Humans of Padel
Join your host Max Marsh Pickard, General Manager of Padel Art & Co founder of The Padel Outlet in a weekly entertaining dive into the world of Padel and the people involved in the industry
Humans of Padel
The Robotic Revolution in Racket Sports | Haitham Eletrabi
website: www.tennibot.com
Instagram @tennibot
The episode explores the transformative impact of Tennibot, a robotic ball collector and training partner for racket sports. Haitham Eletrabi discusses how Tennibot enhances practice sessions for players and coaches, increasing efficiency and providing valuable training support.
• Introduction to Tennibot and its offerings
• Haytham's personal journey and business inception
• The technological advancements of Tennibot
• Integration of AI in sports training
• Benefits for both casual players and professionals
• Market trends and expansion potential
• Software adaptations for different racket sports
• Future plans for performance analysis capabilities
• How to purchase a Tennibot and their pricing
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Humans of Paddle podcast. In this episode, I'm joined by Haytham El Trebi, the CEO and founder of Tennybot, the world's first robotic tennis ball collector and ball machine. It's a very interesting episode about how ball machines and AI technology can assist in the development of tennis and paddle players. I hope you enjoy the episode as much as I did. Have a great day Well, Haytham, thank you for coming to the UAE and taking the time to have a chat with me. We were just on court trying the Tenibot, both in tennis and in paddle. So what is the Tenibot and what can it bring to paddle and tennis players?
Speaker 2:Thanks, Max, for having me. First of all, it has been a pleasure. Tenibot is. We build autonomous robots for racket sports. Our first product, the Rover, was basically a Roomba for tennis Runs around the court, picks up balls and continuously saving time for players, coaches and maximizing the time of the court. The second product that I just showed you is a partner this one. Think of it as an autonomous, smart tennis ball machine or a paddle ball machine or a pickleball ball machine, so it's 10 times better than anything else in the market. It moves, it sees you creating the most human-like shots and, because it knows where you are, it can create shots that make you run, or it can give it to you directly and then have all the bills and whistles of a typical ball machine added on top of this, and then the AI features because of the ability to move on the court ball machine added on top of this, and then the AI features because of the ability to move on the court.
Speaker 2:So how did you decide to get into this business? I was playing tennis as a kid. My mom and dad wanted my sister to be the next Tiffy Graff. Spoiler alert didn't work. She loved playing tennis, but the running back and forth was the most fun part for her. But I was her hitting partner, so I go with it was her before and after the lessons.
Speaker 2:And then I didn't play for years, right before I moved to the US, and this is when I started picking up the sport and fell in love with it all over again. But I always, always hated picking up the sport, whether you're playing with a ball machine, practicing serve hitting with a coach that 15-20 minutes you dread picking up balls and stop playing. It always frustrated me, wanted to buy something, but there was nothing out there remotely close to what I was envisioning. Everything you have to stop playing to go pick up balls. You have to stop playing to. Before I can even get into the next workout, I already deflated from all the time wasted in it. So this is when I started working on the Tenny Boots Rover and shortly afterwards a professor of mine in Harvard introduced me to Lincoln and I've been working together ever since and the growth of team from two people to seven people full-time and couple of other folks part-time as well so you and Lincoln a business partner.
Speaker 1:So what's your role and what's his role? How do you divide the tasks?
Speaker 2:so Lincoln, basically on the technical side, lincoln is a CTO, I'm the CEO. So Lincoln basically write the code, anything software that goes into the device. It's able to communicate with the phone, communicate with the net and upload videos and all that fun stuff. Linkedin takes care of it. Me on the business side the sales partnerships, the strategy, all the fun stuff.
Speaker 1:How complicated is the technical side to that? Because when I see the machine moving and it's looking where I am, it can follow me and all these kind of things. I mean it seems like something from a movie from like in 50 years. How complex is that actually to build? A great question.
Speaker 2:So it is fairly complex. It took us years for the rover to get this technology to look as seamless for the end user where it's COR moves on the court, doesn't hit obstacles and it detects the net, auto-calibrate all that fun stuff. Years of research and development and testing, and then going back what worked, what doesn't work and reiterate. And then we used a lot of this knowledge to go into the partners. That's why we were able to take down the development time from six years for the rover to six months for the partner, where we implemented all that knowledge and experience. So the end goal for us is to make it simple, as simple as possible for the user, but that takes a lot of complexity under the hood for us to get into.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because that's two different things, isn't it like? The experience, your user experience, and then, I guess, the technical side behind that to make it work from the whole, whatever back office or whatever you guys call it. It must be really hard to combine those two. And what are the challenges that you guys have faced in growing this business and developing it?
Speaker 2:One comment you mentioned earlier. A lot of times people will think it's sci-fi and they're seeing and believing. Once they see it in action, they're like, oh, it is real. A lot of times people think this is CGI or graphic. From the amount of technology that goes into it, that looks like a sci-fi movie. So technology that goes into it, that looks like a sci-fi movie. So a lot of times once you do a demo or show it to people or go to a tennis event or battle event or pickleball event and having this going there, you see that people basically just switch on. Is this a reality?
Speaker 1:It's actually possible. It's actually possible.
Speaker 2:Whether it's moving, or whether it's shooting, or whether it's seeing you all that fun stuff. And then, like every new technology, the idea is you need to educate the customer, educate the audience, make them understand, help them see. How's the difference? Luckily for us, the product is very self-explanatory. So once you take it out, oh my God, it's a ball machine that moves. We're like oh wow, that makes a ball like Roomba for tennis. So the idea is just get over that initial hump. Afterwards people get to try it out. It's just a matter of like how fast can I get one?
Speaker 1:Do you think that the Tenibot partner will replace coaches?
Speaker 2:I feel the Tenibot partner is a great tool for two categories of folks Individuals who want to play tennis or battle or pickle, with the convenience and flexibility without having to set up with someone Someone cancels last minute and couldn't get someone in time, or that other person feeling well, or they just want to play I don't know in their backyard at 2 am in the morning where no one else will be available.
Speaker 2:This is from a player standpoint Convenience, having someone competitive your level all the time. For the coaching standpoint, I think it's a value add for it it's significant in the sense of like okay, I'm on the court already Three, four, five hours, six hours a day. Ability to have that partner as a trusted tool to help save your legs and extend your time on the court, because suddenly it's feeding the player and you're actually adding the most value to the player instead of screaming on the other side of the table more fast or switch your leg or move your legs or any of that stuff. Now you are standing next to the player, giving them that input and feedback, and we've seen big, big percentage of our customers have been coaches and academies because they saw the value add. Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 1:I mean you see, here, for example, it's noisy right when you go in there. You walk through, there's balls bouncing glass, you know there's music, it's a very noisy thing. So it's true that coaches are often shouting over the net to try and get the player to understand what they're saying. So if you can remove that part of you just feeding balls, which is not that technical, and then you can focus on developing the player much closer on how they're holding the racket and communicating a lot more with them, I think it makes perfect sense for coaches to use it yeah, and for players.
Speaker 2:Obviously the value add for them is better, because I'm not coming here to take a lesson with max to someone feed people. I'm coming here to listen to the gyms, the advice, the feedback, the stuff nobody else can give me. So I feel it's value adds for the players and the coaches.
Speaker 1:Yeah, makes sense. And I mean your business is currently mostly in the US, I guess.
Speaker 2:Most about 70% of our sales and revenue coming from the US, but the other 30% are growing quickly in the Gulf region and also Australia, canada and Japan.
Speaker 1:Which markets do you see have big potential for your products and why do you think it's different market to market?
Speaker 2:do you see, have big potential for your products. And why do you think it's different market to market? It's funny, it heavily depends on the sport. So tennis obviously huge in the us. In europe, pickleball is growing like crazy in the us. Battle, on the other hand, even though it started growing in the us, it's it's very prevalent in gulf countries, middle east, north africa, gulf countries, middle East, north Africa, obviously Europe, spain, italy, sweden. But I feel that from a battle standpoint or battle standpoint how you pronounce it, it's UAE, saudi Arabia, gulf countries and Europe will be a big market for us, very attractive from a battle standpoint For tennis, I think. Still, us takes, takes the cake and the pickleball obviously is growing, popping all over in China and the US.
Speaker 1:Okay, and what's the difference? Because today we did tennis and paddle right. What's the difference from, let's say, the technical aspects of the machine going from a tennis court onto a paddle court? What needs to be taken into account to adjust it from sport to sport? Great question.
Speaker 2:So luckily, the tennis ball is on the same side, so from a hardware standpoint it's the same machine, no changes needed. What you need to basically change on the back end is the software and configuration ability to know okay, the paddle court is smaller, the type of shots like we were talking downstairs earlier is needed where the ball is landing close to the basically glass, versus on the tennis you are focused more on down the line, cross court, inside out stuff like that. So the good news everything is configured in the back end. It's just a matter of switching between those two sports you need on this app. You basically tell it okay, this is the drill we're working on, and that drill by definition is for Badal, but that drill is by definition for tennis. And then it uses the cameras to detect and calibrate based on the size of the court and do you have players at a professional level using the machine?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Donald Young is one of our customers and investors. He's a professional tennis player, now professional wicketball player.
Speaker 1:There's a few of those isn't there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's funny. A lot of tennis players are transitioning to wicketball and it's funny and they seem to be doing a great job at wicketball, dominating very quickly, and Donald's a great guy. So, yeah, he loved the tennis version and I'm excited to get him his wicketball version as well, as he helped with the practice you get to get, because you can, as you saw downstairs you can get the feed rate very high, the speed very high. You can get very demanding very quickly if you want it to be, or you can slow it down and make it leisure, fun activity. How fast can it go? It can speed up to 70 miles an hour and then the feed rate can go down to less than 1.2,.
Speaker 1:I think. 1.4 seconds, that's 70 miles an hour, that's pretty quick, that's a firing range. What benefit have, let's say, high-performance athletes, professional athletes, what benefit are they getting from this type of machine? Because I see it at recreational level, like you mentioned, you can't find a player. You want to just train without paying for a coach, or the coach wants to use it to play with their players and be closer to them. But what would be the benefit for high-performance or professional athletes using this type of technology?
Speaker 2:I think the value add for them is having the consistency Like, even when you are hitting with a hitting partner some of the balls, the speed is hard to control because they are human after all. Obviously you are way more consistent than an amateur player, but when you're playing with them product like the Tenibot Partner you can get a certain level of precision. It's very hard to get from an individual and if you are a high-performance athlete, you want this kind of precision, you want this kind of consistency. You want I don't know 150 volts all over the landing and virtually the same exact spot.
Speaker 1:And the intensity as well, because maintaining that intensity for a hitting partner or another player is virtually impossible Correct, that's exactly right.
Speaker 2:And also we talked about the precision possible correct, that's exactly right. And also, when we aimed about talking about the precision, how about, like actually running players basically right and left, right, left, unless you have two or three people on the other side of the court a lot of time is very hard because those are already high performance athletes. So being able to test them, challenge them and get them to get to the next level and we've seen even college players in the us saying this is harder than anybody else I ever played with yeah, it makes sense.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's literally a robot on the other side. I mean, you have always this comparison of certain players being like a metronome on the other side of the court. Well, now you have an actual machine that can be there, literally. So what do you think is next? What do you think the future holds for it? Do you think you'll have an actual partner like hitting the same ball back to you? Are you guys working on that? Is that part in the pipeline?
Speaker 2:I think for us we are more focused to continue. That's definitely fun as a concept standpoint. For us, we are more trying to keep the cost of the product content as accessible as possible, because it's basically priced like every other board machine, except it's 10 times better. If, once we start adding more and more complexities and the price points start getting higher, which still obviously some folks will buy it. But we want to make sure I don't want to say democratize it, but make it accessible.
Speaker 2:We love, grow up playing racket sports.
Speaker 2:We love it and want more people to play it.
Speaker 2:So I think by providing tools that help players get better, faster or have more fun on the court, we get to get more people coming into our sports, play our racket sports, whether it's tennis or badal or pickleball, and having them basically coming and play more.
Speaker 2:So the way we look at it, if you think of it, the rover help, it makes the lessons more efficient, help players practice their weakest shot, which is serve in tennis, for example. I don't know how this translates to badal or pickleball from a difficulty standpoint, being the weakest shot, but I know for a fact me personally as a tennis player I always hated playing serve because I have to practice serve because I have to go, because of all the others, I just needs my serve is my weakest shot. So this is where they're overcoming to play. And now the partner and the station help get better workout, better practice, more fun exercise for players and as a tool for coaches to give more lessons and allow their players to basically get more value out of the time on the court that makes sense and will you be bringing in like an analysis uh side, so because it has cameras right, correct, so will it be able to evaluate a player like how, this is your shot, this is your level.
Speaker 1:This is what's bad about your back hand, you. The follow-through isn't good. Will it reach a point where you're analyzing players and able to assess them and give them tips on how to?
Speaker 2:improve 100 because, like you said, it already have the cameras and sorry detecting all this data, collecting the data, obviously locally on the players devices, but the idea is, over time it can be able to start seeing patterns, recognize certain mistakes.
Speaker 2:They're doing stuff that will take time, seeing more and more data basically allowed to do so, being able to have this as a tool for amateur player give them some common sense advice and then for a higher end or like a better quality, higher performance athlete, an additional tool for the coach to be able to analyze and give feedback to the player and help them improve their game based on data they have on the court every time they are out there. And the best part about the Tennybot puts it in a unique position that this is not just another camera system, it's actually interacting with the player. You can test the theory because by saying, okay, maybe he's not moving his feet, okay, maybe if we put the ball slightly out of range and see how they react, and so on. So it can allow you to work on certain weaknesses that no other machine can.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then you can also improve on that, I guess. Right, we have that data of what you did last time and you look at your speed. You're moving, the speed you're hitting the ball. Does it track the speed the ball comes back?
Speaker 2:It does because it's tracking the ball, tracking the white lines, tracking the court, tracking the player. So you're basically doing simple calculation to get a sense of the speed. Wow, I mean where time that you will be able to run AI models. A lot of those are becoming lighter and lighter and samplers will be able to give you a meaningful data on your game fairly quickly with some, obviously, data. You need to play a little bit with it to be able to give you meaningful advice.
Speaker 1:How hard would it be to have an actual player on the court, let's say on a tennis court? I think it would be easier because it's more linear, but how hard would it be to have an actual?
Speaker 2:player that would then hit the ball back to you. I think you basically start thinking of taking as a partner, adding robotic arm to it, holding a racket, creating a shot and bombing up the speed aggressively enough to make sure that it can run. So I don't think it's sci-fi, it's just the idea is is it cost prohibitive or not? Because I think this can easily go over $10,000 at least to get something like this. But it'd be interesting project to see how the value add, Because obviously from a PR standpoint it's fun.
Speaker 1:Literally playing with it. I mean, the sky's the limit with these things, right? So you're just like what if you know like we can't do it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and I do see definitely applications for it, but I think from an accessibility standpoint and keeping the price point under control, that's where I mean, I was thinking it from a paddle perspective.
Speaker 1:You know, paddles need always four players right, Correct and occasionally you'll have one that's missing. Imagine you have a robot that can just roll into the court and you've got your fourth player. Wouldn't that just be amazing? A hundred percent Same with tennis.
Speaker 2:Also doubles. Yeah, if you're playing doubles and then you're missing a player, it's something like okay, let's step him in set. Like okay, let's tap it in set up a level and a control.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because you could adjust the level of it. You could make it really good, really bad, and that would be super interesting. But I mean, yeah, I guess the price point would be on a whole different level. We digressed a little bit into the future. I'm sure we'll get there in the next 10 years, that's true. But let's say someone is listening to this and they want to buy a partner. Where can they buy it? How do they buy it? How much does it cost?
Speaker 2:They can go to Tennybotcom. Right now we are taking pre-orders. We ship in May. So basically they place an order, pay $4.99, and then the remaining amount. When it's ready to ship in May, we send them an email and the robot works for tennis, but they'll pick a ball. The pickleball version is a different hardware, okay.
Speaker 1:And then is there, like an application that the player downloads.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's on the App Store. Obviously, they wouldn't be able to use it until they have the device, but since the App Store it's the same name Dennybot you download the app and you're basically able to use the device.
Speaker 1:So let's say, if we bought it here as a club and we download the app, can other people download the app and use the same machine? Correct, oh okay, app. Can other people download the app and use the same machine, correct, oh okay. So it's not specific to one device?
Speaker 2:no, no, the idea is like that's exactly example. Here we have clubs and and facilities where, basically, they buy a machine and then anyone with the app you can control it, decide your own drills. It keeps your own stats on your on your phone, so everyone will be able to use it nice.
Speaker 1:I look forward to us having one here in padel and I'm going to work on my tennis and my and my paddle. Is there anything else that you want to discuss that you feel like we didn't touch on that you would like to put in value a bit more about the Tennybot and about what you guys are doing?
Speaker 2:No, I think great questions. Really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for having us and I'm excited to have more and more people playing with the partner and the rover.
Speaker 1:And I'm excited too, and I'm excited to get in mind in May. Thanks, ethan, thank you sir, thank you, I appreciate you.