Creating a Community Through Pickleball: The Southlake Paddle Club Blueprint

Saddle up for a stimulating episode where we converse with Tim Wright, the brain behind the thriving Southlake Paddle Club. Prepare to have your curiosity piqued as we unravel the journey of this booming pickleball club that rose from a casual dinner idea to a 1,200-member powerhouse, synonymous with signature events and a robust member enhancement program. Rest assured, we'll unlock the four-bucket mission that serves as the club's guiding principle, and you'll be hooked on every word.

We'll navigate the many ways the Southlake Paddle Club makes an impact on the pickleball world. From crafting a platform for members to play even when others aren't around, to leveraging cutting-edge technology for effective communication, and fostering a deep sense of community. With Tim and his fellow Board members steering the ship, the club has expanded its ranks and contributed to the community in remarkable ways. But the juicy bit? Well, that's when Tim makes an exhilarating announcement about upcoming membership openings and the club's involvement in three major events, including Southlake Oktoberfest and Carvana PPA National championships in November.

Finally, brace yourself for the big reveal! We'll hear about the club's plans for the MLP style tournament - an event that promises to be an incredible spectacle. This comprehensive conversation with Tim promises to be a blueprint for anyone looking to construct a triumphant club. So tune in, laugh with us, and enrich your understanding of what it takes to run a successful club. We guarantee, it's a hearty blend of inspiration, laughter, and invaluable insights!

Special thanks to Crown Pickleball for their support and sponsorship! Don't waste money on balls that break, Crown pickleballs rarely crack, are more visible and have a higher spin rate than the competitors.
Use our link to receive a discount on your next purchase! https://crownpickleball.store/blazingpaddles

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

Yeah. So it's funny because I do get this question, or I got the question a lot more when we first started getting sponsors, like because I would put a big email out celebrating GT law or TO's. You know, you kind of hear these rumblings like, well, what are you going to do with all that money? You know, almost like um, are you going to use that money for you?

Speaker 2: 0:22

Yeah, that's a nice new car Truck, looks nice.

Speaker 1: 0:27

Yeah, tristan, I go to Hawaii for a week and it's all paid for by the club. No, and you know those are all common questions you get and everything. But our mission from the very beginning was to fill four buckets.

Speaker 2: 0:43

Well, if you weren't already excited now you have to hang on just to see what those four buckets are. Right, we're talking to Tim Wright, the architect of the Southlake Paddle Club, one of the founding fathers. This club has taken on a life of its own. Karen and I are obviously members, but it's over 1200 members. It's got some real special traits to it. It's involved in a lot of things outside of what you might think are just pickleball activities. Tim's a big picture guy and he had big big plans for the club. We're going to hear all about it. We're involved in a lot coming up here this fall. So thank you for sticking around. Episode two, season one Blazing Paddles Saddle up. Glad you did. How are you, buddy?

Speaker 2: 1:26

I'm good how you guys doing, doing great, and we're here with Tim again. He was in one of the last podcasts of the old iteration of this, which was HR Hardball, and again this was probably an indicator that that was not going to be the format much longer, because all we did was talk pickleball. Tim is one of the founders of the Southlake Paddle Club 1200 members strong, and only at that level because you had to actually put a cap on it. Now this place is pickleball crazy. Just looking at what's coming up ahead, there are three pretty big events coming in October. We have October Fests, where we're going to be participating with Southlake Paddle Club and several other people to put on an event. In October Fests you have the MLP style tournament that the Southlake Paddle Club is putting on, and I'm happy enough to be participating in that somehow the work that went into that, and it's going to be a fantastic event.

Speaker 2: 2:18

And then what? In about a month and a half we have the national championships coming here right up the road and farmers branch. So our little Berg here is blowing up with pickleball stuff and Southlake Paddle Club is involved in all three of those, because we have a lot of people volunteering at the nationals too. So I thought let's bring Tim on. I think that, if nothing else, you could share a blueprint of success for people who are trying to build a club and pickleball club or not, whatever the club is you've done some real special things here and I thought we'd ask you a little bit about how it started, what started it and what you're proud of, what some challenges might be, et cetera. So I'm going to shut up for just a second, congratulate you and ask you how did this thing start? Because I know you didn't expect it to be this a year ago?

Speaker 1: 3:03

No, definitely not. Well, listen, I'll just kind of start off with a little bit of the story if some of your listeners don't know how this all started. It was middle of May of 22 and Joe Coneglio and another good friend of ours we call him the godfather of the club he's not really active, but Rob Baldwin was at the dinner that Joe Coneglio myself it was a true fire in South Lake Town Square. We were having dinner with Thrill Wives and we had been playing for probably a good year at that point. In fact, that's when we met you up at Bicentennial Yep. We met Sean Cocher, we met all these people that were great, but we never really had any formalized way of playing with each other. So I was sitting there, maybe a couple of cocktails in, and I said you know, All good ideas came from that.

Speaker 3: 3:51

They really did without that.

Speaker 1: 3:53

I don't know how anything would happen. So I'm sitting there. I'm like you know what? There's got to be a way that I can still play and you can still play if I'm out of town or I'm sick or I've got other plans. There's got to be a way to do this. And we started to brainstorm. I'm like, wait a minute, I think I've got it. Why wouldn't we bring a community together of people that are already playing pickable? Right now, you go to the pickable courts and everybody's kind of stay into themselves. Right, we might say hi and how's it going, but we're not like putting games together, we're not, you know, competing against each other. And I thought, man, that's an opportunity. Well, you needed a couple things. You needed some technology to kind of bring everybody together, and one of those things was creating like a like we use sign up genius, but you could use any program to basically say, hey, I'm going to play on Monday night, I'm signed up, you can sign up too. And so that's kind of how that sign up genius idea started.

Speaker 1: 4:46

But another thing was let's communicate. Right, we don't even communicate outside of this little group of four. So how do you do that? Can you do that through text? Not really. So we use group me. Everybody knows group me. Problem with group me is that you can only have so many people on there before the message that you send that's very important gets pushed to the top and no one sees it anymore. So we've evolved even from there. Now we use Discord with multiple channels. So I say all that because at the time this was just an idea. We had no idea what it would become. But the one center point of everything once we got about 30 people and we thought maybe this could be 50 people or 100 people, it was very slow, right. That first month or two was, I think, we had 100 people. We had a party in August celebrating our 100th member that joined us. We all have beers up at Cowtown Brewery.

Speaker 2: 5:42

And that was yeah, remember that.

Speaker 1: 5:44

I mean, that felt like oh my gosh who's going to imagine a hundred?

Speaker 3: 5:47

people. Look at all these people. Yeah, 100.

Speaker 1: 5:51

And we had Josh, what's the guy's name? He came up to the place a young kid, he's like 24, 25 years old, and he was the centurion oh that's right, that's right. And we prayed him around the bar and he was the centurion, he was felt special that night. We thought you know what? That's pretty cool. I don't know, can this get to 200 or 300? And like, nah you know what? Probably not, or it would take at least a year to do that.

Speaker 3: 6:16

Oh, I thought we wouldn't have enough room to. Well, that's the thing, right, you're always concerned about courts and stuff.

Speaker 1: 6:22

So we got to a point where I was thinking you know what, if we could just get some good fundamental points about our club down and gosh, it's changed so much. But I remember thinking to myself we need to have, we need to serve the people in our club, we need to take care of them. And what do they want? They want organized play. So we came up with all different types of organized play. Of course that's evolved to the point we have now where it's kings and queens and doubles challenges and singles challenges.

Speaker 1: 6:55

But at the time there was a lot of open play. Hey, come on up at seven or you know five, 30 or seven, let's do open play. And then we have these challenge plays where when we did challenge play you did, we used duper and duper was great in the beginning. Well, I know you had some people have their feet. I like it, I like duper from the very beginning.

Speaker 1: 7:20

And I say all that because we continued to listen to everybody. We couldn't please everybody because there were so many people coming on so fast, but if we could serve them in a way that listened, we can provide a place to go. We're going to do the right thing as leaders of the club, and I think that's what was the catalyst that caught fire, because the word got out there that we were doing organized play and you could just sign up and we were doing some really cool events outside of going to happy hours and doing things like clinics with pros, and we were ordering balls for our members and just like we had this endless thing of things we were doing.

Speaker 2: 8:00

it went into the club Party in the park.

Speaker 1: 8:01

Yeah, party in the park Every Friday night. We'd have 50 people at play and pick a ball and drink some beers and play some music. So I could ramble on. I don't want to keep doing that, but that's just kind of the thing that sparked it, I think in the very beginning.

Speaker 2: 8:17

What do you think? Because it did it kind of went incremental and I know that we were part of that first lot of enroll.

Speaker 1: 8:25

First wave, yeah, yeah, the first wave. What do we call it? We're founding members.

Speaker 2: 8:31

Then it kind of went into hyperdrive and I think the first 100 founding members.

Speaker 2: 8:34

That's right, man. A lot of it is had to be. I mean, what you just described is great, and I think the club could have stopped there. It could have been, that would have been great, it would have been fun, but I think you had a bigger vision than that, because what we've seen, I mean you're running this much differently than any other clubs that I can think of. One thing that's unique, by the way, is you don't charge the members. What's free in this world? Nothing, nothing is free in this world.

Speaker 3: 9:03

Except for being a South Lake Battle Club member.

Speaker 2: 9:05

That's amazing, but yet we're still able to do some things and have some events. And I mean, you've come up with this. Well, I'll let you speak to it, but the members are not at any cost to be a part of this club.

Speaker 1: 9:16

That's right. Yeah, my friends call me crazy, friends that aren't part of this club. They're like, ok, you're spending all this time You're not making any money. It's not just your friends. Yeah, there's people inside the club too, I know.

Speaker 1: 9:28

What are you doing? You know this is a passion project for me. I never thought it would make me a dollar. I never went into it with that thought and I remember telling Sean and Joe let's do this for as long as we can without charging anybody and it doesn't cost the whole lot, right, we have a sign up genius subscription. We've got a mail chip subscription for sending emails out. I mean, it just didn't cost the whole lot. And we weren't doing big events. We were all in the park that we use is free. Thanks to Southlake, it's an open park.

Speaker 1: 9:58

So it got to a point where I don't know six, seven months in, and we really started to think about one of our foundational thoughts, which was giving back to the community. And how do you do that? Well, you can pick up all tournaments. You can actually roll up your sleeves and go get involved with community charity nonprofits that are in our backyard. There's a lot of ways to give back. We can just give money, we can write checks, but we didn't have any money to do that, right? So we came up with the idea at that point we need to do sponsorship and, karen, you're on the board.

Speaker 1: 10:35

This took us a while to kind of get to this point, we thought let's do bronze, silver and gold sponsorships and charge them differently, and we'll do cool things. And I think I finally came up with this. I just said, listen, let's just keep this really simple, because the more sponsors that we have, the more work it will be on our board and no one's getting paid here and we're already super busy with our lives. So why don't we just keep it really simple, have one level of sponsorship? We finally landed on the term or the word platinum sponsor, and that was going to be $5,000. And we sat down multiple times figuring out OK, what can we give a company in Southlake that they'll pay $5,000 for? I mean, we need to give them some pretty cool stuff, right? And we put together a pretty neat list. I won't go through all that.

Speaker 1: 11:22

And then our first sponsor was Joe Coniglio. He's the managing partner at Greenberg-Turg in Dallas and he's like, well, I'll jump in, I'll do it. And that, basically, was the first one. And then we brought on an orthopedic surgeon group, that's TOS Orthopedics. And then we brought on a bank Regional Texas Bank or Texas Regional Bank, which is Mimi Tran. And then we have brought the ASAD group on. This is a real estate group and that's Kim and Mark Assad. And then we just recently brought a Cures Health, cures Function Health, which is a chiropractic group. So Karen is our. You can probably speak to this more than I can here. I mean the reason that we sought them out. It wasn't like a you didn't have to have like 500 transactions to kind of make your money back. You could just do a few potentially, or maybe even one, and get your money back. I mean you can speak to that.

Speaker 3: 12:22

Right. Well, I mean, I think what we're offering is they spend that on magazine ads, right, and you're sitting there in a magazine next to your competitor. We're giving them exclusive marketing through our club, through all of our different communication channels. I mean that's very unique. And also we, I mean we've I think we've gone above and beyond what we contracted by naming our events, giving naming our events after the sponsors. I love seeing the sponsors come out to our challenges and meeting folks and giving their swag away. I reviewed some of that today. That was really cool seeing some of those videos and, yeah, it's a really neat way to give back to, like you said, community, but you know it also just by servicing the businesses that are in our community right in that manner. But you said something we skipped a step because we became a nonprofit ourselves in order to be able to do this too.

Speaker 3: 13:28

So it's like I mean it's just a win-win situation for our sponsors and for our club because our club gets access to some really cool partners that we've made through these sponsorships. I mean, it's not like we we've even said no to some sponsors, right, it's not. It wasn't about the money, it was about having the right fit for the club.

Speaker 1: 13:47

Yeah, it's really been incredible how it's all worked out and we have said no to some people, but the people that we've said yes to, we've vetted them just like they vetted us Right. We didn't wanna just say yes to anybody. And the folks that we have on board are just amazing. They're so supportive and we've been able to leverage that relationship in many ways. I mean, we had our big draft party last Friday night.

Speaker 3: 14:11

I don't know how many people we had up there 50, 60, I don't think more At least, at least it was a huge party and I showed that to what am I saying?

Speaker 2: 14:18

You said that was a Friday, that was a Sunday night, I mean.

Speaker 3: 14:20

Sunday night.

Speaker 2: 14:20

Yeah, yeah, yeah and that was even more amazing, he had 50 people up there and having a draft, an MLP draft, I'd guarantee 95% of the people there had never played, or even thought of playing an MLP seven.

Speaker 3: 14:33

I wonder if that even happens anywhere in any pickleball club. But that's what so speak, to the fact of like why we even went after sponsorships and money since we had such low overhead.

Speaker 1: 14:43

Yeah. So it's funny, cause I do get this question, or I got the question a lot more when we first started getting sponsors, like cause I would put a big email out celebrating GTLaw or TOs. You know, you kind of hear these rumblings like well, what are you going to do with all that money? You know almost like are you going to? Is that money for you?

Speaker 2: 15:01

Yeah, that's a nice new car and you brought on vacation. Your truck looks nice, is that what you do?

Speaker 1: 15:07

Tristan and I are going to Hawaii for a week and see it's all paid for by the club. No, and you know those are all common questions you get and everything. But our mission from the very beginning was to fill four buckets and we tried to convey this to the club and you know how it is. I mean, there's some people that are really connected and they hear every word we're saying and there's some that kind of tune in once a month and that's fine too. But really and maybe there's going to be a bunch of members listening to this and I can explain it now but there's really four buckets and this was always the plan. It wasn't like an afterthought, it was just well designed and one was giving back to our community Right and and and helping the community that we are in or just outside of. That's a big piece of it. The other bucket is Education. Now, this is something that we're thinking about right now. We have ideas we've not implemented yet, but we just started our sponsorship program here in the last. You know, we just got a sponsor last week or two weeks ago and then maybe two months before that. So we're going to implement some educational programs so we can help Not only people understand the game of pickleball, but help people in Communities where pickleball might be the difference between maybe them going on the street or going and having fun at a rec center to play Pickleball. Mean that's kind of our vision, right? We have a lot of cool ideas we have to implement, but the other one is Member enhancement. Now, this is the coolest one, or action to the coolest one. It's a. It's a. It's a great one for our members because, as you said, john, there's no membership fee and, like this tournament that we're having Unfortunately can't have hundreds of people. We only have 48 players and some reserves, but none of those people are going to pay a dime to play in a three-day event. Now, if you go out to rock wall and you go play in the PPA Tournament or whatever turn you play in every day you play, you know it could be a hundred bucks or 80 bucks. So for us to give back to our Members who aren't even paying, just to show, show kind of how we're leaning into them, is Incredible and it's in.

Speaker 1: 17:06

Like you said, karen, there's nothing out there for free. I'm so proud that we can do this for free and guess what? It's a win-win because they get something for free and our sponsors are Front and center for everything that we do. We put them on a pedestal everywhere we go. Now, why do we do that? It's because, well, they're they deserve it, because they paid the $5,000.

Speaker 1: 17:25

But we believe in them and we believe that why would you want to go just look up on Google an orthopedic surgeon or a real estate agent, when you have someone that you already have an in with the love of the game of pickleball right and their connection to our club? So I'm not saying there's no force. You know you have to use anybody, but why wouldn't you just step into it and say, let's go check it out first, and and I'll talk about our first look program here in a Little bit, but that's kind of how that that second step was our first look program, but that's why we we do it. So it's a win-win for our members because they get that, and then to win for the sponsors. The fourth bucket is our operational costs, which still are fairly minimal. But you know we'll buy things like our tents to, you know, help with sunshade, and we'll buy.

Speaker 3: 18:13

Stickers and yeah.

Speaker 1: 18:17

It's minimal stuff, it's not like we're going out and going crazy, but it creates a brand, because without all those things it's kind of tough to create a brand. Our website you know that's a brand Southwick Paddle Club. If you've ever gone to that, go to Southwick Paddle Club commons.

Speaker 1: 18:33

A bunch of cool stuff there, so you know that's it, that's that's pretty much it I mean in terms of what we're doing with those, with those funds, and we're excited about what we're still gonna do with those funds. It's a 25 that we've got five sponsors, twenty five thousand dollar Budget and we're gonna do some really cool stuff with that, not including me going on vacation with any of that money.

Speaker 3: 18:55

Yeah and so building a brand who's this and who's this in our tent at.

Speaker 2: 19:01

Is it that's?

Speaker 3: 19:02

an elite waters and Ben Johns only the top players in the world hanging out.

Speaker 1: 19:08

The camera.

Speaker 3: 19:10

Oh.

Speaker 1: 19:14

You know, you know who those two are, are they?

Speaker 2: 19:16

are they good?

Speaker 3: 19:17

no I think I could take her.

Speaker 2: 19:22

Well, all right. So what was the actual founding date, Tim, do you know?

Speaker 1: 19:27

it was June 1st, june 1st 22 okay so you had the first birthday.

Speaker 2: 19:34

I know that we were trying to plan to have like a big birthday bash, but then Satan went and made it 108 degrees every day here all all summer.

Speaker 2: 19:42

So I know, we'll end up doing that, that's so. You know, 14, 15 ish months, you've accomplished quite a bit. Karen mentioned, you know, non-profit. The membership is at 1200. You had to cap it several times and then have open enrollment. You've got tournaments, you've got sponsors, got a lot you could be proud of. Can you pick one thing that you might be most proud of that we haven't already discussed?

Speaker 1: 20:05

Yeah, it's, it's not. It's more intangible, I would say, and it really fires me up every day that I think about it and it's the community that we built. I'll tell you a quick story. We there's a lot of stories like this, I'll just pick one.

Speaker 1: 20:20

But I was talking to a gentleman in our club this has just been a few months ago and he pulled me aside and he said you know, it's really interesting because my kids, you know, left the house, you know going to school, they're growing up, they're all back. It's my wife and I, but all of our kids, for the most part, were based around kids, sports and maybe some work stuff. But as that goes, so does some of your friends. Right, like, you're not as tight with the friends because you're not going to the baseball parties and the football parties and all that and and and. So he tells me he's like you know what my friend group kind of shrunk down is. Maybe it was like three to five friends that I really had, that I was really close with. And this, this club, has changed everything. Like I've got 2030, 40 friends that I'm hanging out with all the time. We're not only playing pickleball, we're doing stuff outside of pickleball, we're doing tournaments together, we're traveling together and it's complete. It's the exact words. It completely changed my life.

Speaker 1: 21:21

And like and you hear, and you guys hear these stories too. I mean, I hear stories like this all the time and that, to me, makes it all worthwhile, because if we can serve others in our lifetime to make other lives better, that's what it's all about. Right, it's not all about me, it's about what can I do to help your life Improve. And I know for a fact 100%, and I'm not taking all the credit there's been a lot of people involved Joe and Sean and all of our directors and our board, karen and Marcus and Karen Bussle and Larissa and the new and just all these we have like 30 or 40 core members have been here from the very beginning. John, you're included in that, and it's like it's an amazing group with.

Speaker 1: 22:03

If it weren't for all, 30, 40, 50, we wouldn't have this accomplishment. But that's the one thing I'm the most proud of that we've been able to build a community that is really bonded in so many ways. And I will say this if there's one challenge that I would say, it's getting more people to buy into this group. It's not a cult or anything like that, but just buy into what we're trying to do here. Pay attention, listen to what we're doing, get engaged on Discord. There's so much cool stuff going on on Discord. Join a tournament, do a charity event at Chicken and Pickle with us. I mean, there's just like you know. Read our emails there's so much going on.

Speaker 3: 22:45

We only have a 60% over right. Come on people. Well, here's in part of it.

Speaker 2: 22:49

I understand your frustration, but you know it's the Pareto principle right. I mean, 20% of the people are gonna do 80% of the stuff, and I think that that holds true with this too.

Speaker 2: 22:59

I do think that more people could be getting more out of it, and I think you know the other God. I said there was three big things. Four big things because we have our courts finally opening here, a brand new pickleball center here in Southlake which will actually have nine dedicated pickleball courts. I think that might, you know, kickstart a lot more members being active as well, because one of the challenges we have is you are very aware of is we don't have much in the way of courts, which causes challenges the more popular sport gets, because we're not the only ones trying to get those courts.

Speaker 2: 23:31

So I know that's been a challenge here recently too. I don't know if you are gonna speak to that, but we I think that's another thing that shows kind of the character of the club and the direction that we have is, we know there's gonna be times when there's gonna be competition for these public courts and they are public courts. We could get eight people on one court and sometimes they'll have two tennis players that go up there and just wanna hit the ball back and forth, and you know what? We just have to tip our hat and be polite and share, and it you know it grinds my gears and I know it doesn't have a few other people too.

Speaker 2: 24:04

but you know, they're not our courts, and soon we will have our courts, and I think that might make a big difference too.

Speaker 1: 24:11

Yeah, we'll see how that all plays out with the operational plan in Southlake. I mean our club will definitely get use out of that, but I still foresee us playing a lot up on the hill based on how they're gonna operate that. I had a great conversation last week with Eric Clay, who's the new manager there. I never met him we're gonna have lunch at some point here and just seems like a really great guy. He's got some really good ideas and so I look forward to, you know, having a relationship with those guys. Sean Cornelius is the coordinator along with Eric, and so you know we'll see how that all plays out.

Speaker 1: 24:51

But to the court availability piece, I say that you know, if you're listening and you're part of our club especially, there's no doubt we get frustrated. But I would say let's just add some perspective into all this, because when you go to most places, especially now with the growth of the game, you're gonna play one game and you're gonna maybe sit for a couple. Especially you don't get an open play event. What I'm proud about our club is when we have our scheduled events. It's doubles challenge 4.0, which is a TOS orthopedics night. By the way, on Thursdays Every one of our key events has a sponsored name to it, but when you come to that, you're gonna play five straight games.

Speaker 2: 25:33

Yep.

Speaker 1: 25:34

Right, and you're gonna when you play King and Queen. You know we like to get four courts but if we get three you're gonna play three games, sit one game. So overall I don't think that's too bad right, and as time goes on there'll be more courts in the community, in the cities, and we'll be better. But you know there's no reason to get too upset about all of that. Let's work with people and let's you know.

Speaker 3: 26:00

We've been a little spoiled. I mean, I started going to chicken and pickle open play. I used to go to wagon wheel open play right and you sit. That's part of it. Here we have an organized play where you are not only it's a different style, then you'll get an open play right, but you get recognized as being a winner. You're. We're doing these cute videos now for the winners. They do a little video and we're putting them on our socials and it's just getting better and better. Man, that's like their creativity.

Speaker 3: 26:33

I love the one with Allison the other day like proofing and what you're doing with them to, like, doctor them up, and so we can go with the theme and it's got a song. It's just really cool stuff.

Speaker 1: 26:44

Yeah, I don't know, can you see this? Probably can't see it, it's probably not worth showing, but like it's something. This is another part of the community piece that I'm really excited about, because people are really getting into these championship. You know videos, yeah, at the end of the night, like you said, people will kind of just take a minute, figure out what they're going to do, and some are pretty lame, you know, but some are really awesome and like it. Like I don't know if you can even see this one, but let's just play it Come on which one was it?

Speaker 1: 27:11

Anybody can't even hear it. Can you hear it, the one that Derrick's going down?

Speaker 2: 27:15

Oh, yeah, oh yeah we can see it Nobody had bad breath.

Speaker 1: 27:19

Yes, I mean just you know, he goes down, he goes down. Robert comes over, tries to save his life. He's got that breath.

Speaker 3: 27:29

I mean, that's coordination, that's like it.

Speaker 2: 27:33

Well see, that's what you should do with it. Have some fun with it. Yeah, I think there's a lot of pressure on some people to get up there. Maybe they weren't planning to win, but they're like I got nothing, so you know it's always good to have one in your back pocket. You never know what.

Speaker 1: 27:46

Yeah, Go there Like like Allison, I got to get props to Allison. I mean, every time she wins she's I don't know she's thinking about the stuff where she gets there. But here she is, she's putting on the makeup, she's looking all pretty, getting ready for an autograph session, and then look at this, and then she comes down and there she's going to do some autographs.

Speaker 3: 28:05

I mean it was so good. It was so good. I was like that's brilliant. I posted that one today on Facebook I was just laughing and laughing. I was like it's so good, that's so good so you know, listen, we work hard.

Speaker 1: 28:19

We, you know, have families, we have relationships with our spouses and all that stuff. It's just a great way to get away and kind of break free from your normal everyday lives, and I think people are finding a gear coming out to play in our club that they just haven't found before. I mean, they're just having a great time and I don't know, I just that's that.

Speaker 3: 28:42

Yeah, oh super.

Speaker 2: 28:44

Yeah, we've well, yeah, so. Tim, here's the magic question because you know we're in a town of what? 26,000 people or something. You have 1200 members in the South Lake Paddle Club and we're capped. How do we, how do you become a member if you wanted to become a member, since we don't have open enrollment?

Speaker 1: 29:05

So one of the challenges that we have right now is obviously courts, but I view that as an opportunity. So I've been working with other places that have courts around to try to open things up. So maybe what we're going to see in the future is we're going to see and I'm just throwing out places right On a Tuesday night, you may have two events at Bicentennial and then you might have two events someplace else that we have access to Now the challenge with going on the place.

Speaker 1: 29:38

They want to charge, right, and then we say we don't charge. So we have to figure out how we're going to work through that. Even in our own facility down the hill with those nine courts being built, that's not a free facility. That's going to be the Taj Mahal is not free. We're going to have to pay our way to play in that place. So how do you do that? Do we end up charging a fee? How do we do that? There's a lot of questions we have to work through, but we do know that there are people we have a lot of. We gained a lot of respect from places in neighboring communities and other facilities like Hackberry or Lifetime, and they're looking at us going wow, we could use some of their business. So let's open our doors and maybe we can have some of their events at our place.

Speaker 1: 30:25

Right, we could have never done that before, but now they're like going well, these guys are the real deal. We're actually up to 1265 members now.

Speaker 2: 30:33

Is that the number 1265?

Speaker 1: 30:35

Yeah, 1265. So it's one of those things where it's just kind of going to take care of itself, I think, and then when the nine courts open up, we're going to be okay there too. But I'm excited we're working on a plan right now to bring back skills and drills for the members that want that. That was a super popular thing that we did on the back of the day and we just didn't have the courts. Well, hopefully we'll get some courts that will be able to do that, Maybe start off every other week and then do it every week, and we'll have. We have three or four right now certified instructors within our club that would basically that have already said they would step up and do that. Now. There would be a cost for our members, Wouldn't be a whole lot, but they would step up and do the instruction.

Speaker 1: 31:22

I was doing that instruction every week myself for a long time and I loved it. But you know I was kind of spread thin. So that's just little things that were just continue to add the tournament that's coming up, the MLP tournament. That's going to be huge with Hackberry. Then we have our final on Sunday, October 22nd at Shicken and Pickle. Ice Shaker is going to be the sponsor, the center court sponsor, for that. So yeah, we're just, we're just. There's kind of endless on things that we can do with this thing.

Speaker 2: 31:51

Are you going to open up membership anytime again, because I know I've had people ask.

Speaker 1: 31:55

So I wanted to. I have a special announcement that I was going to.

Speaker 2: 31:58

Writing news.

Speaker 1: 32:00

Yeah, I haven't even shared this with the board, although I have kind of talked about it, and it's something that I felt for a while that we need to do, especially to maybe release some of that pressure up at Bicentennial. So you ready for the big news?

Speaker 3: 32:14

Yes.

Speaker 1: 32:15

Okay, I'm not going to talk to when we're going to open the club's membership up as a whole. People that are listening might know we do things very different there. We have enrollment windows every two to three months and we do it for five days, and the reason we do that is there's a lot of work to be done in those five days, and so we'd rather just cram all that work into those five days versus having it open all the time. And the last time we did this, which was in July, we added 550 new members to our club. That's crazy.

Speaker 1: 32:47

I thought it'd be like 300 and that kind of blew. That blew the wall, the words just out there, right, you got to join the club, got to join the club and it doesn't hurt that, it's free. So here's the other thing. So what I thought we should do is for anybody in Southlake, okay, and there's a way that they're going to prove that anybody in Southlake, effective October 1st, will no longer have to wait to be a member of the club.

Speaker 3: 33:14

Okay, all right Okay.

Speaker 1: 33:17

So if you want to join, you would join just like everybody else. You go to Southlakepaddleclubcom, go to members, click on the green button, fill out the form that comes to us and we process your membership. And really what that means is there's a welcoming email that you get and you get set up on SignUp Genius and you get set up on Discord, which is our communication platform. Okay, so we're going to do that October 1st. What we're going to do there is we're not going to open it up for people outside of Southlake until our next enrollment window, and at this point that's probably going to be November. You know we're already into October here and a few more, a few, a couple more weeks, less than a couple of weeks, and we'll probably do that end of October, early November, which should coincide with the opening of the new facility, the Taj Mahal.

Speaker 2: 34:13

The Taj Mahal pickleball.

Speaker 1: 34:15

Yes.

Speaker 2: 34:16

And we'll have the Nationals right after that, that's right.

Speaker 3: 34:21

Are you playing in Nationals Tim?

Speaker 1: 34:23

I'm not Okay, no.

Speaker 3: 34:24

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 34:27

I didn't make the cut in the last tournament that I played in. That could have gotten my golden ticket. And then I've got a little bit of a knee issue that I'm playing like once a week, twice a week, trying to get back into it. But no, I'm not, I'm not playing.

Speaker 3: 34:40

Well, you know, you can still go without having a. Apparently they they opened it back up.

Speaker 1: 34:47

Yeah, is that still lottery based?

Speaker 3: 34:50

I don't think so. I just, for some reason, I'm thinking that they didn't get the. It's not full. But I don't know I could be, let me double, let me fact check myself. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 35:01

Do a full fact check.

Speaker 3: 35:02

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 35:03

Yeah, no, I may be so, and you know what I might still do that A part of me has just been a little bit on the sideline here with my knees, so I haven't really thought a whole lot about it, honestly.

Speaker 2: 35:12

Right, right, the pickleball injuries. They do, they do challenges.

Speaker 3: 35:17

Tim. I played this morning with Allison and Mary Reiniac, me and Tess against them.

Speaker 1: 35:23

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 35:24

They want me to check their games and I am sitting on ice right now. She was literally sitting on ice.

Speaker 1: 35:30

I literally what happened out there?

Speaker 3: 35:33

They destroyed me. They destroyed me, they had me. I have a new nickname. It went from okay, I was the wall, then what was I? The Tasmanian Devil, then Little Monster, and now Allison gave me the nickname of Duck Duck. You know what Duck Duck is?

Speaker 2: 35:51

Duck, duck.

Speaker 3: 35:52

You know when you go to a shooting gallery and that was ducks like or they're here then they're there, then they're there, then they're there and you gotta take them down.

Speaker 1: 35:59

Are you the?

Speaker 3: 35:59

one shooting or the one ducking. I was the duck running everywhere and getting everything she's like you are everywhere, and you know, because of course I can't let a stinkin' ball go.

Speaker 2: 36:08

Drives me nuts to let a ball go, so I was all over the place this morning.

Speaker 3: 36:12

I am. I am literally. I told John, when this is over, I'm done, I'm going to go sit in bed.

Speaker 1: 36:17

Well, when is it over for you? You play, you're like, at seven leagues. You play at seven leagues. Four leagues.

Speaker 3: 36:22

This is their schedule. So Friday morning driving to Brookhaven for a TCD league. Friday night we're playing mixed TCD. Saturday morning getting up playing mixed league. Sunday night playing that makeup from in McKinney that you know that rain out. So Sunday night You're leaving one out. Oh, I am. What is it? Freaking Bruce Reath recruited you as a sub Bruce.

Speaker 1: 36:52

Reath.

Speaker 2: 36:52

He advanced to us for our MLP practice match Saturday oh yeah.

Speaker 3: 36:57

Okay, so Saturday morning, so two times on Friday, saturday morning, saturday afternoon I'm practicing with Bruce's team for against John, and then Sunday evening going to McKinney for the makeup session and then Monday morning with a couple of the girls that you know we're doing some high level like just training play.

Speaker 1: 37:17

I mean I'm sick. Do you even? I mean right about burnout, because that seems like you're on the verge of burnout. Let us be honest.

Speaker 3: 37:27

No, I'm not, because it just I'm getting better and better. I mean I think even this morning you know it was even though it was tough.

Speaker 2: 37:36

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 37:37

We. I mean I had to really think quick and I mean I wasn't, it wasn't like it was, I was getting destroyed. So I mean that's a lot of growth from from where I was. Yeah, you know yeah, that's good.

Speaker 1: 37:50

Hey, quick change of subject. But along those same lines, what do you guys think about the SBC MLP matchups on Friday, saturday and Sunday, those spots, is that you think people are going to fill those up? I mean, you guys are going outside of those, it seems like on Saturday.

Speaker 2: 38:07

Well, we had to because of previous commitments, but I think it's a great idea.

Speaker 1: 38:10

Yeah, ok, good, so you think it's going to work.

Speaker 3: 38:13

Yeah, have they. Have people signed up?

Speaker 1: 38:15

We're going to play on Sunday, the news team and then the race team that I'm on we're playing on Sunday afternoon, so I think we're the only ones signed up so far. But again, again, I hope that a lot of the members are going to listen to this. If you're on a team an MLP team I didn't do the math, but there's a ton of spots, a ton of opportunities you could play before you actually play in October. And just speaking from last year, that would have been an awesome thing, like we practiced a couple of times, but once we got to the games, john, you were on my team, right?

Speaker 2: 38:47

We didn't play games before that Did we no yeah. No, no so think about what could have happened, John, if we played some games. I think about it every freaking night, Tim.

Speaker 1: 38:58

You know, you're on the right side with that left lefty forehand and I'm on the left side with the righty forehand.

Speaker 2: 39:04

I mean, that was quite a it would have been special.

Speaker 3: 39:06

Well, what do we make? We have?

Speaker 1: 39:07

12 teams. I think we were fifth or something, were we?

Speaker 2: 39:10

I was our fourth, I want to say, I'll say fourth yeah that sounds good. I'll say fourth so big times here in pickleball, not only with the club but with Octoberfest, with the MLP tournament, with the national pickleball center.

Speaker 1: 39:25

Well, you got to explain what Octoberfest is yeah, let's break that down If we had a couple of minutes here, right, let's go ahead, go ahead. So we're.

Speaker 3: 39:30

This is for the people listening. The the chamber has this annual Octoberfest. It's number one in the state Of Texas by I don't know who rates. I think that's kind of funny that there's a actual system Is that most beer consumed as a housework.

Speaker 1: 39:52

I don't know, like, what's the criteria for that?

Speaker 3: 39:56

But number in the top five in the country, apparently, and so they were looking for new ways to entertain people. And one, a friend of ours who, who runs the Wiener dog races for Octoberfest, is how about pickleball? And do I have the right for that? So next thing, you know, we're meeting with the chamber and and what turned into hey, can you do something Saturday, sunday afternoon, as I'm hearing him talk and he's like you know, we need something that's going to entertain people, keep people there. And I'm like well, nothing's more entertaining than pickleball, of course. Why not run pickleball the whole time? Yeah, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, walk out 20, seven hours of pickleball.

Speaker 3: 40:35

So we purchased a pickle roll. We're going to have it in South Lake Town Square. This is the first of its kind I think that I've ever heard of. Certainly I haven't heard of anything like this in the area. I mean, I think they've done tried to do like some kind of you know clinics or just teaching kids, but but on like chalking off the street, right. So we're actually purchased a pickle roll, we're bringing it in. That's that, if for anyone who's listening to this.

Speaker 3: 41:02

You know we're going to be talking about it in. That's that. If for anyone listening to pickle roll and you don't know what that is, it's what the PPA uses when they do these events. In fact they're they're crazy busy right now setting up for the nationals that's coming here at Brookhaven. I didn't realize that they were actually using those courts for for these tournaments, but they do, and so we'll have an actual court and we're going to have exhibition matches and just high level matches. And when I say exhibition, it's going to be like South Lake and South Lake City Council versus our neighboring Keller City Council, or we're actually going to have a special locked in yet, but it's getting there.

Speaker 1: 41:45

I'm pretty sure we're working on it. Well, but that's that's the type of thing we're talking about Right.

Speaker 3: 41:49

That's the idea is to do something that's going to maybe place fire right. We're working on that to see if we can tee that up.

Speaker 2: 41:57

So yeah, even most importantly, we're going to have some South Lake paddle club Members that are going to be out there playing. I think that the announcement went out today. Today is Wednesday, the 20th, and there's four different ways you can participate you can be a player, you can be a volunteer, you can be a sponsor, you can have your naming rights to one of the matches, you can be a vendor. So we do have a 20 by 10 tent going to be court side. We've already talked to several people. We've locked down some of the spaces already and there's over 100,000 people that'll walk through those little streets in downtown South Lake over a three day period. So we will have more information about that.

Speaker 2: 42:35

This is going to be first class. This is not chalk on the street. It's going to be a first class pickleball event.

Speaker 1: 42:42

My hat is off to the two of you because the dedication to this game of pickleball I don't know if there's a couple in our city In fact there's not, let's be honest that is dedicated to this game and doing the things you guys are doing, and it's easy to partner with you guys because you're all in pickleball, right.

Speaker 3: 43:02

So my hat's off to you guys.

Speaker 1: 43:04

My hat's off. You've got Dig Pro. You know what Great merchandise I know. You've got the pickleball business that's just about to start, so corporations could basically have events that they can participate and bring their employees out to play. What a great concept that is. So my hat's off to you guys.