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Racquet Fuel provides insights into the best practices and innovations of racquets industry business leaders.
Co-hosts Kim Bastable, Director of Professional Tennis Management at the University of Florida, and Simon Gale, Senior Director Racquet Sports Development at the USTA National Campus, help racquets leaders in your ability to grow the game and to improve the experiences you offer to both your staff and players by talking to industry leaders, including USTA executives, authors and innovators. If you are on a career path in racquet sports or already a racquets business leader and you want to stay up to date on ideas and innovations in racquets industry business and leadership, this podcast is for you.
Presented by the Athlete+ Podcast Network at the University of Florida Institute for Coaching Excellence.
Welcome to Racquet Fuel, where we launch into great conversations and share powerful tools to help you become a stronger rackets leader. Your hosts are Kim Bastable, a former all American tennis player and now the director of professional rackets management at the University of Florida. And Simon Gale, the USTA senior director of racket sports development. Today on Racquet Fuel, a discussion with David Johnson, an expert on the boom of pickleball and now Padel, who shares how a leader can make the most of their investments in these sports. Here are Kim and Simon.
Kim Bastable:Welcome to Racquet Fuel. I'm Kim Bastable, here with Simon Gale, and today, David Johnson. We are so excited to speak to David because Pickleball and Padel are growing, if not faster than the speed of light. We all know it's just around the corner for Padel. It's in front of us for Pickleball.
Kim Bastable:And David has been in the pickleball space for many, many years. He'll share with you his history, but he's going to help us understand these trends, the business of these sports, how and we are a business and leadership podcast, so how leaders can make the most of this, do the best with it, make make money, make, patrons. Just it's such a crazy world, I think, and and David might explain it. It's happened so fast. There's a lot of things going on.
Kim Bastable:But, Simon, I know you said your experience with David goes way back to your patronization of his pickleball central. It's it's crazy that that's the connection, but David was the only guy in town.
Simon Gale:Yeah. Quite a pioneer when you look at it. Ten years ago was not that long ago, but it's it's about when this sport really or the sport of pickleball anyway got going, started to gather some real real momentum, and pickleballcentral.com was where my club's credit card was swiped often to help us get our Pickleball space up and running and all the equipment we needed. So looking forward to hearing David's journey, his knowledge, and and research, and the the time spent as a consultant now should be fascinating to everyone because I don't know of anyone else who's doing it, at least at a level David is. So I think there's a lot of talk out there, but I wanna get some facts today and see see what the stats are and so on.
Simon Gale:So really excited to have you, David, and looking forward to our conversation. Great, guys. It's awesome to be here. So, Dave, maybe we could start with a little background on your journey into pickleball and more recently the Padel space and how you've evolved into making that, for lack of a better word, a consulting business.
David Johnson:Yeah. So back in 2006, my wife and I cofounded Pickleball Central, and it started small. When we go back and look at the old website, it's a little bit embarrassing. But, yeah, we started small, and the business just kept steadily growing. And, eventually, we quit our full time jobs and went, 100% into pickleball.
David Johnson:We were running the business out of our home for the first five or six years. At one point, we had three employees coming in six days a week into the house, and half the house was dedicated to to pickleball and the other half to the family. And then we moved into a warehouse and continued to grow and moved into a bigger warehouse, and after that, even a bigger warehouse. Along the road, we were fortunate enough to do a couple acquisitions. We acquired Pickleball Inc, which was the original equipment manufacturer started by Barney McCallum, one of the founders of the sport.
David Johnson:And we acquired Pickleball Tournaments, which was, you know, by far the the leading SaaS program for running pickleball tournaments. And tournaments played a a huge role in the growth of the early sport of pickleball, probably more so than any sport in terms of the size, the scale, and the importance of of tournaments to the growth of the sport.
Simon Gale:So you talk about growth. Pickleball especially has just taken off over the last ten years, and I would say especially the last five on a national scale with with PPL and things like that. But Padel is is now starting to gain momentum. What are some of the high level numbers associated with these sports rapid growth, and where do you see participation trends going for each of these sports?
David Johnson:Yeah. It's it's really interesting because you've got sort of a mirror a 180 degrees between Padel and pickleball when you look at The US versus Europe in particular. Right? In Europe, Padel is by far the dominant sport. Pickleball is trying to get a foothold over there, has been trying for quite a while, but just has been a lot slower on the uptake.
David Johnson:Whereas in The United States, it's the exact opposite. So you know? And then you throw in the rest of the world. I I estimate there's approximately 25, 26,000,000 pickleball players compared to probably about 30,000,000 Padel players worldwide. And the Padel people are trying to get into The States.
David Johnson:The US companies are trying to get into Europe, and both of them are trying to grow the Asian market. So the Asian market is interesting because it doesn't have a history in either sport particularly. So you're kind of seeing both sports kind of grow at the same time over there. So that'll be an interesting laboratory to see how those sports grow. And then what we're starting to see now, particularly in The States, is the multisport facilities.
David Johnson:So you're starting to see pickleball and Padel in the same facility, and I think we're gonna see a lot of that with new facilities that are opening up. They will have both sports in them. You will see some pickleball facilities in The States starting to add Padel. And then you've got the country clubs, the tennis clubs, etcetera, that tend to like to have multi sports if they're in demand or if they're in if they're popular. So it's it's quite common at a country club these days now to see tennis and Padel and pickleball all in the same facility.
David Johnson:So there there's various models. There's various ways that the sports are growing, but I think that they can be quite compatible. I think we're gonna see a lot of the multisport facilities in the future.
Kim Bastable:It's very interesting when you look at what you have a prediction of that you see I think that you would say we're at the height of the pickleball participation when you see it declining by the end of the decade.
David Johnson:Well, yeah, let's be clear. I I see the growth declining, not the overall size of the sport. You know, pickleball has been growing at at fifty, sixty, 70% a year depending upon what year you're looking at. That's not sustainable long term, and that's gonna start in The US in particular. We're gonna see the growth rates starting to come down, and it looks like it's gonna come down fairly quickly.
David Johnson:The SFIA just released their first midyear report, and their trailing twelve months growth of pickleball was only at 14%. So I think the '25 growth rate when it comes out for the full year '25 will be under 14%, which is less than I had projected six, eight months ago. So I think we're seeing a a fairly significant slowdown in the growth, but I think we're gonna continue to see good growth for a market the size that it is for the next five years. They'll just be more in the the 10% or lower percentage rate in terms of growth.
Kim Bastable:Okay. That's good clarification. So which would would probably attribute to the idea that there would be the addition of Padel at some of those facilities. I'm guessing is that's why you would say because I would I guess I would ask the question, why are these facilities adding Padel? Are they not able to monetize entirely, or they just see Padel as another place they can add income?
Kim Bastable:Why would they add Padel?
David Johnson:I think that they're adding Padel for a couple of reasons. One, they may be hearing that there's demand in their city and nobody is supplying the Padel courts. I mean, there's, you know, there's probably only 15 or 20 cities in The United States that have Padel courts open to the public in those cities. So there's there's huge opportunity for growth there. And I think that the dollar amount you can get per court you know, Padel is still sort of a premium priced sport, and I think that the pickleball operators look at that and say, hey.
David Johnson:We have an opportunity to have some different levels of participation and of pricing that we can use. And so they're gonna give that a shot. So they're looking for for early mover advantage, first mover advantage. They're looking at a slightly different business model that might be very complementary. And I think that a lot of the people that are doing facilities are entrepreneurs, and, they just like the thought of trying, you know, a tweak to what everybody else is doing to see if it works.
Kim Bastable:Yeah. No. That's that's what I was gonna ask you about was was who's the leader, but I wanted to point out before that the height of the roof will matter based on so talk about that just real quickly for people who might be considering. What's the height requirement?
David Johnson:There's some there's some differences in the sport from a business standpoint. So the height of the roof is one. Pickleball, the minimum you wanna look at is about 18 foot ceilings. In Padel, you're really looking at 30 foot ceilings. So the opportunity to move into new spaces for Padel is more limited, and Pickleball will have already taken some of those 30 foot spaces just because they were good spaces for other reasons as well and happen to have high ceilings.
David Johnson:We see that the average indoor facility for Pickleball typically has about nine courts in it. The average for Padel is typically about four. The Padel courts are a little bit larger, but, you know, when you're looking at building a business around it, there are those differences. Both sports are basically doubles sports as opposed to tennis, which has a lot of singles in it. So, you know, the the business model is similar there.
David Johnson:The sport of Padel, you typically book an hour and a half to two hour sessions. In pickleball, you book by the hour. You may do two hours if you really wanna play a lot, but oftentimes, it's just an hour. So you've you've got a few differences in the culture and how the sports are played, and those roll into the business decisions then of what you're going to do. In The States, I talk a lot about pickleball had the advantage that it's very easy to set up a temporary outdoor pickleball court, and that's how the sport has grown.
David Johnson:Right? In the early days, you played in rec centers on wood floors with multiple lines, but you could easily get a court set up and play on it. Or you went to your your outdoor municipal courts that were free, and you chalked or you temporary lined or eventually the parks and recs put temporary lines in. But the cost was relatively small, and it was relatively easy to do. You just simply can't do that in Padel.
David Johnson:So it's it's gotta go through a different way to build the market from the grassroots level. I also point out from a a business standpoint, the Padel courts require a bit more maintenance. Right? You've got glass that you've gotta keep clean. You've got sand on the, you know, on the court, and that's gotta be updated and monitored and maintained.
David Johnson:Whereas pickleball, you know, you can usually just use a leaf blower and you're off and running, maybe a wash every once in a while. So, you know, there are some differences when when you're looking at that, and you need to be aware of that if you're gonna add the sport to a facility or start a new facility.
Kim Bastable:Yeah. Those are those are good reminders. So tell us who the people are. You mentioned they're entrepreneurs. The leadership aspects of these facilities were.
Kim Bastable:Where are these people typically coming from that are building these probably newer facilities?
David Johnson:Yeah. So we see the sport going in, as I mentioned, in the to country clubs and and tennis clubs, and that's that's sort of a a different level of who's involved. Right? That's a a larger club with maybe higher membership costs, larger facilities, etcetera, and often with a a strong tennis culture. Then you come into the dedicated indoor facilities, a market that really has only taken off in the last two to three years.
David Johnson:I was lucky to have started a pickleball club back in 2018 with four courts, one of the first in The United States that was opened year round with with tennis type surfaces and and dedicated courts. So, yes, there's a lot of entrepreneurs that are coming in. We see a lot of people coming out of high-tech who have put some money away and maybe are burnt out on the lifestyle of a high-tech person. They've fallen in love with the sport, and they wanna get involved in the business side of it somehow. So they look at repurposing an existing business typically.
David Johnson:It's it's pretty rare you have a build to suit new facility coming in. And they repurpose. You're looking at probably somewhere between an investment of a half 1,000,000 to a million dollars to get a facility up and going, particularly on the pickleball side. The Padel side might be a little bit less because they typically are smaller in square footage. And while the courts cost a little bit more to construct in Padel, you know, you amortize that over ten or twenty years, it's really not that big of a difference.
David Johnson:And then just depending upon the level of amenities you put in. The the pickleball space and the Padel space to a a certain extent will probably start to look like the hotel industry in in the not too distant future where you have, you know, your budget, your family, your business, your long stay, your luxury, your resort. So there'll be a tiering of the level of facility based on the build out, the amenities that are offered, the price points that are offered, that type of thing. So, you know, to begin with, it was just you threw up a facility and you didn't kinda worry where you fell in that that tiering. But as more and more competition comes in, you're gonna have more of that tiering.
David Johnson:And so, yeah, a lot of the folks are entrepreneurs. They they put some money away. Maybe they bring in some investors, friends and family, typically. There's no VC to speak about in the pickleball world to to finance a facility. You might be able to get an SBA loan.
David Johnson:Padel, by the other hand, has two or three VCs out there that are investing in Padel facilities in The US. So there's a, again, a slightly different way that you may start a facility.
Simon Gale:So one of the questions I would have, David, it's still early days, but you talk about these entrepreneurs and new buildings coming in just in the last couple of years, but it's about now you start getting to a point where honeymoon period's over, so to speak, and you maybe had some sort of special deal on your loans or, you know, to get you through a year or two. But now you need to start making money, and there's some real challenges with running business. I've owned a facility and and understand those challenges. And at the end of the day, you need a return on that investment, and and the free pickleball as an owner wears off after a while, and I need to see a return on on my investment. So one of the things I look at is there's no history of these sports in this country with people with elevated experience.
Simon Gale:You you open a tennis facility, you can call a dozen people in the country who've got twenty or thirty years leadership and can come in and run your business for you. Pickleball and and and especially Padel don't have that. They're still getting people certified to teach the sport. So the business model for me is not proven because it's early days. What are you seeing, and what are some of the challenges that these places are having two or three years into it?
David Johnson:Well, you're absolutely correct. There are very few proven models. There are a few facilities out there that have been open five, six years, but it's it's pretty limited. So people are are trying to figure out, you know, what are the keys to success of a pickleball or Padel facility. And I I did mention earlier, but with the companies that I founded, we sold those about four years ago when I retired.
David Johnson:And I do consulting, and I've started the International Association of Pickleball and Padel facilities exactly for that reason. A lot of people were were looking for models, for metrics, for, you know, just help in how do you establish a successful club. You've got the startup phase. You've got the grand opening, and then you've got, you know, a ten year slog of making the the facility successful. And while you're doing that, competition is growing.
David Johnson:And so competition is gonna be one of the major challenges that people are going to face. Somebody's gonna open up ten minutes away from you. And so what are the the key factors for you to make sure that you can be successful? What I try to tell people is you're really not in the pickleball or Padel business. You're in the hospitality business.
David Johnson:You have a thousand members or a thousand people coming into your facility, and they wanna have a good experience while they're there. They you know, just like when you go into a restaurant, you want good food, good service, good value. Those things are all gonna be just as appropriate in a Pickleball or Padel facility. Building community is one of the keys. You wanna build community where people wanna come to your facility and play with people that they've met, know that it's gonna be hospitable, that they're gonna have a fun time.
David Johnson:Even if their friends aren't there, other people will be there they can play with, and it's gonna be good. Part of that also comes around to the programming. There's a lot of opportunity in pickleball and Padel for programming. A lot of people are relatively new to playing. The coaching environment is different, I think, than it is in tennis.
David Johnson:You can get up to speed relatively quickly in pickleball or Padel. You don't have to learn, you know, things like an overhead serve that can take quite a while to get effective at that. So you can have a quick intro to the sport. And then for the really successful facilities, I think they focus a lot on the beginner to intermediate player and with a fair amount of programming to help them progress from a in pickleball, it might be from a two five player to a three o player to a three five player. We generally find that facilities that focus on four five or five o players, those guys don't tend to spend as much money.
David Johnson:They tend to monopolize courts. They tend to not be as outwardly friendly to newcomers that are coming in. They're really there to to play competitive games, and and they wanna focus on that. So if you can have a warm welcoming facility that focuses on beginner and intermediate players, helps them progress in their their play, you have leagues, you have occasional tournaments, glow in the dark things, whatever fun things that build the community. That's really important.
David Johnson:And to do that, I think staffing is the key thing. You really have to focus on having the right staff. If I walk into a facility and the front desk person is on their phone and hardly looks up when somebody comes in, I know that facility is going to be in trouble. If I walk into a facility and they know your name because you've been there multiple times, you know, I have a good sense that that's going to be a good facility. So your customer facing staff really have to be selected for their skills in welcoming people, being hospitable, making people feel comfortable, helping them, helping them grow.
David Johnson:You know? And so that's your front desk people. It's your it's your general manager, and then it's your your teaching staff, your programming staff. We tend to think that the programming staff in a in a decent sized facility, you should have one or two employee, you know, coaches on staff that are there forty hours a week driving the core of the programming. And then you supplement that with ten ninety nine coaches that you bring in, and you make sure that those coaches fit your profile of a good coach who is also hospitable, provides a great coaching session, has the ability to encourage people to come back, go through that progression of training, all of that is going to lead to a successful facility.
Simon Gale:So what you're saying is you can't just build the courts and everybody will just come and you'll make money, David? Is that the secret sauce here?
David Johnson:That's what we're finding out. Yes. That is the secret sauce. That However that generally doesn't work.
Simon Gale:However, one of the things that we've been doing Pickle and Padel programming here for five years, and and I was doing Pickleball the ten years from 2015 at my old club. And you're learning a lot as a director, and you you've gone from director of tennis to director of racquet sports, for example. The low hanging fruit for these sports is to take a successful tennis person, get them certified, and say, now go and teach these sports. However, what I've seen is when it's part of what you do and it's not what you wake up and do every day, the customer sees through that and sees that your passion is not as great and it's just something you've done in between tennis lessons, for example. So we learned early, I need someone who wakes up every day and drives the program, not just teaches it, because the customers know the difference.
Simon Gale:They see your passion. So in a two sports that are still developing a a staff, you know, people have just got certified over the last few years and are starting to make careers out of it. What are you seeing with staffing in terms of that dangerous transition of a tennis person who teaches these other sports versus specialists who just focus on those sports alone?
David Johnson:Well, when I look at the dedicated pickleball facilities that have started in the last two or three years, 95% of the people coming in are not necessarily coming from a tennis coaching background. They may have played some tennis in high school or in college, but but they didn't become a coach. They have gotten the pickleball or the Padel religion. Right? They are bought into it.
David Johnson:They are excited about it. They love to play. And coaching is is one area that there are a lot of job opportunities right now. And if you're a good coach, you can make a good living either as an employee in a facility or as an independent coach, you know, working as a as a ten ninety nine and maybe working in in a couple different locations. So I I I would echo what you're saying that the most successful pickleball or Padel coaches are those that love the sport and are dying to have a career in the sport.
David Johnson:Some of them are just supplementing for a full time job that they have, but the the ones that that commit to becoming a full time pickleball or padel pro generally are in love with the sport and haven't had a lot of tennis coaching background. Again, going back to the country clubs and the tennis clubs, it's a different environment. Right? Because you've already got 10 whatever tennis courts. You've got a lot of tennis players there, and those coaches have come from the the tennis world and have come up in that.
David Johnson:And so I I think you have to be cognizant of if you're running a a country club or a tennis club, how are you going to address that issue of of of getting your pickleball people to really have the enthusiasm about the sport that rubs off on their coaching and rubs off to the the people that they're coaching.
Kim Bastable:That's super great insight. I think we're all trying to figure this out, how this fits from a leadership and business perspective, and I love that you can put it in the frame framework of many of these, like the stand alone club as well as the clubs that are adding these sports. Let's talk a bit about membership models. Let's discuss you know, not many years ago, dues were low, and you paid for programs. You paid for court time.
Kim Bastable:There's a little bit more, I think, toward the trend of a higher dues number where things are included. I know that what you're probably gonna say is there's not one successful model. It depends where you are with all kinds of factors, but give us your insights in the member model.
David Johnson:Thousands of models, Kim. It's it's I I'm a data guy, and I like to collect data. And it's just really hard to collect data on membership models because there's so many different tweaks to a membership model. But what we're seeing in in general terms falling out in a, let's say, a dedicated pickleball facility is there's one type of facility that's everything you wanna eat. So you pay one membership fee a year or a month, and you get to have free court reservations and free open play and then maybe discounts on coaching and tournaments and leagues.
David Johnson:There is a limit that is put on how many courts of those free courts you can reserve. So you may be able to have two courts reserved at any one time. And the more expensive the membership, the earlier you can reserve the court. You know, it might be twenty one days in advance as opposed to fourteen days as opposed to seven days. The thing is if you can reserve twenty one days in advance, but you can only hold two reservations, you know, you you can do one at twenty one days and one at, like, fourteen days, but then you don't have one reserved until you've plates.
David Johnson:You know, you you gotta be aware of if you have too many of those memberships, it can be hard to reserve a cord at the time you want. And that's kind of the drawback of the all you can eat memberships is not overselling memberships, and then people get frustrated because they can't get a court when they want to. We we have facilities. One of the larger franchises, for example, their stated goal is to have a 100 memberships per court, and that's at the high end. That tends to be problematic.
David Johnson:One of the facilities that I know is is the most profitable, most successful facilities limits memberships to 25 per court and then makes up the rest of the time in walk ins, in clinics, in that type of thing. The hybrid is of of the all you can eat is you you pay the membership fee, you get free open play, but you have to pay something for everything else. So if you wanna reserve a court and play on a private court, you maybe get a 10% discount on it, but you still have to pay for the court. So you pay a $100 a month. Courts normally go for $50.
David Johnson:You might get them for $45 when you reserve them, but you have to pay for them. And that way, people that tend to hog courts are actually paying for the time that they're using the courts. Right? So it's it's up to them to decide how often they wanna play. There are a few limited facilities that have no membership fees or very low membership fees, $100 a year or less.
David Johnson:But then they charge for open play, and they charge for court reservation time generally. So those are kind of the the three that we see, and and the hybrid model in the middle there is the one that I'm starting to see the most of.
Kim Bastable:Well, what just as an example, what would the $100 low fee for the year what what does that get you?
David Johnson:You know, they're gonna they're gonna get you some discounts at the pro shop, maybe some discounts on coaching, that type of thing. But they get you mentally as a member. You know, you're gonna get their monthly newsletter that talks about what's going on. You're gonna get emails about events, that type of thing. Pickleball has also has a lot of snowbirds, and so you'll sometimes see half year memberships in facilities to address that, or you have the monthly membership dues where you can come on or off, you know, as your needs require.
Simon Gale:Well, I think it's gonna be fascinating to see five, ten years from now which models have been sustainable, what works, what doesn't. You're in the early days of this research and so on, and it's gonna be really fascinating to see where it all ends up and which businesses make it and which don't, what saturation point. It's gonna be fun to watch and and watch it unfold. So I feel like, Kim, we're gonna need an annual check-in with David to to get some updates outside of his newsletters and so on. So David, you've shared a lot today, and we could keep talking, we appreciate that you've been able to squeeze all this information into thirty minutes.
Simon Gale:Totally. But we always strive to have everyone leave with one piece of advice or an action item from a leadership point of view. So if you could give our future directors and current directors of Racquet Sports a bit of advice around these complementary Racquet Sports, What would it be?
David Johnson:I think I'd give you an immediate thing and then a longer term thing. So immediately, it's that hospitality factor. Remember what kind of business you're in. Remember what people want, and give it to them. So make sure that that you have a hospitable community based facility.
David Johnson:I think that's going to be a a key to success. I also think that you need to be considering where your facility is going to be in the next two years, five years, and ten years, and come back and revisit that on a regular basis, taking a honest look at what's happening in the industry as you're going along. I like the Wayne Gretzky thing about I score a lot of goals because I I go to where the puck's going to be. So think about where your facility needs to be in two years, where it needs to be in five years, and you're gonna have more competition to deal with. And one of the things I point out long term is if you've got a lease, your lease is like this long term.
David Johnson:Right? You start at this rate, but the rate goes up every year. There's a built in escalator in your cost. Right? So you've you've got that pressure on your business of increased costs from your lease, which is your largest expense you have.
David Johnson:As more competition comes into the market, what's gonna happen on pricing? Well, probably this. Right? You know? You're you're you may have to address your pricing lower compared to to other facilities, and I think that's really true in Padel.
David Johnson:You can charge an arm and a leg in Padel right now because you're the only game in town. But when there's five facilities in town that have Padel courts, you can't get a $150 an hour for your court anymore. You're gonna have to be down at a 100 or 75 or something like that. So you've gotta be planning for those things, coming up with higher, what we call economic density uses of your court. Where do you make the most money per hour on your court?
David Johnson:It's not an individual reservation. It's coaching. It's league play. It's tournaments. It's corporate events.
David Johnson:So you can look at a lot of factors when you're looking at how can I make money and make sure that even if my hourly court rates go down, I still have a successful business long term?
Kim Bastable:That's excellent. I just my makes my mind spin when I think about the excitement these business owners have toward this idea and then how complex it very quickly gets toward competition coming in, the expenses, as you say, the lease annually increasing. The yeah. It's just and this is really truly a hospitality business and making sure you have that right person who's just living and breathing and loving these sports so that they can promote them is a huge, huge key. So, yeah, Simon, that's my takeaway.
Kim Bastable:I'm just, like, shaking my head thinking about as much as I love to play Padel, and that's particularly of the two been my favorite, the idea of putting together a club, it's just not that easy. What's your takeaway?
Simon Gale:Look. It's not for the faint hearted, is it? It's it's I've been a club owner, and and it's hard to put your pill head on the pillow at night sometimes and get some sleep worrying about these things. And there's no roadmap for this. They're working it out on the fly.
Simon Gale:And and I really like the long term two, five year reviews, which you should do anyway, but more based on where's the industry trending, how many clubs have opened in our area, do we need to change pricing, and you bring up a lot of great topics there. My biggest takeaway is the same as any of our Racquet Sports is we're in the hospitality business and build real connection with the community. I think that can solve a lot of your problems. I think finding people who want to grow the sport and genuinely love the sport that they're teaching or that they're of the you know, that they're running the facility. If they're the manager, you have to love it because you can only fake it till you make it for so long people see through it.
Simon Gale:So I take away a lot of things here. It's been invaluable. I think our listeners will get a lot out of this. And, David, just to finish, where could people find out more about your research? I think that would be interesting for some people.
David Johnson:There's a couple different places. Definitely the association, the iappf.org. We've just launched a magazine, so there's now a magazine for Pickleball and Padel facilities. It covers the whole spectrum of, you know, operations, programming, ownership, etcetera. And we I also do a a monthly publication just on pickleball.
David Johnson:It's called the business of pickleball, and you can find it at businesscons pickleballconsultinggroup.com.
Kim Bastable:I think everyone's gonna rush there. I hope you have plenty of ink in your printer.
David Johnson:Absolutely.
Kim Bastable:The magazine is I've seen the newsletter. It's incredible information, and I just think the data collection piece on this is fascinating. We all have anecdotal thoughts about what these businesses are doing or should be doing, but when you can show what they are doing and the trends, it's a powerful piece of information. I I could see that everyone needs a David in their back pocket if they're gonna start one of these businesses, and I encourage everyone to really be thoughtful. And I and I would say the big takeaway is this passionate person that can really educate people about these sports because so many of the people are new to the to the sports, and they need introduction, and they need nurturing, and that care and concern for them, knowing their name, inviting them back, all the tools that we can use to encourage them to come back.
Kim Bastable:Yeah. I think they're a great addition to the world of tennis, personally. I think they make us leaders be better because we have to juggle a few more things. So it's exciting, and we really will invite you back, David. We need to see where things are in a year.
Kim Bastable:So thank you very much for your time today.
David Johnson:Thank you. And I look forward to coming back. Cheers, David. Cheers.
Kim Bastable:That's what we have for you today on Racquet Fuel. We'll speak to you next time.
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