ONE37pm: When did you first hear about pickleball and what was that first experience with the sport like?
Steve: That's a funny story. My nephew told me about this “new sport called pickleball”. I am a decent tennis player, and a fairly decent table tennis player. And he said, This is the perfect sport for you. It's also very strategic. It's like playing table tennis where you're standing on the table, but to get to use your brains. go try it, you're gonna love it. And my nephew's like a kidder, he likes to tease me. So when he said it's called pickleball and I hadn't heard of it, I thought he was kidding. I was like, I'm gonna Google it and you'll laugh at me. But I Googled “pickleball Austin Texas” and I said, “is there a place where Austin has pickleball on Wednesday?”
I found a place called Bethany church. So I went to the Bethany church gym on a Wednesday night. I didn't have a paddle, I didn't have a ball, I didn't know the rules. I show up. I'm like, I'm just gonna watch this. There's no way they’re gonna let me play. Like I don't even have any stuff. I don't know how to play. So I just show up and start watching it and they ask me ‘Do you want to play?’ I'm like, ‘I don't know anything about it.’ ‘We don't care, we want you to play.’ And it was incredibly welcoming. I realized that pickleball to a lot of people, both then and now, It's not just a sport. It's a mission. They really are trying to get you in, and I was welcomed. Like, you know, like the prodigal son. It’s like they killed the fatted calf for me. It was awesome, and it was so much fun. I just loved it. Right from day one.
ONE37pm: You've said that you hope to reach 40 million recreational players by 2030. Are there any active ways that the MLP is trying to get to that number?
Steve: We’re here in Columbus, Ohio, for our final event of the year, and the city has been incredibly welcoming to us. The fans have been great. Our host David Kass who owns the facility has been awesome. We were fortunate enough to meet the mayor of Columbus, and had a long conversation with him about how it would be incredibly easy to implement pickleball in the schools, elementary schools, middle schools, high schools. You're just basically putting tape down on the church gym, you can get nets, and balls and paddles at a relatively low price. Frankly, if it is for this effort, for bringing more kids into the sport, you probably get most of that either free or very low cost from a lot of people who would love to partner with the city. You know how many kids are going to have an absolutely great experience with that. And I said for a really low investment, you can be making a lot of kids' lives better.
One thing I also talk about a lot, especially with pickleball and kids, the cost of pickleball for kids is probably 1/10th to 1/100th the cost of tennis for kids. As someone who's not only chubby now, but I was kind of a chubby kid, I had good hand eye skills but I wasn't the best athlete. I'm sure if I played pickleball as a kid in high school, I probably would have been good. And if you're someone who's not great at other sports, but you find something that you're really good at, it's a big deal.
This will be a sport that every kid will enjoy. But there will be some kids that this could be their thing. That would be the thing that would really help them be happier during a very difficult time for some kids. I just think that's magic. Right there in that conversation, and we’re gonna follow up with the mayor. He's not heard the last of me. Hopefully, we're gonna bring this to 1000s and 1000s of kids in the city at a very, very low cost in dollars and a very, very high payoff in health, happiness, and joy. He was very receptive to that. That's just every day, it's just another conversation like that, one win after another.
ONE37pm: The MLP is obviously still very young. Were there any challenges on this journey that kind of stick out to you?
Steve: Yeah, I think there's been a lot of challenges for the sport. I think as someone who started playing six years ago, obviously there are a lot of pioneers that came way before me who have built the sport and I'm super thankful to them.
USA pickleball, the people who are ambassadors for USA Pickleball for decades who've put hundreds and thousands of hours into building the sport. We stand on the shoulders of giants. I think something you were hearing six years ago that you're hearing a lot less now is when you say ‘pickleball’ the reaction used to be, “is that a real sport?”
That was like nails on the chalkboard for pickleball players. You just hated that. I think that reaction is largely a thing of the past. Part of that is getting people like LeBron James and other amazing athletes like Tom Brady and Kim Clijsters to come in and say that they love the sport. They play it. They love it. They value it. I think those comments are a thing of the past, and that that was certainly a barrier.
Then I think there's been the biggest barrier to the growth of the sport by far is there's not enough courts. That's something that MLP is hoping to address. We need the sport to organize more efforts to lobby the federal government to provide funds all over the country to build pickleball courts. My idea would be a federal matching grant program that would match any city or state or local government that's building pickleball courts, they would pay half the cost. For a couple billion dollars, we can build 100,000 courts throughout this country. I think the health benefits would be at least 10x what the government would spend on that. And that's not including the joy benefits and the community benefits and the getting people away from their computer screens and yelling at Twitter benefits.
ONE37pm: Is there any specific place in the US or even the world that you want to take MLP next?
Steve: Yes, I want to take it all over the world. I predicted this will be the most played sport in America sometime fairly soon in the next few years. I think it will become the most played sport in the world… Yeah, it's gonna take a little longer. A lot of soccer players, A lot of cricket players. There's other sports, but I don't think it's impossible that pickleball could be that sport.
ONE37pm: And like you said, I think with soccer, it's so popular because it's so accessible. You can play it virtually anywhere.
Steve: Any church, you have any parking lot, anything could be a pickleball court. Pickleball courts and portable nets are great. Yeah, we can make that work.
ONE37pm: The last question that I wanted to leave you with, if you could play pickleball against anyone dead or alive, who would it be?
Steve: If I could time travel I'd go back to play with Joel Pritchard. And like the first game in 1965. I'd love to be there. Day one. And, I would love to tell him what this is going to become. I'd love to say ‘pretty good invention, you did good. You have no idea how many lives you’re going to change.’
ONE37pm: Is there anything you'd like to leave our audience with about pickleball before we part ways?
Steve: I have another mission for us. In the US, we'll be hosting the Olympics in 2028. The LA Olympic committee gets to choose five sports as the host country. They gotta pick pickleball. They have to. So many of the top players in the sport come from other countries. They have to announce the new sports in 2024 before the 2028 Olympics. In those four years, I think a lot of countries can have really competitive teams. Dekel goes back to Israel, and helps train his team there. DJ Young goes back to Spain, Simone helps Brazil. If all these amazing players are given four years, knowing that they have to build a team. It would be an amazing competition. They could really bring the world together.
