Pickleball is experiencing explosive growth, driven by grassroots program development at parks and clubs around the country. One of the driving factors behind the growth is the presence of social media to serve as a home base community for players to discuss the sport, to connect with each other, and to help players find places to play.
The largest collection of social media communities in our sport is the suite of groups and pages collectively known as “The Kitchen,” and there’s one man who primarily runs them all: Jared Paul. Forbes got a chance to chat with Paul to talk about his journey into pickleball, his approach to building communities, and his future plans for The Kitchen.
Paul was introduced to pickleball the same way a lot of people were in 2020, by virtue of Covid and its impact on society. “I moved out to Austin, Texas, to raise money for a music startup. Soon after moving to Texas, Covid hit and the industry shut down and I was kind of left with nothing to do. A buddy invited me to play pickleball a few months into the pandemic. I had never heard of it. It sounded absurd, but I agreed to go play. And my life has never been the same in so many ways for the better, since.”
Like millions of Americans, Paul caught the pickleball bug. Since he was relatively new to Austin he sought a way to find more players. His idea was to create a simple Facebook group called “Pickleball Austin” (which is now renamed to cover all of Texas and boasts nearly 6,000 members all by itself) to help coordinate players in the Austin area. Pickleball Austin grew quickly, Paul’s music venture was still on hold, and he had an idea. He had met fellow Austin residents Steve Kuhn (founder of Major League Pickleball) and Tim Klitch (Founder of the Austin Pickle Ranch and owner of the MLP team Texas Ranchers) and thought perhaps he could build something that these two well-heeled pickleball enthusiasts might be interested in.
Paul solicited the help of a pair of friends, one near and one from afar. Dane Illiff was Paul’s partner in the stalled music venture, and Jason Aspes was Paul’s childhood friend from Atlanta, with whom he rekindled a friendship after many years apart. All three men shared two main traits; first, all were from the “Agency” world, experienced in the unique combination of marketing, sales, advertising, and promotional skills required for pure brand building. Secondly; all three had bought into the burgeoning boom that pickleball was becoming.
The team decided to adapt the same techniques they had used to build brands in prior industries on behalf of others, apply them to the ever changing social media landscape, and see what they could build that could capitalize on their new passion.
His approach to The Kitchen was the same that you see in the business world all the time: Marketing, Branding, and Strategy. When asked to articulate his strategy in particular, Paul did not hesitate. “It’s all about curation at the forefront. And because of that, we’re able to shine a brighter light on the content that we think matters. And that might be a giveaway, that might be a pro coming in and sharing their story. That might be some brand, a brand coming in and doing a presale for their paddles. And I think by reducing the noise, we’re able to shine a brighter light on the content that really matters. I think by having great engagement, manufacturers and players are more attracted to your brand.”
Paul has faced some criticism for his heavy hand curating the group, but he offers no apologies. “We heavily curate the content, as I’m sure you’ve seen. So we’re probably getting dozens of posts per day, but only a dozen or two dozen actually stay on the forum. Some people don’t love that, but we do that because we don’t want it to be redundant. We don’t want it to be people asking the same questions over and over again. So a lot of times we’ll leave a post up for 24 hours and we’ll take it down.”
But there’s a method to this curation madness. “By reducing the noise, we’re able to shine a brighter light on the content that really matters. I think by having great engagement, brands and players are more attracted to your brand.”
Who is the “we” in that statement? Well, more often than not, it’s Paul. His two co-collaborators Illiff and Aspes help administer the sites, but the primary voice approving content and curating comments is Paul. As the site has grown, the administrator responsibilities have grown as well. Paul now spends more than 90% of his day by his estimates on the sites, or focusing on the sport in general. “I’m very meticulous, very OCD when it comes to content. I just posted an Anna Lee Waters point, and it literally took me an hour tweaking the filters. And some people think that’s crazy. I post all of our social media content. I do all of our moderation. And people think that’s ridiculous. And at a certain point at scale, it won’t be possible. But I believe that it’s the little things that really matter, and it’s the little things that brands see and they want to work with you. I think the approach is, every single thing matters, big or small.“
So, under Paul’s meticulous watch how has the brand grown? Let’s look at some numbers. As of this writing, The Kitchen boasts:
- Nearly 400,000 cumulative members or followers on all platforms.
- 86,000 in the main “The Kitchen” group, and thousands more in each of the geographic-focused Facebook groups.
- 112,000 followers on Instagram.
- 74,000 followers on TikTok.
- 50,000 subscribers to the email newsletter.
These numbers, by the way, are on a very healthy projection upwards. When we first spoke to Paul in mid-February 2023, the total number of members on all platforms was in the 315k range. So that’s 20% growth in just two months. We knew that pickleball was exploding from a participation standpoint, but this kind of online growth is the thing that advertisers dream of.
Paul admits that Facebook is still the primary focus of all the properties. However, the changing demographics of the sport are forcing Paul increasingly to focus on other channels. “Facebook group is our North Star and everything kind of trickles down from there. I’m a big fan of Facebook groups because of the community aspect and because people can connect, meet one another, have interesting conversations, debate topics, ask about products, instructional, and the like. Instagram is great, it’s visual, but it’s not community. TikTok? Not community. Twitter? A little bit. But Facebook is the true community.”
This focus on Facebook does not mean The Kitchen isn’t working on the other platforms; on the contrary. “We do tailor different types of content to different channels. And so it’s a really interesting kind of paradigm to watch the different channels grow and see what works and what doesn’t work and what people are interested in. “
Paul notes that the social media industry, as with pickleball, is now seeing demographic shifts. Pickleball is starting to trend younger, but started older, so Facebook made sense as an initial focus area. However with a younger demo in the sport, the newer social media platforms increasingly come into play, which leads to more and better content needs on these newer channels. Conversely, the newer social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok once were the milieu of just teenagers, but now are gaining traction with older Americans, so the content has to be appropriate to reach multiple age groups simultaneously. “On Instagram last month, we reached 17 million people, and we only have 80,000 followers. So I think the group, when people are sharing the content, it’s reaching far and wide.”
Also helping this reach: original programming and a new focus on celebrity and pro engagement. The Kitchen has morphed from being a group where people argue about the minutiae of the sport’s rulebook to one where the sport’s top players frequently participate and engage with fans, and to one where its resources now allow Paul to focus on original programming. You may have already seen Paul’s video content featuring the likes of Jamie Foxx and Rob Gronkowski, which features on every platform capable of video streaming and which garners a crossover-audience of the star’s fans and pickleball fans alike. The success of those quick hits enabled Paul to move into another new space: Event Sponsorship.
“We’re moving into the event space, and we’ve been doing these curated events. We did one with Anheuser Bush, we did one with Comic Relief, we did one with Eleven Vodka. We’re doing one with John Bon Jovi’s son’s rose brand Hampton Water wine this summer. We just did a Super Bowl program where Drew Brees and Chandler Parsons and Golden Tate and some other athletes and celebrities came out. And I just think that pickleball a year ago was not cool. And now because all these celebrities are getting involved, it’s cool. Which I think is important because you want to attract younger people, and younger people want to do stuff that’s “cool.” So I believe in the power of blending culture and sport.”
So, what’s next for The Kitchen? Paul has big plans and certainly does not seem content to sit on his laurels. First up, a tournament series. “We’re launching a four city amateur “Money Ball” series in Texas, where we’ll be having the biggest payouts to amateurs that I know of to date.” The series starts in mid-May in, where else, Austin, the proverbial “home” of the pickleball world right now.
But the big news on the horizon is an E-commerce initiative that Paul is launching called “The Kitchen Shop.” Paul hopes to use the shop not just as a clearing house for all the available brands, but to curate a list of his favorite products as a service to The Kitchen members, much the same way he curates the content they see. “We have these things called the Top-Fives, and we’re picking the top five of our favorite paddles, power paddles, spin paddles, water bottles, shorts, hydration products. And then from there, we’ll explain why they’re our favorite, and then we’ll make it easy for people to buy them. There are so many products, especially right now. Like, there’s, I think, 180 different carbon fiber paddles on the market right now, and nobody knows how to differentiate. And so we’re going to try to help people figure out what’s the best for under $100, what’s the best for spin, power, control, so on and so forth. So we’re not going to have every product. We’re going to have the products that we love.”
Groups, social media, content, newsletters, websites, events, and e-commerce. The Kitchen has it all for pickleball fans. And Paul’s energy and drive is behind it. You can find Paul online in any one of his forums, planning his next big move.
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The Kitchen is comprised of is main Facebook Group, several geographic-specific Facebook groups catering to popular areas for players such as Texas, California, and Florida, and has expanded to include strong presences on other social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and its conventional website through which it runs its email newsletter. We’re going to take them much more curated approach.”