a very good reason, then experiment a little bit. There's certainly resources out there for

you to try new things and find something you like, if not love, at least like more than maybe what you do. So the best thing I can tell you is just expose yourself to a lot of things. beach in the world, more than 100,000 beaches in 212 countries. Sandy.com provides beach goers around the world with detailed, comprehensive, and easy-to-use information to help them plan their perfect beach getaway at home and abroad, and to make sure you're never disappointed by a beach visit again. Plan the perfect beach trip today by visiting sandy.com. That's www.sandee.com. The link is in our show notes. Stay sandy, my friends. So let's go back to your degree and switching your degree to material science. One of the reasons there was because you thought about developing an innovating new pickleball

racket. So were you clairvoyant at the time when you said, geez, this is going to be a huge sport and I really want to focus on I know it has grown fast, but I don't think anybody saw it being what it is today four or five years ago. What I'd really say is I had a genuine interest. That's really what pushed me into that. Not that I thought that material science engineering, as complex as it is, was really going to apply directly to paddle manufacturing, which is not the most complex thing,

but I did have a genuine interest in how paddles were made and how we could make them better. It just seemed very fun to me to design something for performance reasons, like a very high performance and a sport is one of the highest performance things you can do, right? The more you can kind of maximize performance, the better you're going to do in a sport. And that really appealed to me because the design to me was very limited and had a ton of room to be a lot better. And it still does. Um, so, so doing that still appeals to me very much. So as much as I'd like to say, I had a vision of what pickleball could be and that I was investing in the future. I really wasn't, I was just genuinely interested in something. And I feel like whenever you're genuinely interested in something, if you pursue it, you are naturally going to, you know, find some good things because you're so genuine

about it. And if you're opening yourself up to opportunity, you know, doors are going to open and good things are going to happen. Um, so yes, it's great to have a forward thinking, futuristic investing type of mind. Um, but I'd also say if you're genuine about something, you can make opportunity for yourself in, in almost any area, really just by being genuine and having a lot of go get it in this. Basically. You wrote a blog your freshman year in college. It was a webpage of sorts. You can still find it online where you said you're very optimistic about your future, even though you didn't know what you wanted to do. How important is having optimism in our future success? Um, yeah, I think optimism is, is definitely a good thing. Um, and I would caution people against false optimism. Uh, there's, there's a point to where it gets ridiculous. Of course you have to be a little bit of a realist as well. Um,

but it's almost more like, um, I like to think of it less as optimism and more confidence in yourself. If, if you know kind of it less as optimism and more confidence in yourself. If you know kind of the person you are, the things you're good at, your work ethic, and, you know, all the things that kind of make you who you are, there's always going to be room for you and opportunity for you out there if you go and get it, if you go and find it. So, yes, it's somewhat optimistic, but it's also a little bit more confidence in yourself. We can all find good things in ourselves that we're good at and we can emphasize. And if you focus on those things, you could call it optimistic instead of kind of looking at the bad things in yourself and the qualities we don't like. So yeah, I guess to some extent, you could call it optimism, but people could definitely probably do a better job of finding

the good in themselves and being confident and optimistic about those things. Most people, when they start companies or think about starting our company, fear failing. It's embarrassing. They don't want to be unsuccessful. It's bad mentally. If they have investors, the investors may not like it. How important is fear of failure in our future success? Yeah, it's definitely interesting because it's almost like two things fighting each other. Because to me, I'm like, I wouldn't be afraid of failing. Fear is never a good thing. But at the same time, you have to have a healthy respect for it because nobody wants to fail. You don't fail on purpose.

Let's put it that way. You are trying your utmost to make any venture you do't fail on purpose. Let's, let's put it that way. Uh, you are trying your utmost to, to make any venture you do not fail. So it almost feels tragic when you do anyway, right? You're like, I gave my all of this and I still failed. Right. But in that sense, I wouldn't fear it. I'd say absolutely do your utmost to not fail that make, you know, that's kind of making sure that you gave it your all and that you, you didn't leave anything on the table. Um, and then at the same time, when you do eventually fail, you have to kind of just back off and say, what's productive now?

Uh, what can I do now to make the most of the situation? And typically it's learning something from that, uh, from that experience. And I think my parents kind of instilled that in a way I didn't realize it until later, but they always had the highest expectations for, for any of us in whatever we pursued. It's like, you are able to, to be excellent at this. Therefore you should be. And we expect it of you. You need to be excellent at what you're doing. And then at the same time, if we ever fell short of that excellence, they'd be like, it's okay. It's all right. You don't need to be actually that excellent. We wanted you to put it in a hundred percent effort to begin with and know that you did. And then if you still can't, you still did the hard part, which is, you know,

putting a hundred percent in and now you can learn something from it. But it's not the end of the world if you don't actually achieve what you want to achieve. It's more important that you gave 100% in order to try to achieve that in the first place. So I liken that to striving not to fail, but at the same time, if you ever do fail, still learning a lot from it. You started a company in college called Sticktricks. TRX, I guess the I is left out of that one. What was that company? And again, you really had a clairvoyant instinct for the future of pickleball. Yeah, yeah, that was definitely more of a fun first venture than it was a real business. It was me dipping my toe in the water, but it was basically me and a group of friends within Pickleball that felt like Pickleball could be

more exciting than it was. I think our first tagline was, not your grandma's Pickleball, because it was still definitely the stigma was an old person's sport. And we're like, hey, we're young, we're cool. We can make this sport cool. We can make it more fun than it currently is, which is already very fun. But the stigma stigma around it we wanted to change uh so kind of the idea behind that was was putting on more of a show with pickleball you know doing trick shots and and making it more um spectator worthy i suppose you could say so whether that was particular events with the sick trick squad or just a style of how you you play pickleball and present pickleball to people it was it was less of a business it wasn't really for profit it was more for uh you know let's let's try to make pickleball and present pickleball to people. It was less of a business. It wasn't really for profit.

It was more for, you know, let's try to make pickleball cool. So let's talk about pickleball, and we'll start with its history. Pickleball was invented in 1965 on Bainbridge Island, Washington, by three friends at the summer home of Joel Pritchard, who has a neat little factoid, served as a Republican congressman from 1973 to 1985, and who, as the story goes, felt compelled to invent a new game to occupy their bored kids. His name comes from a pickle boat, which for those of you who don't know, and I didn't know before I did some research for our show today, is a hastily assembled rowing crew. And the name

was a nod to the new pedal sport they were cobbling together from parts of other sports, including badminton, tennis, and even wiffle ball. For our listeners and viewers out there who don't know, and I think everyone at this point has heard about pickleball, but a lot of people don't know exactly what it is and how to play. Can you explain what pickleball is as well as the rules of the game yeah you know it's definitely hard to be perfectly succinct with pickleball because it is a combination of another things but the easiest kind of one sentence thing i have for you and i'll get into it a little more is it's a combination of tennis and ping pong on a badminton size court

okay so it is technically the same size of badminton court. I think it's kind of in between tennis and table tennis with its attributes. Where I can describe it from there, I'd say some of its kind of sticking points are it's a racket sport that's very easy to learn and very easy to have fun on your first day playing it, which is one of the biggest attractions as opposed to something like tennis, which I think is just mechanically more difficult for people when they're first picking it up. So they're usually not going to have as much fun

the first day or even the first year that they're playing it. Improvement is definitely very easy. And kind of the mechanics of the game are such that you can do a lot of different things and still be successful. It doesn't come down to straight athleticism like a lot of sports do. Like, um, obviously if you're playing basketball

with somebody that can be more skilled, but if you're more athletic, it's, it's going to be tough. Basically the, the bar between athleticism and skill is much closer in pickleball than it is in sports where athleticism outweighs skill. Um, so that's definitely a big selling point for people. Uh, it's also just physically pretty easy to play you can play it physically at a at a high level and you know exert yourself extremely but you don't have to do that which is why it kind of makes it great for for kids and older people and that's kind of how it got its start basically is that it was kind of a sport for for everybody but i say it's you know it's not just old people and kids everybody and and really anybody which

is another great selling point which is the people you meet in pickleball are from so many varieties of life. It's like it's the most diverse sport I've ever played in terms of any demographic you want to say. It's got eight. It's got guys and girls. It's got people from all over. It's got them, you know, in different jobs. It's really the one unifying thing. The people playing pickleball don't really have anything in common, but they play pickleball, right? So that's why you're going to meet a bunch of interesting, diverse people. It's one of these sports where you really can't explain what it is on a podcast. I think people can go online. There's probably... You got to play it.

What's that? You got to play it. You do have to play it.. You play and then you understand. So, okay, let's talk about the professional sports of pickleball. I think around three, four or five years ago, there was a mad dash. Let's create a league. And we're going to be the first ones out there. But there were two people out there. There are two billionaires who are competing and fighting against each other. And there's a lot of confusion today about how many leagues there are, what the differences are. Can you tell us about the two leagues and clear up all this confusion for everybody? I'll try to make this succinct as well, but it's definitely a little more complex.

But this actually happened much more recently than people think. The advent of the PPA Tour was in 2020, beginning of 2020. That was their first tour season. What is DPA? What does it stand for? Pro Pickleball Association. So they wanted to be the pro tour of pickleball, basically. There was also the APP tour launched at the exact same time,

which is a third organization, different from the one you mentioned. And I'll get to them later, but they were kind of the other pro tour at that time in 2020. The billionaires came into it in 2021. The first major league pickleball event was held in, I want to say October of 2021. So a year and a half really after the tour had even started. And similarly, the billionaire that acquired the ppa tour also got into it in late 2021 so it was more late 2021 things really

started happening um in the beginning of 2022 the ppa tour along with its new owner um basically started signing the top pro players to long exclusive contracts, like three-year contracts with stipulations that they play PPA Tour events and any events outside the tour you need permission for. And Major League Pickleball was more a team-style event. It wasn't really a tour event. It was more like, let's put together teams and make this an entertainment spectator-based sport rather than just tour events. In 2022, they basically talked, tried to work something out, did not. And from there on out, it kind of became pretty adversarial

as it was more competitive between the two rather than working together. And that's been going on ever since then, basically, uh, warring back and forth. Sometimes they were working together, sometimes they weren't, uh, and you don't really want to get into the drama and politics of all that. But, um, as of today, there, there was a, a merger at some point to where, um, as long as that's, uh, signed and done with, then they are basically the same entity now uh so they decided that to come together um and i guess kind of on the wayside is the apv tour which kind of has gone down in terms of uh how impactful it is in pickleball they uh are less focused it seems on on the pro side of pickleball and more on the uh providing tournaments for for amateurs

uh type of thing they do still have pro events, but less so than the other two organizations. Are you looking for your next great gift to surprise a friend, colleague, or loved one? Bliss Beaches makes the perfect gift. This best-selling bright and beautiful coffee table book by Randall Kaplan features stunning drone photography from exotic beach locations around the world.

It's the perfect housewarming gift, a great addition to any home or office, and a fun and creative alternative to bringing a bottle of wine to somebody's house for dinner. Bliss Beaches is available for purchase on Amazon, where it has glowing reviews and a five-star rating. Get your next amazing gift and order a copy of Bliss Beaches by clicking the link in our show notes. So just in summary, there's two leagues today. One's individual league. They've signed players to three year exclusive contracts but you have to ask permission to play in different tournaments outside of that league and the second league there are teams of pickleball where you sort of like a

draft although i don't think there is a draft where yeah there is a draft actually okay there is a draft so so walk us through um sure the three-year exclusive and i'm when you say that it reminds me of pj and live the fight there because there's antitrust there's there's antitrust concerns when you're signing every pro player to an exclusive deal right yeah so the three-year contracts were the initial thing that they did in 2021. As of recently, because of a merger, they're now working together for a schedule together. They're working together on, hey, we'll have this amount of team events and this amount of tour events, and the players can choose this amount of events between the two. So they're not really exclusive without each other.

They're more synonymous with each other now. So they're basically combined at this point. A team event is, just to kind of make it clear what a team event is, it's composed of two guys and two girls. And normally, you know, pickleball is played as a doubles team. So you'll play like a guys doubles match, a women's doubles match, and two mixed doubles matches as part of your team match essentially um so that's kind of what that format is um but yeah definitely happy to say that at this point it's not no longer uh fractured they're they're not

uh both exclusive with with certain players they've come together and now you were you know back all in the in the same league under the same umbrella and we'll all play the same events. So Major League Baseball, NFL, NBA, there's no individual people who own those leagues. Do those two gentlemen still own the league where they make money? And then talk to us about the team aspect. We hear every day that there's a new celebrity. It's LeBron, it's Tom Brady, it's everyone and their mother who are investing in these teams.

How much are these teams worth? And how much money are they putting in? $10,000, $25,000, $100,000, $500,000? Yeah, so to answer that first part, I guess major league pickable teams uh their current valuation i think is around 10 million um so it depends on how much percentage of a team you're actually uh buying so it can be any percentage and you know a lot of these teams are part of venture capital groups where celebrities are part of those venture capital groups, and then the venture capital groups

purchase the team. So depending on how much stake the celebrity has in the venture capital group, it depends, you know, they can basically their money is spent, uh, how that firm deems fit, uh, which could be any percentage for any given amount of money, but that's the current valuation that I know of. Um, so yeah, that's, that's, uh, that's major league pickleball. Um, it definitely got, uh, I think it got a lot of people talking about pickleball when, you know, you see celebrity involvement. Uh, and I think that's one of the best things about having them involved. Not that they're, you know, super directly involved, but more people are going to be like, Oh, I need, I should check out pickleball if LeBron's, you know,

interested in it. And, uh, I definitely say kind of the investors in it, both the hands-on ones, ones and, um, the venture capital style, you know, they definitely can see the pickleball has very much an appeal as a spectator sport, because it's also a player sport, you know, it's, it's very, I mean, it's basically swept the nation in terms of people playing it. It went from a very low number to a very high number very, very quickly. And the growth in kind of all aspects of that has been pretty huge. Back to your other question about kind of who owns the leagues. Not really sure on all this because I don't really pay attention to that kind of stuff.

I'm more focused on playing. But I'm pretty sure the founder of major league pickleball has uh very slight ownership in each of the teams so kind of the overall league combined um but much more majority ownership is in um you know the the individual teams and how much they own of those teams and then um on the ppa tour side the uh the majority owner is still the the guy that purchased it in 2021 uh Tom Dundon. But they have a number of owners as well, so it's fairly diffused there. And then with this merger, I'm not exactly sure how everything is split now.

I don't know any details on that. How do teams make money? That's a great question. Um, honestly, right now the, the major league pickleball side of things is more of a investment kind of equity future type thing than actually making money. So the tour has always been more focused on kind of making money via events, whether, you know, it's TV, it's sponsors, it's spectators, all those things, you know, there's a revenue model. Um, and of course you're spending a lot of that revenue on paying players and setting

up the events and doing, you know, it's, it's a pretty classic business model. And of course, you're spending a lot of that revenue on paying players and setting up the events and doing, you know, it's a pretty classic business model. Whereas Major League Pickleball since the beginning has been more of a vision of what can it be rather than a revenue model. They don't currently have much of a revenue model. Of course, a lot of businesses are going to be in the red for a while and their expenses are definitely more in terms of running events and paying players. They're going to be more than what they're making from sponsors and TV, essentially, at this time. But, of course, they're making money from selling equity and new teams. And I think the vision with that is that eventually it becomes more like an NBA, NFL, where there is a ton of value in providing team events, whether it's City Associated

and there's spectators coming in and there's huge sponsors. The vision is to make it much like know, much like an NBA NFL type of league. And I think that's why people are buying it. Not because, you know, they're getting revenue today, but because they think they get, you know, a ton of revenue in 10 years. When I had a material outcome on a company I co-founded went public in 1999, everyone's showing you deals. Everyone's got a deal. Everyone's got, you should invest in this bridge where someone showing you deals. Everyone's got a deal. Everyone's got, you should invest in this bridge where someone takes a toll. You should invest in some palm tree farm, which is actually one that I should have done. And someone said to me, yeah,

you should buy a pro soccer team. They were, I think at the time, $20 million, $25 million. Not that I would have invested that kind of money or had that kind of money to invest in a team. But as most teams, when they're bought, they have, it's usually not one person who puts up all the capital. I thought, geez, number one, I'm not a soccer fan, although I am today. I don't think the league was making money. And I think the teams were losing money where you own a team, but you're having to put in several million dollars a year of cash flow going forward to keep these teams from going bankrupt to make sure that the teams keep going, you have to pay the salary and all kinds of other expenses. That obviously wasn't a good decision. And it's something I should have done. I think the LAFC, Los Angeles Football Club, is the first MLS team to reach a billion dollar valuation.

Are teams going there right now? I mean, $10 million for a league that has no major TV contract, which is the primary driver, the value of these teams, seems ridiculous. Yeah, no, I would definitely agree with that. And I think the reason it gets this kind of, you know, these types of investors at these types of valuations is kind of what it's done in other avenues. Because, you know, a couple years ago, people had no idea what pickleball even was. And then it went from that to a legitimate pro sport with not major, you know, TV contracts, but certainly some. Sponsors that are super engaged, wanting to spend. Tons of new players and fans coming in all the time. The numbers of people playing just massively increasing super rapidly, more rapidly than any other sport by far.

Um, so all of those things, if you're, if you're looking from an investor standpoint, do you go and look at it and say, is this, is this money worth it now? Probably not. But if it continues on the track that it has in every other facet of the sport, then it certainly will be. Um, and of course, whether that, you know, proves trueet of the sport, then it certainly will be. And of course, whether that proves true with kind of this whole team thing and getting it like another sport league

that if that happens, that remains to be seen. And I think it has a lot of steps to get there. But I think people kind of believe in pickleball because of what it's done in other areas, which is certainly remarkable for any sport. And I would add to that that I think the number one thing that kind of sponsors and TV want to see are engaged fans.

And more than just about any sport I've ever seen, pickleball has that. They have fanatically engaged fans that are basically willing to do anything for pickleball. And this was even before there was a pro tour. I realized very quickly that people that play pickleball are so fanatical about it that they will do anything for it. And that was kind of one of the things in the culture of pickleball that I think everyone has really, really liked and stuck with it. So having a fanatically engaged fan base that will do anything for the sport

is a golden nugget for any investor, I think. And as soon as they realize that, they're usually pretty all in. So that's a good segue into some statistics. So I'm going to redo that one too. Before we get into your incredible career, let's talk about some pickleball statistics. 36.5 million people in the United States have played pickleball at least once in the last year. That's 14% of the U.S. population. In 2021, the average age of a pickleball player was 38.1 years old, which was three years younger than in 2000. The sport is

getting younger. The average age continues to decrease, and today the age group of 18 to 34 represents the largest age bracket of all pickleball players, totaling 28.8% of all players. 60.1% of pickleball players are U.S. with 130 new locations being created every month, which compares to 270,000 tennis courts in the United States. California has the most courts and nearly a thousand. Pickleball is the fastest growing sport in the United States from 2021. It grew an incredible 39.3% in that year alone. And in 2022, it grew 85.7%. Ben, what's going on here? And why is it so popular? And are we heading to a situation where at some point soon over half the US population, over 100 million players, 150 million players are going to be playing pickleball? Yes. I mean, there's a ton of things that make pickleball what

it is uh the first thing i'd say is it is extremely easy to play it as a casual player to be somebody that is not you know super invested in playing the sport regularly and of course there's a ton of those people too that get obsessed with it and do play it extremely regularly like every day type regularly but um you can you know play for months, come back to and just be like, oh yeah, I can pick this up again. This is a lot of fun. So it's very much a participation sport just because it's so easy to, you know, have fun and have good points the first time you go out and every subsequent time you go out,

you know, practicing a lot, which is in contrast to a number of other sports. So there's that going for it. I'd say the social aspect is really huge in today's world. There's so many people that I've met that play pickleball and they're like, pickleball is our social seat. This is how we meet people. This is how we make friends. And it's really easy for that. And there's a lot of reasons for that too. There's one, there's the culture. It's just, it's welcoming. When you like pickleball, you want to introduce to other people. There's that, you know, there's such a variety of backgrounds, you know, because it's kind of the one thing that's unifying people. You meet people that are very unique and, you know, you know, you meet people you wouldn't otherwise meet without pickleball.

So I think that's huge. And even the proximity is huge in pickleball. If you compare it to like tennis, you're like three times as close to them. When you can actually just talk while you play, that's actually huge versus tennis where you basically have to shout at them, right? Just something as physically simple as proximity makes pickleball another thing that it is. So it's got a lot of simple things going for it, but kind of everything combined has made it this crazy roller coaster of growth, basically. So, yeah, I would definitely not be surprised to see a very large percent of America playing pickleball on a semi-regular basis. And, you know, we haven't seen many examples of a sport that is so participation-based rather than spectator-based

because, you know, a ton of people watch football, but not that many people play football. It's kind of the opposite of what football is. So whether that is super successful in different areas of what a sport is, like a pro tour or a team league or anything like that, that remains to be seen. But we do know that as a spectator sport, it's incredible. So for our viewers and listeners who don't know, what Ben is talking about is a pickleball court is 44 by 20 feet. And the game is often played at the net. That's where the

strategy is. It's not like tennis where you're whaling away and you're essentially five feet from the net and all the players are at the net. If you're going to win, that's, that's the strategy. And so the player should envision a much shorter court. They're not yelling at one another. They're talking to one another. They're 10 feet away from each other where, where the game is played. And you mentioned the social part of pickleball. It's a hundred percent, right? Everybody talks. It's a great social function. We have a court at our house and there are people who continually invite themselves to play. And it's been fun meeting all kinds of nice people, incredible people. It's a great networking aspect too.

If you've got a court, it's phenomenal. I've met so many incredible human beings, business people, philanthropy. I'm very involved in that as well. And it's really added a lot to the social value in our social calendar. Yeah, I would definitely emphasize meeting some interesting business people and opportunities and entrepreneurs is definitely a huge upside as well. Let's talk about your incredible pickleball career and start at the beginning. Can you take us back to your Florida vacation back in 2016 and how things progressed from there. Yeah.

So I found pickleball while I was playing tennis in the community that I lived in, in Estero, Florida. They built pickleball courts near the tennis courts that were in the community. And I'd often hit with my brother there because he was training for pro tennis at the time. So I'd hit with him at those tennis courts. I basically just saw pickleball played in that community and it looked like fun. I had played a lot of racket sports and paddle sports and I'm always willing to give them a try. So I gave that one a try and kind of just liked it pretty, pretty quickly. And then I just played with kind of the locals in the community, which

were admittedly the more of the seniors for uh, for the next month or so. Um, and then it kind of just turned out that I was in a hot spot at pickleball. Uh, Naples, Florida was going to be the host of the first U S open in 2016. Uh, so that was my first tournament and around there were a lot of good players. And, um, so I met a lot of those good players early on, started playing with them. And, uh, really from there on out, it was one-way traffic of pick-up ball every day. Where were you finding courts back then? Actually in South Florida, there was pretty plentiful courts compared to everywhere else. There were permanent courts in Estero and

the Naples facility had, I don't know, 30 permanent courts. And besides that, you could find plenty of temporary courts. So at that time, South Florida is one of the hotspots for pickleball courts and you could find them pretty easily. But take us through your first tournament was the U.S. Open. It was 30 minutes from where you were living in Astera, Florida at the time. I believe you placed fifth in that tournament. What happened from there? Did you say, all right, this is something I want to do as a hobby. We'll get into making money later, but there really was no money in the sport at that game. So what were you training for really anything other than being as good as I could, which I guess you could call training, but I just viewed it as playing for, for fun and trying to get better. Cause that's what I liked doing.

Cause it was a really fun sport. Um, yeah, I did place fifth in the first us open. And, um, at that time, I mean, that was the pro division. So if I could place fifth after playing the sport for two months, I definitely wasn't taking it seriously as a professional sport. I was like, come on, this is kind of easy, right? But at the same time, I knew how fun it was. So it's not that I was going to say this sport's a joke. I'm not going to play anymore. It's more like, hey, this sport doesn't have very many players.

And, you know, I want to play it because it's really fun. And I'll continue to play pro tournaments because also that's fun. So I guess in the year following that year, 2016, I came back the next year. And that year, 2016, I think I played one or two more tournaments. It wasn't very much because I went back to Maryland, and there wasn't really any pickleball there. So I didn't play that much for the rest of that year. But when I came back to Florida the following year, 2017, that's when I was a senior in high school. I had a ton of free time.

And I just played every day, multiple hours a day, um, just cause I enjoyed it so much. And that year, 2017, I actually won the U S open. So that was kind of the moment where I was like, I guess I am pretty good at this game. So, uh, um, I mean, I was already going to keep playing cause it was really fun, but then I was going to school in 2017, fall of 2017. It was my freshman year in college in Maryland. And I knew from there that I was going to do my best to juggle school and travel to tournaments and do my best there. I knew I wasn't going to be able to train very much because I didn't have anybody to play with in Maryland really. And whenever you're not playing as much, obviously, it's going to be harder to get better. But I did know I wanted to travel and play tournaments

because that's what I really liked doing. So that was kind of my plan. And that's what I did. I had a heck of a year of pickleball in 2017. And then from there and out, I was juggling school, um, you know, taking tests and exams and then flying on Thursday to go play Friday, Saturday, Sunday, fly back and have class on Monday. Who was supporting you during all this time? How are you making money or getting money to fly to all of these tournaments? Uh, yeah, so, I mean, we, we were certainly not making good money at, in pro pickleball, but, um, kind of the pickleball culture was certainly helpful in that you could almost always stay with friends. Like you just be like, all right, which pickleball player lives in this area. Let me go stay with them. Um, and they were really good about that.

I had a ton of wonderful hosts and people in pickleball that I still stay in touch with. As far as traveling, kind of airfare and stuff, I got my first sponsor in 2017, Engage Pickleball, which is still in pickleball. They were definitely helpful in kind of covering expenses and giving equipment and stuff. Um, and then of course some, you know, limited prize money. I felt like the most prize money I probably made in one tournament in 2017 was like $1,500, but I was like, let's go. I'm rich. You know, I can cover three flights with this. Um, so yeah, there, there was that. And, you know, I was coming out ahead, not, not really far ahead, but, um, by the end of 2017 or 2018, I was like, you know, I can come out a couple thousand dollars ahead playing for the year, counting all my expenses, which is great because

I get to travel and play pickleball and have fun and I'm not losing money on it. Thanks for listening to part one of my amazing conversation with Ben Johns, the number one pickleball player in the world and the greatest player of all time. Be sure to tune in next week for part two of my awesome conversation with Ben.