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On October 17, 44 doubles teams entered a tournament where every match was a single rally. Win the point and you advance. Lose it and your night is over. The final was one point for $5,000. How the Paddletek One Point Slam at CityPickle Times Square works, and why the best programming gives players a story to tell.

Your calendar is not your programming. Ask an operator whose club is growing what's working, and you'll hear two words: quality programming. Ask what that means, and you'll usually get pointed to a calendar. Filling the calendar with open play isn't hard. Finding what fits the people who actually walk through your door is. Get it right and you give players a reason to choose you, come back, and bring thier friends. That's the core job of programming: helping people find their pickleball family. In my new piece on The Dink Pickleball I break it into three things players are looking for: 1️⃣ A good game. Open play is the heart of the sport, and matching is the craft: level-specific sessions, DUPR-banded play, challenge ladders. 2️⃣ Getting better. Coaches still do the teaching. Video and AI analysis from PB Vision give them evidence and a way to stay connected between sessions. 3️⃣ Something worth competing for. A format with a hook gives players a story to tell. Two of my favorite examples: Silly Sports started Silly Pickles as a league on a few courts in Chicago. It now runs in 110+ cities with 30,000+ players, more than 30% of them new to the sport. Last Saturday at CityPickle Times Square, 44 teams played the Paddletek One Point Slam. Every match was one rally. 43 points decided the bracket. The last one was worth $5,000. A club that only sells court time is competing on price. A club that gets its programming right becomes somebody's pickleball family. Full piece in the comments 👇

More than 400,000 end customer accounts have moved to PodPlay from other club software. Seven reasons clubs migrate, and the arithmetic behind the switch.

400,000 customer accounts have moved from another club platform to PodPlay. Here’s why: The build-first era of pickleball is over. Supply caught up with demand, and the basis of competition moved from courts to experiences and community. When “being open” was the strategy, your software only had to take a booking. Now your technology is a major component of the experience, before, during, and after a player’s time at your club. Seven reasons operators make the move, in the order they tend to notice them: 1. Mobile first from inception. PodPlay was built to run autonomous clubs with nobody behind a desk, so the app had to be self-evident or the model failed. 13,500+ App Store ratings at a 4.91 average. 2. Built with taste. The right way is faster than the fast way. Shipping 90% of the functionality with none of the friction, over and over, compounds. 3. One stack, not seven. Tournaments that talk to the scoreboards. Replay that knows who booked the court. AI analysis an operator can sell as programming. 4. A ticket into the content ecosystem. 35 million views of amateur highlights captured at PodPlay clubs, carrying the club’s name into the feed. 5. The autonomous category. 70+ autonomous clubs on the platform operating with extended hours and labor light. Pickleball 365 in Fair Haven, Michigan runs three unstaffed courts that are booked more hours per day than many clubs are open. 6. Multi-location architecture, built first. Our first customer ran 20 locations. Franchise roll-up reporting came before we had a second customer. 7. System of record to system of action. PodPlay Insights puts an AI assistant over the club’s own data, in the dashboard, not in a chatbot tab. Migrating isn't easy. But it is six to eight weeks of structured project work against a revenue and cost profile that changes permanently on the other side. Migration is a one-time expense. Staying is a recurring rate. Full BLOG in the comments.

Pickleball demand isn't the problem. The lease is. West Shaw's new piece in The Dink Pickleball is the most clear-eyed breakdown of both sides of a pickleball club P&L I've read this year. Few people see this market from as many angles as West: club design through Johns Design & Consulting, operator/coach development through racketpro, marketing through StackEleven Marketing. It's a great companion piece to After the Gold Rush, the article I wrote for The Dink this summer. The trends we flagged there are playing out in real time. Four insights from West's piece that stood out to me: 1️⃣ Experience and community win. JDC's data across hundreds of clubs shows revenue per court holding steady for a year. What changed is that being open is no longer a competitive advantage. West's test for an owner: "Can you learn your members' names?" 2️⃣ Rent and labor are the two lines that decide the P&L. On a $50K/month lease, a 10-court club needs over $1M a year just to break even, and the 5 to 9pm rush only gives you 40 court hours a night. Rent is mostly locked the day you sign. Labor is the line you can still move, and West finds nearly every club he audits is either over staffed or staffing the wrong things. 3️⃣ Regional variation is real. "What works in Naples may not work in Dallas." 4️⃣ Smaller clubs earn more per court. Clubs with 10 courts or fewer average about $8,000 per court per month, versus $5,600 at larger ones. This suggests that scale buys capacity, but, on average, at lower efficiency. So what's the role of technology in this next phase? A few ideas: ✅ Cover the hours nobody wants to staff. Autonomous operation lets an owner-operator be present 7 to 9am and 5 to 9pm without carrying full payroll the rest of the day. Clubs using PodPlay Technologies's autonomous capabilities have cut labor costs by up to 66%. ✅ Make every fixed-cost hour earn. When rent is your cost of goods, the pricing and programming that fill 2pm matter as much as what fills 7pm. ✅ Give players a path. West keeps finding clubs with no progression for players to follow. Ratings, replays and structured programming turn a court booking into a reason to come back. ✅ Learn by market. Multi-location operators and franchise systems should be able to see what's working in local markets, and act on it fast. ✅ Let software run the transactions so people can run the hospitality. Check-in, payments, scheduling and tournaments shouldn't need someone at a desk. Learning members' names should. West predicts the next phase will include a wave of of smaller autonomous or semi-autonomous clubs with local roots and real community. The next phase belongs to operators who use technology to get closer to their customers, not further away. Link to West's piece in the comments.

Josh Gartman is Director of Coaching & Programming CityPickle Times Square. He and Kaitlyn Kerr go way back. MLP Mesa was his first real taste of pro pickleball, so he set out to learn everything there was to know about the players. Six months later he was being asked about players for the 2023 draft. Now he runs coaching, programming, tournaments, leagues and DUPR at one of the busiest clubs in New York. Next up: we're excited to be working with Josh and the CityPickle team on the Paddletek One Point Slam at CityPickle Times Square. 🗓 Saturday, Oct 17 · 7–10PM 64 teams. Games to 1. Single elimination. $5,000 in prize money. Register in the CityPickle app 🔗