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Ben Johns: The Greatest Pickleball Player Of All Time | E83 · In Search Of Excellence

• 0:00
  Ben Johns: I mean there's a ton of things that make pickleball what it is the first thing I'd say is it is extremely easy to play as a casual player to be somebody that is not you know super invested in playing the sport regularly and of course there's a ton of those people too they get obsessed with it and do play an extremely regularly like every day regularly. But you can, you know, not play for months come back to this be like, Oh yeah, I can pick this up. Like I was just genuinely interested in something. And I feel like whenever you're genuinely interested in something, if you pursue it, you are naturally going to, you know, find some good things because you're so genuine about it.
• 0:38
  Randall Kaplan: Welcome to In Search of Excellence where we meet entrepreneurs, CEOs, entertainers, athletes, motivational speakers, and trailblazers of excellence with incredible stories from all walks of life. My name is Randall Kaplan. I'm a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist and the host of In Search of Excellence, which has started to motivate and inspire us to achieve excellence in all areas of our lives. My guest today is Ben John's, Ben is considered to be the greatest pickleball player of all time, he has been the number one player in the world in singles, doubles and mixed doubles for most of the last three years. His dominance includes a 108 match winning streak and singles, over 80 ppa titles 15 of which were triple crowns, the most of any male pickleball player in the history of the sport, which happens when a player wins singles men's doubles and mixed doubles all in the same tournament, and he is also the first pickleball player to win 100 tournaments. On the business side, Ben is a co founder of pickleball getaways a vacation travel company that arranges pickleball vacations to Mexico, Portugal, Croatia and other sunny locations. And he is also the co founder of pickleball 360, and the online instructional video subscription service. It gives lessons on how to become a better pickleball player. Ben, Welcome to In Search of Excellence. Thanks for being here.
• 1:57
  Ben Johns: Thanks for having me.
• 1:57
  Ben Johns: Quite the intro.
• 1:59
  Randall Kaplan: So you were born and raised in Lanesville, Maryland, a small town which as of the 2020 sentence has a whopping population of 572 people. Your dad mark is a software engineer and owns his own business and your mom Heather is a primary school teacher. You're the middle of seven children and there are 23 years separating your youngest and all the siblings. Can you tell us about the influence your parents had and your siblings hatin on you, as well as what it was like being homeschooled until you went to college?
• 2:31
  Ben Johns: Yeah, sure. Family was definitely pretty instrumental in pretty much everything I've done. Really my mom homeschooled, yeah, all the kids up through high school, which, obviously, homeschooling six kids through high school is no easy feat. So I call her a saint. She's incredible. And my dad as a software developer, engineer, designer, after he quit his job, when I was like seven or eight, he was just doing his own thing entrepreneur style, from there on out, basically, so he was always at home. So basically, we always had two parents around, and we're at home a lot. So we were definitely a very tight knit family. And I think they were definitely able to help guide us along, you know, the good pads and support us and whatever the kids wanted to do. Because they were around so much. And we're pretty pretty hands on. So I'd say you know, they were absolutely incredible. And what I always emphasize with them is they never push their kids to do any anything in particular, it was more just like, hey, let's find out what you like what you enjoy. And if you want to do it, we'll support you in whatever you do. So like my older brother played pro tennis, they supported him with that. And her sisters, a concert pianist, she's in grad school for that now. So it really never we had a passion or they were always there for. And mine turned out to be a little bit later in life with pickleball. But they were happy to support the variety of things I did as a kid, I was much more into doing a lot of different things than any one thing very much. Yeah, you really can't emphasize enough how much they inspired all their kids to be good at whatever the it is that they were doing, you know, if you're going to do something, do it well, was their philosophy, and kind of everything they did to enable that.
• 4:08
  Randall Kaplan: I've always wondered this for kids in our homeschool, how does the parent or parents, our mom and dad know the lesson plan in order to keep up with the other kids at school or learning? And the second part of that question is, it's very hard for someone in high school to be in a classroom of someone in kindergarten, for example.
• 4:28
  Randall Kaplan: That's why I think we have first grade second grade third grade through high school. So how does that work? Are you all in the same room and she's giving a lesson plan? Where are you getting that from? And how do you know you're keeping even or on track with those in public or private school?
• 4:46
  Ben Johns: Yeah, there were definitely a lot of online resources. And I think my mom was really good about picking and choosing between online resources and textbooks and you know, all the resources that are out there which are really quite incredible. There's a ton of stuff And what I really liked about homeschooling is within the classroom, you know, you're on a very defined track of, you know, the speed of how much you're progressing in any given subject. And with homeschooling, you don't really have to do that. Because you're all basically having your own personal track. It's because you're not the same age as anybody else around you, you're on your own track. And therefore you can slow down or speed up on any given thing that you're doing. Like, for instance, when I was a freshman, I had done all the math that would be required in all of high school. So my mom had me years ahead and mathematics. But if any one of us needed to slow down on something, or we weren't enjoying something as much yet, and she wanted to kind of wait for us to develop into it, then she could do that she had kind of the liberty to do that. So she wasn't really pinned down by any predefined, like, Hey, this is how we do things. It was more just kind of up to her. And yeah, there was not really an official classroom, I think, more than almost anything else.
• 5:55
  Ben Johns: I think my parents emphasize being independent. And it seemed that, at least to me, in hindsight, by the time we were a freshman in high school, or anything, she didn't really need to be super hands on with anything. She was like, here's the work, you got to do get it done on your own time. You don't need to be in the room, you can do it outside, if you want, I don't care, just get it done. I think they emphasize personal responsibility enough to where none of us were shirking that responsibility, but understood it was important, and we would, you know, put it on upon ourselves to actually get it done and get it done well. So I really liked that part of it, it emphasized some personal responsibility to where when he got to college, it was like, Oh, I've already done this before, this is the same thing. It definitely emphasized independence and just kind of taking care of things yourself and doing them well. When you're homeschooled.
• 6:47
  Randall Kaplan: How do you keep up in the social aspect where you don't have a lot of friends around? I think one of the great experiences of going to school is meeting people, you make lifelong friends at every step of the way, I still have one friend from kindergarten, a couple from second and third grade, eighth grade, high school, etc, etc. So were you around kids your own age? And how did you interact? And how did you make up for the lack of daily social camaraderie with kids your own age?
• 7:18
  Ben Johns: Yeah, I definitely feel like that's something that's often kind of reported about homeschooling. And you can certainly do a number of different ways. And I feel like some really do miss out on that.
• 7:26
  Ben Johns: For us personally, one helps being in a big family around, you know, five other other kids all the time. And I think it's great to be around both older and younger kids, not just kids your own age, because it exemplifies a lot of things that are very productive. But of course, actual kind of social exposure outside the family.
• 7:45
  Ben Johns: Most of us at least the boys played a ton of sports. So sports were kind of one of the main outlets and the girls did any number of different things.
• 7:50
  Ben Johns: There's tons of activities you can do outside of, you know, school that exposes you to kids, I mean, every day, if you want, it can be the same thing if you want that level of social exposure. So that was definitely one thing. And yeah, I'd say I never really thought about it that much as a kid. And looking back on it, I was very happy with the amount of time we did kind of spend socially, just because I felt like we also had much more time to spend on pursuing actual kind of things that we wanted to enjoy, which, you know, some would say, as a kid, it's more important, important to enjoy social things than you know, be great at something. But I'd say you can certainly do both. And I'd lean more towards you know, pursue something and get really good at it or multiple things if you want. And the social stuff will just kind of happen naturally.
• 8:41
  Ben Johns: But I felt like that's kind of what most of us did. But I certainly appreciated the opportunity to spend more time on the things I wanted to spend on
• 8:50
  Randall Kaplan: here. We're very active a kid you played a lot of sports, you tell us what your hobbies were, and go through them and how they prepared you for your future. Incredible pickleball career.
• 9:01
  Ben Johns: Yeah, I was definitely a kid that wanted variety. So I played a lot of things. I've played definitely every sport with a racket. But growing up, I pretty much did what my older brother did. He is six years older. So whatever he played, I played. He we were kind of a baseball family initially. So I played baseball from the ages of like six to 16 but I was swinging bats and throwing balls, as soon as I could walk basically. So that was probably the first one. My brother found tennis when he was 14. So I was seven, almost eight. I played, you know, as much as he did, and he kind of got obsessed with it. So early on, I was playing a ton of tennis as well. The same time we we'd like table tennis or ping pong as we like to call it. My dad got us a you know a table in the basement. So we spent a ton of time on that almost equally with tennis. So I'd say those two were the first Racquet Sports we're exposed to. And then more so for myself and less so my brother I played a decent amount of golf as a kid to wear I try to really enjoy. So those were the four kind of primary sports that I really got into and various times more one or a couple were more emphasized than others,
• 10:09
  Randall Kaplan: each of which requires tremendous hand eye coordination, if you're going to be good at something.
• 11:08
  Ben Johns: For sure, they were very eye hand oriented, which is all the basic guidelines, I hand coordination sports a lot those those were
• 11:16
  Randall Kaplan: to college, you went to University of Maryland, terrapins in College Park, tell us about how you switch majors, and why you switch majors. And from there, let's talk about one class that you took the huge influences had and has had on your life?
• 11:33
  Ben Johns: Sure. Yeah. That's a good question. So I spent my freshman year in the business school, which is kind of purported to be one of the best things about the University of Maryland is their business school. But kind of what I realized a little bit into it is it's not that any of my classes were bad. It's not that I had a distaste for anything that I was doing. But I felt like it was definitely emphasized in that school, that it wasn't what you know, but who you know. And while I knew that was definitely true, to a certain extent, I realized that in school, I wanted to be learning the what's like, I wanted to know more things, because I was like, I'm already meeting a ton of great people in pickleball, I can go into business, if I want without necessarily learning directly about like a business degree.
• 12:13
  Ben Johns: Not that, you know, I definitely respect people that get those degrees, because you can do a number of things with them. But I felt like I wanted something a little more concrete. And I guess engineering appealed to me in that it was definitely very much about what you know, and you were learning some, some hard stuff and some, some very intellectually stimulating stuff that I would really struggle with. So I kind of wanted to struggle, I guess. And after that first year, I was like, I need something that really pushes me and one class it really impacted me it was I remember as it was an honors seminar called how innovators think, my professor was Mark Wellman. And there was a project in there called the personal creativity, reflection, which was a number of things. But the gist of it that impacted me was I for some reason, it was looking at other other majors.
• 13:09
  Ben Johns: And I came across an engineering that I didn't even know existed, it was called material science and engineering, which is not a typical engineering that you know, you don't you think of like civil or mechanical or whatever. So I had no idea this even existed. And when I saw it, I definitely looked into it a lot more, which was part of that project. And I kind of realized, like, Hey, this is the one I've been looking for. Because I had looked at other other engineering, even when I was going in as freshmen, I was like, none of these really seemed to hit the right spot with me. Seeing that one, which I didn't know was the thing. I kind of did realize that that is what I did enjoy, and kind of just from that project and that class, that was what made me change majors along with kind of realizing that I want it to be a little more harder and finite.
• 13:55
  Randall Kaplan: Is that amazing.
• 13:55
  Randall Kaplan: We have one class with one professor who can change the trajectory of our career and our life. I had one bancor, when I took econ, as a sophomore in high school, which was a new class and it, it just lit me up.
• 14:11
  Randall Kaplan: I was entrepreneurial already. I had the gene. But part of that class was reading stories about other successful business people on how they created their companies. And I always thought, Gosh, this is, this is so great.
• 14:23
  Randall Kaplan: This is something that I want to do. When you went to a college, did you have a goal of, hey, I'm going to go you're in the business school, I want to go work on Wall Street, I want a marketing job. I think so many students and I have a intern program, each summer of 36 amazing students from around the country. It's a teaching internship, it's a 12 week program. And one of the issues that they're most concerned about in our program is they have tremendous anxiety about what they're going to do in their life, something they want to go into investment banking, we talked about it I have founders of investment bank CEOs come in, and after I talked to them about it, and these leaders in the field, talk about it, around a third of the third don't really want to go into it.
• 15:11
  Randall Kaplan: And I think around two thirds don't know what they want to do.
• 15:15
  Randall Kaplan: Did you know what you want it to do? And what's your advice to all the students out there? And not only a student but a lot of people in the workforce, especially when they're in the first stages of their career have the same anxiety? What's your advice to them when people really don't know what they want to do?
• 15:33
  Ben Johns: Yeah, you know, that's a great question, because I feel like the numbers don't lie, right? There's a lot of people in that boat that don't really know what they want to do. And I was definitely one of those in business school. Like, I liked people I liked business.
• 15:42
  Ben Johns: I knew I would like to work for myself. Start my own businesses all that but I didn't know at least Studying wise, what that would translate to like, what I should be studying what I should start with, I really didn't know where to start or what to do or what I really wanted to do, I knew none of those things. And I'd say, you know, of course classes certainly helped you in college, but I would say what helped me was getting a variety of things that didn't really apply to whatever it was I was doing, like, basically didn't pin myself down. And you're one to like, Okay, I'm doing this.
• 16:16
  Ben Johns: And I'm all in on this. Because if I didn't actually know what I want to do, I needed to expose myself to more things. And of course, the more you expose yourself to the better of an idea you're going to get, and that's not just classes, I'd say, you know, expose yourself to hands on things that impact you in some way that you're not used to. Right, the more you can expose yourself to things you're not used to, the better it is.
• 16:37
  Ben Johns: And that can be classes that play sports that can be venture so you can meet people, like it's just so many things. So many people take different classes, do different things, definitely get some hands on experience in many different facets of careers. If you like in general, that's something colleges offer but they don't really push on students is like, hey, you know, let's do an apprenticeship with this career over here. Go talk to this professor. He's in a unique field, like, you kind of have to take on yourself in college, like the the resources are there, but you have to go find them. So I'd say definitely try to do that as somebody entering college and even for ones outside. I mean, if you don't like what you're doing, I mean, I'd say unless you're you're doing it for a very good reason.
• 17:22
  Ben Johns: Then experiment a little bit.
• 17:25
  Ben Johns: There's there's certainly resources out there for you to try new things and find something you like, if not love at least like more than maybe what you do. So the best thing I can tell you is just expose yourself to a lot of things.
• 17:36
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• 17:54
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• 18:34
  Randall Kaplan: At the time when you said Jesus can be a huge sport. And I really want to focus on redesigning a paddle that at that point, there weren't many out there.
• 18:44
  Ben Johns: Yeah, I'd say I have to, I'd like to take more credit. But there was no clairvoyance, there was no anticipation of how big this sport could be. And would be, of course, I knew it was growing fast. But I don't think anybody saw it being what it is today, four or five years ago, what I'd really say is I had a genuine interest. That's really what pushed me into that I not that I thought that material science engineering is complex, as it is, was really going to apply directly to paddle met paddle manufacturing, which is not the most complex thing. But I did have a genuine interest in how paddles were made, and how we could make them better. It just seemed very fun to me to design something for performance reasons, like very high performance. And a sport is one of the highest performance things you can do right? More you can kind of maximize performance, the better you're going to do in a sport. And that really appealed to me, because the design to me was very limited and had a ton of room to be a lot better. And it still does. So So doing that still appeals to me very much. So as much as I'd like to say I had a vision of what pickleball could be, and that I was investing in the future, I really wasn't I was just genuinely interested in something. And I feel like whenever you're genuinely interested in something, if you pursue it, you are naturally going to, you know, find some good things because you're so genuine about it. And if you're opening yourself up to opportunity, you know, doors are gonna open and good things are gonna happen. So yes, it's great to have a forward thinking futuristic investing type of mind. But I'd also say if you're genuine about something, you can make opportunity for yourself in almost any area, really, just by being genuine and having a lot of goodness basically,
• 20:25
  Randall Kaplan: you wrote a blog your freshman year in college, it was a web page of sorts, you can still find it online where you said, you're very optimistic about your future, even though you didn't know what you wanted to do. How important is having optimism in our future success?
• 20:40
  Ben Johns: Yeah, I think optimism is definitely a good thing. And I would caution people against false optimism.
• 20:47
  Ben Johns: There's there's a point to where it gets ridiculous. Of course, you have to be a little bit of a realist as well. But it's almost more like, I like to think of it less as optimism and more confidence in yourself. If you know kind of the person you are the things you're good at your, your work ethic, and you know all the things that kind of make you who you are. There's always going to be room for you, and opportunity for you out there if you go and get it if you go and find it. So yes, it's somewhat optimistic, but it's also a little bit more, you know, confidence in yourself have, you know, we can all find good things in ourselves that we're good at. And we can emphasize.
• 21:24
  Ben Johns: And if you focus on those things, you could call it optimistic, instead of kind of looking at the bad things in yourself and the qualities we don't like. So yeah, I guess to some extent, you could call it optimism that people can definitely probably do a better job of finding the good in themselves and being confident and optimistic about those things.
• 21:38
  Randall Kaplan: Most people when they start companies, or think about starting our company, fear failing, it's embarrassing. They don't want to be unsuccessful, as bad mentally, they have investors, the investors may not like it. How important is fear of failure in our future success?
• 21:56
  Ben Johns: Yeah, it's definitely interesting, because it's almost like two things fighting each other. Because, I mean, I'm like, I wouldn't be afraid of failing that fear is never a good thing. But at the same time, you have to have a healthy respect for it, because nobody wants to fail. You don't fail on purpose, let's let's put it that way. You are trying your utmost to make any venture you do not fail. So it almost feels tragic when you do anyway, right?
• 22:23
  Ben Johns: You're like I gave my all this.
• 22:27
  Ben Johns: And I still failed, right? But in that sense, I wouldn't fear it, I'd say absolutely do your utmost to not fail that makes, you know, that's kind of making sure that you gave it your all and that you you didn't leave anything on the table. And then at the same time, when you do eventually fail, you have to kind of just back off and say what's productive now? What can I do now to make the most of the situation and typically, it's learning something from that, from that experience. And I think my parents kind of instilled that, in a way, I didn't realize it until later.
• 22:57
  Ben Johns: But they always had the highest expectations for any of us. And whenever we pursued, it's like, you are able to be excellent at this, therefore you should be and we expected of you, you need to be excellent at what you're doing. And then at the same time, if we ever fell short of that excellence, they'd be like, it's okay. It's alright, you don't need to be actually that excellent. We wanted you to put in 100% effort to begin with, and know that you did. And then if you still can't, you still did the hard part, which is, you know, putting 100% in, and now you can learn something from it.
• 23:37
  Ben Johns: But it's not the end of the world, if you don't actually achieve what you want to achieve. It's more important that you gave 100% in order to try to achieve that in the first place. So I liken that to striving not to fail, but at the same time if you ever do fail, still learning a lot from it.
• 23:54
  Randall Kaplan: He started a company called called Sick tricks. T AR x I guess the eye is left out of that one. What was that company? And again, you really had a clairvoyant instinct for the future of pickleball.
• 24:09
  Ben Johns: Yeah, yeah, that was definitely more of a fun first venture than it was a real business. It was me dipping my toe in the water, but it's basically me and a group of friends within pickleball that felt like pickleball could be more exciting than it was I think our first tagline was not your grandma's pickleball because it was still definitely the stigma was an old person sport and we're like, Hey, we're young, we're cool. We can make this sport cool, we can make it more fun than it currently is, which is already very fun. But the stigma around it we wanted to change see kind of the idea behind that was putting on more of a show with pickleball you know, doing trick shots and and making it more spectator worthy, I suppose you could say so whether that was particular events with the sick drink squad, or just the style of how you you play pickleball and present pickleball to people it was, it was less of a business.
• 24:55
  Ben Johns: It wasn't really for profit. It was more for you know, let's let's try to make the good ball.
• 25:01
  Ben Johns: Cool.
• 25:01
  Randall Kaplan: So let's talk about pickleball and we'll start with its history. Pickleball was invented in 1965 on Bainbridge Island, Washington by three friends at the summer home of Joel Prichard who has a neat little factoid served as a Republican congressman from 1973 to 1985. And who as the story goes, felt compelled to invent a new game to occupy their board kids is name comes from a pickled boat, which for those of you who don't know, and I didn't know before I did some research for our show today is a hastily assembled rowing crew, and the name was a nod to the new paddle sport. They were cobbling together from parts of other sports including badminton, tennis and even wiffle ball. For our listeners and viewers out there who don't know and I think everyone at this point has heard about pickleball but a lot of people I don't know exactly what it is and how to play. Can you explain what Pickleball is, as well as the rules of the game?
• 26:00
  Ben Johns: Yeah, you know, it's definitely hard to be perfectly synced with pickleball because it is a combination of other things. But the easiest kind of one sentence thing I have for you, and then I'll get into it a little more, is it's a combination of tennis and ping pong on a badminton sized sport.
• 26:15
  Ben Johns: Okay, so it is technically the same size of badminton court. I think it's kind of in between tennis and table tennis with its attributes. Where I can describe it from there, I'd say some of its its kind of sticking points are, it's a racquet sport, it's very easy to learn and very easy to have fun on your first day playing it, which is one of the biggest attractions as opposed to something like tennis, which I think is just mechanically more difficult for people when they're first picking it up. So they're usually not gonna have as much fun the first day or even the first year that they're playing it. Improvement is definitely very easy. And kind of the mechanics of the game are such that you can do a lot of different things and still be successful. It doesn't come down to straight athleticism, like a lot of sports do, like obviously, if you're playing basketball, somebody that can be more skilled. But if you're more athletic, it's going to be tough. Basically, the the bar between athleticism and skill is much closer and pickleball than it is in sports where athleticism outweighs skill. So that's definitely a big selling point for people. It's also just physically pretty easy to play.
• 27:16
  Ben Johns: You can play it physically at a at a high level, and you know, exert yourself extremely. But you don't have to do that, which is why it kind of makes it great for kids and older people. And that's kind of how it got its start basically is that it was kind of a sport for everybody.
• 27:31
  Ben Johns: But I'd say it's you know, it's not just old people against everybody. And really anybody which is another great selling point, which is the people you meet in pickleball are from so many varieties of life. It's like it's the most diverse sport I've ever played in terms of any demographic, you want to say it's got a it's got guys and girls, it's got people from all over. It's got them, you know, in different jobs. It's really the one unifying thing. The people playing pickleball don't really have anything in common, but they play pickleball. Right.
• 27:58
  Ben Johns: So that's a bunch of interesting, diverse people.
• 28:03
  Randall Kaplan: It's one of these sports where you really can't explain what it is on a podcast, I think people can go online, there's
• 28:10
  Unknown: probably got to play it. You got to play you do have to play and play, then you understand.
• 28:16
  Randall Kaplan: So okay, let's talk about the professional sports of pickleball. I think around three, four or five years ago, there was a mad dash, let's create a league. And we're going to be the first ones out there.
• 28:28
  Randall Kaplan: But there were two people out there, there are two billionaires who are competing and fighting against each other.
• 28:32
  Randall Kaplan: And there's a lot of confusion today about how many leagues or what the differences are. Can you tell us about the two leagues and clear up all this confusion for everybody?
• 28:44
  Ben Johns: I'll try to make this as safe as well, but it's definitely more complex. But this actually happened much more recently than people think. The advent of the PGA Tour was in 2020, beginning of 2020. That was their first tour season.
• 28:58
  Randall Kaplan: What does it stand for?
• 28:59
  Ben Johns: Ro pickleball association. So they want it to be the pro tour football.
• 29:02
  Ben Johns: Basically. There is also the HPP tour launched at the exact same time, which is a third organization different from the one you mentioned. And I'll get to them later, but they were kind of the other pro tour at that time and 2020. The billionaire's came into it in in 2021, the first major league pickleball event was held in, I want to say October of 2021. So a year and a half really after the tour had even started. And similarly, the billionaire that acquired the PPA tour also got into it in late 2021. So it was more late 2021 that things really started happening. In the beginning of 2022, the PGA tour along with its new owner, basically started signing the top pro players to long exclusive contracts, like three year contracts with, you know, stipulations that play PGA tour events and any events outside the tour you need permission for and majorly pickleball was more of a team style event. It wasn't really a tour event it was more like let's put together teams and make this an entertainment spectator based sport rather than just a tour events. In 2022, they basically talked to try to work something out, did not and from there on out. It kind of became pretty adversarial as it was more competitive between the two rather than than working together. And that's been going on ever since then basically a warring back and forth.
• 30:40
  Ben Johns: Sometimes they were working together. Sometimes they weren't. And you don't really want to get into the drama and politics of all that but as of today there was a merger at some point to where it's As long as that's signed and done with and they are basically the same entity now, so they decided that to come together, I guess kind of on the wayside is the APD tour which kind of has gone down in terms of how impactful it is in pickleball. They are less focused, it seems on the pro side of pickleball and more on the providing tournaments for amateurs type of thing, they do still have pro events, but less so than the other two organizations.
• 31:20
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• 32:33
  Ben Johns: Right? Yeah, so the three year contracts were the initial thing that they didn't like 2021. As of recently, because of a merger, they're now working together for a schedule together, they're working together on Hey, that will have this amount of team events and this amount of tour events and the players can choose, you know, this amount of events between the two. So you know, they're not really exclusive with without each other, the more synonymous with each other now, so they're basically combined at this point, a team event is just to kind of make it clear what the team event is, it's composed of two guys and two girls. And normally, you know, Pickleball is played as a doubles team. So the you'll play like a guys doubles match a women's doubles match and two mixed doubles matches as part of your team match, essentially. So that's kind of what that format is. But yeah, definitely happy to say that at this point. It's not no longer fractured. They're they're not both exclusive with with certain players, they've come together and now you were you know, back all in the in the same league under the same umbrella. And that will offer the same events.
• 33:38
  Randall Kaplan: So Major League Baseball, NFL, NBA, there's no individual people who own those leagues, do those two gentlemen still own the league, where they have where, where they make money. And then talk to us about the team aspect we hear every day that there's a new celebrity, as LeBron is Tom Brady, is everyone in their mother? Who are investing in these teams? How much are these teams worth? And how much money are they putting in? 10? Grand?
• 34:07
  Randall Kaplan: 25? Grand $100,000 $500,000?
• 34:14
  Ben Johns: Yeah, so the answer the answer that first part, I guess, majorly pickleball teams, their current valuation, I think is around 10 million. So it depends on how much percentage of a team you're actually buying. So it can be any percentage. And you know, a lot of these teams are part of venture capital groups, where celebrities are part of those venture capital groups, and then the venture capital groups purchased the team. So depending on how much stake the celebrity has in the Venture Capital Group, it depends, you know, they can basically their money is spent how that firm deems fit, which could be any percentage for any given amount of money, but that's the current valuation that I know of. So yeah, that's a, that's majorly pickleball. It definitely got a I think it got a lot of people talking about pickleball, when, you know, you see celebrity involvement. And I think that's one of the best things about having them involved. Not that they're, you know, super directly involved, but more people are going to be like, Oh, I should check out pick up off LeBrons, you know, interested in it. And I definitely say kind of the investors in both the hands on one ones and the venture capital style, you know, they definitely can see the pickleball has very much an appeal as a spectator sport, because it's also a player sport, you know, it's it's very, I mean, it's basically swept the nation in terms of people playing it and went from a very low number to a very high number very, very quickly, and the growth and kind of all aspects of that is has been pretty huge.
• 35:40
  Ben Johns: Back to your other question about kind of who owns the leagues? I'm not really sure on all this because I don't really pay attention to that kind of stuff. I'm more focused on playing. But I'm pretty sure the founder of Major League Pickleball has very slight ownership in each of the teams.
• 35:58
  Ben Johns: So kind of the overall league combined, but much more majority ownership is in, you know that the individual teams and how much they own of those teams.
• 36:09
  Ben Johns: And then, on the PGA Tour side, the majority owners still the guy that purchased it in 2021.
• 36:14
  Ben Johns: Top done, and but they have a number of owners as well. So it's fairly diffused there. And then with this merger, I'm not exactly sure how everything is split. Now, I don't know any details on that.
• 36:27
  Randall Kaplan: How to teams make money?
• 36:30
  Ben Johns: That's a great, great question. Honestly, right now, the the Major League pickleball side of things is more of a investment kind of equity future type thing than actually making money. So the tour has always been more focused on kind of making money via events, whether the, you know, it's TV, it's sponsors, it's spectators, all those things, you know, there's a revenue model. And of course, you're spending a lot of that revenue on paying players and setting up the events and doing you know, it's a pretty classic business model. Whereas majorly pickleball, since the beginning has been more of a vision of what can it be, rather than a revenue model that they don't currently have much of a revenue model, of course, a lot of businesses are going to be in the red for a while. And their expenses are definitely more in terms of running events and paying players. They're going to be more than what they're making from sponsors and TV, essentially, at this time. But of course, they're making money from selling equity and new teams. And I think the vision with that is that eventually becomes more like an NBA NFL, where there is a ton of value in providing team events, you know, whether it's city associated, and they're spectators coming in, and they're huge sponsors, the vision is to make it you know, much like an NBA NFL type of league. And I think that's why people are buying it not because you know, they're getting revenue today. But because they think they get, you know, a ton of revenue in 10 years,
• 37:49
  Randall Kaplan: when I had a material outcome on a company I co founded went public in 1999.
• 37:51
  Randall Kaplan: Everyone's showing you deals, everyone's got a deal everyone's got, you should invest in this bridge, where someone takes a toll, you should invest in some palm tree farm, which is actually one that I should have done. And someone said to me, yeah, you should you should buy a pro soccer team. They were I think, at the time,$20,000,000.20 $5 million, not that I would have invested that kind of money or had that kind of money to invest in the team.
• 38:16
  Randall Kaplan: But as most teams when they're bought they have, it's usually not one person who puts up all the capital, I thought, Geez, number one, I'm not a soccer fan. Although I am today. I don't think the league was making money. And I think the teams were losing money where you own a team, but you're having to put in several million dollars a year of cash flow, going forward to keep these teams from going bankrupt, to make sure that the teams keep going you have to pay the salary and all kinds of other expenses.
• 38:44
  Randall Kaplan: That obviously wasn't a good decision. And it's something I should have done. I think the lafc Los Angeles Football Club is the first MLS team to reach a billion dollar valuation. Or teams going there right now. I mean, $10 million for League that has no major TV contract, which is the primary driver, the value of these teams. seems ridiculous.
• 39:12
  Ben Johns: Yeah, no, I would definitely agree with that. And I think the reason it gets this kind of, you know, these types of investors at these types of valuations is kind of a track that pickleball outside of teams has been on, and they kind of assume that this sport is on a fast track to get to where other sports is because of what it's done and other avenues. Because, you know, a couple years ago, people had no idea what big volume was. And then it went from that to a legitimate pro sport with not major, you know, TV contracts, but certainly certainly some sponsors that are super engaged, wanting to spend tons of new players and fans coming in all the time, that numbers of people playing just massively increasing super rapidly more rapidly than any other sport by far. So all those things, if you're, if you're looking from an investor standpoint, do you go and look at it and say, Is this is this money worth it now? Probably not. But if it continues on the track that it has in every other facet of the sport, then it certainly will be and of course, whether that you know, proves true with kind of this, this whole team thing. And getting it like another sport league that you know if that happens, that remains to be seen, and I think has a lot of steps to get there.
• 40:31
  Ben Johns: But I think people tend to believe in pickleball because of what it's done in other areas, which is certainly remarkable for any sport. And I add to that, that I think the number one thing that kind of sponsors and TD want to see are engaged fans and more than just about any sport I've ever seen.
• 40:49
  Ben Johns: Pickleball has that they have fanatically in engaged fans that are basically willing to do anything about for pickleball.
• 40:55
  Ben Johns: And this was even before there was a pro tour, I realized very quickly that people that play pickleball are so fanatical about it that they will do anything for it. And that was kind of one of the things in the in the culture of people that I think everyone has really, really liked and stuck with it.
• 41:12
  Ben Johns: So having a fanatically engaged fan base that will do anything for the sport is a golden nugget for any investor, I think. And as soon as they realize that they're usually pretty all in.
• 41:22
  Randall Kaplan: So that's a good segue into some statistics. So I'm going to redo that one too.
• 41:27
  Randall Kaplan: Before we get into your incredible career, let's talk about some pickleball statistics. 36 point 5 million people in the United States have played pickleball at least once in the last year that's 14% of the US population. In 2021, the average age of a pickleball player was 38.1 years old, which was three years younger than in 2000. The sport is getting younger, the average age continues to decrease. And today the age group of 18 to 34 represents the largest age bracket of all pickleball players, totaling 28.8% of all players. 60.1% of pickleball players are male and 39.9% are women. As of today, there are 10,724 known places to play pickleball in the US with 130 new locations being created every month, which compares to 270,000 tennis courts in the United States, California has the most courts and nearly 1000 Pickleball is the fastest growing sport in the United States from 2021. It grew an incredible 39.3% In that year alone. And in 2022. It grew at 5.7%. Ben, what's going on here?
• 42:37
  Randall Kaplan: And why is it so popular? And are we heading to a situation where at some point soon, over half the US population? Over 100 million players 100 and 50 million players are going to be playing pickleball?
• 42:54
  Ben Johns: Yes, I mean, there's a ton of things that make pickleball what it is, the first thing I'd say is that it is extremely easy to play as a casual player to be somebody that is not you know, super invested in playing the sport regularly. And of course, there's a ton of those people too, they get obsessed with it and do play it extremely regularly, like every day regularly. But you can you know, not play for months come back to and just be like, Oh yeah, I can pick this up. Again, this is a lot of fun. So it's very much a participation sport. Just because it's so easy to you know, have fun and have good points, the first time you go out and every subsequent time you go out, you know, practicing a lot, which is in contrast to a number of other sports. So there's that going for it. I'd say the social aspect is really huge. In today's world, there's so many people that I've met the play badminton, or like Pickleball is our social seat.
• 43:46
  Ben Johns: This is how we meet people, this is how we make friends. And it's really easy for that. And there's a lot of reasons for that, too. There's one, there's the culture, it's just it's welcoming. When you like pickleball, you want to introduce other people. There's that, you know, there's such a variety of backgrounds, you know, because it's kind of the one thing that's unifying people, you meet people that are very unique, and, you know, you meet people that you wouldn't otherwise meet without pickleball. So I think that's huge. And even the proximity is huge. In pickleball. If you compare it to like tennis, you're like, three times as close to them, when you can actually just talk while you play. That's actually huge versus tennis where you basically have to shout at them, right? Just something as physically simple as proximity.
• 44:23
  Ben Johns: Makes pickleball another thing that it is. So it's got a lot of simple things going for it, but kind of everything combined has made it this crazy roller coaster of of growth, basically.
• 44:36
  Ben Johns: So yeah, I would definitely not be surprised to see a very large percent of America playing pickleball on a semi regular basis. And, you know, we haven't seen many examples of a sport that is so participation based, rather than spectator based, because you know, a ton of people watch football, but not that many people play football.
• 44:59
  Ben Johns: It's kind of the opposite of what football is. So whether that is super successful in different areas of what a sport is like a pro tour, a team league, or anything like that, that remains to be seen. But we do know that as a spectator sport. It's incredible.
• 45:13
  Randall Kaplan: So for our viewers and listeners who don't know, what Ben is talking about is a pickleball court is 44 by 20 feet. And the game is often played at the net. That's where the strategy is. It's not like tennis, where you're wailing away, and you're essentially five feet from the net and all the players are at the net. If you're going to win that's that's the strategy. And so typically, the player should envision a much shorter court, they're not yelling at one another. They're talking to one another. They're 10 feet away from each other where where the game was played. And you mentioned the social part of pickleball. It's 100%. Right?
• 45:47
  Randall Kaplan: Everybody talks it's a great social function. We have a court at our house OS. And there are people who continually invite themselves to play. And it's been fun meeting all kinds of nice people, incredible people.
• 45:59
  Randall Kaplan: It's a great networking aspect as to if you've got a cord. It's it's phenomenal. I've met so many incredible human beings, business people, philanthropy, I'm very involved in that as well. And it's, it's been, it's really added a lot to the social value in our social calendar.
• 46:18
  Ben Johns: Yeah, I would definitely emphasize the meetings, some interesting business people and opportunities and entrepreneurs is definitely a huge upside as well.
• 46:26
  Randall Kaplan: Let's talk about your incredible pickleball career and start at the beginning. Can you take us back to your Florida Vacation back in 2016? And how things progressed from there?
• 46:38
  Ben Johns: Yeah, so I found pickleball while I was playing tennis, in the community that I lived in, in estero, Florida, they built pickleball courts near the the tennis courts that were in the community. And I'd often hit with my brother there, because he was training for pro tennis all the time. So I'd hit with him at those tennis courts, I basically just saw pickleball played in that community. And it looked like fun, I had played a lot of racquet sports and paddle sports, and I'm always willing to give them a try. So I gave that one a try. And kind of just blanked it pretty pretty quickly. And then I just played with kind of the locals in the community, which were admittedly the more seniors for the next month or so. And then it kind of just turned out that I was in a hotspot of pickleball, Naples, Florida was going to be the host of the first US Open in 2016. So that was my first tournament, and around there were a lot of good players. And so I met a lot of those good players early on, I started playing with them. And really from there on out, it was it was one of my traffic of pickleball every day,
• 47:39
  Randall Kaplan: where were you finding courts back then?
• 47:41
  Randall Kaplan: Actually, in South
• 47:42
  Ben Johns: Florida, there was pretty plentiful courts compared to everywhere else. There were permanent courts in in Estero.
• 47:48
  Ben Johns: And the Naples facility had, I don't know, 30 permanent courts.
• 47:53
  Ben Johns: And besides that you could find plenty of temporary courts. So in that time, South Florida was one of the hotspots for pickleball courts, and you can find them pretty easily.
• 48:01
  Randall Kaplan: But take us through your first tournament was the US Open? It was 30 minutes from where you were living in estero, Florida at the time. I believe you plays fifth in that tournament. What happened from there? Did you say alright, this is something I want to do is a hobby, we'll get into making money later, but there really was no money in the sport of that game. So what were you training for? We training five hours a day, six hours per day, we're just good enough where you just started kicking everybody's ass all day long.
• 48:31
  Ben Johns: Yeah, well, first of all, I was just playing because it was a lot of fun. I wasn't training for really anything other than being as good as I could, which I guess you could call training. But I just needed his playing for fun and trying to get better, because that's what I liked doing. Because it was a really fun sport. Yeah, I did play Speth in the first US Open. And at that time, I mean, that was the Pro Division. So if I can place fifth after playing the sport for two months, I definitely wasn't taking it seriously, as a professional sport. I was like, Come on this is this is kind of easy, right?
• 49:00
  Ben Johns: But at the same time, I knew how fun it was. So it's not that I was gonna say this sport, the joke, I'm not gonna play anymore. It's more like, hey, this sport doesn't have very many players. And, you know, I want to play it because it's really fun. I'll continue to play pro tournaments, because also, that's fun. So I guess in the, in the year following that year, 2016, I came back the next year, and I was that year 2016, I think I played one or two more tournaments. It wasn't very much because I went back to Maryland, and there wasn't really any pickleball there. So I didn't I didn't play that much for the rest of that year. But when I came back to Florida, the following year, 2017, that's when I was a senior in high school, I had a ton of free time. And I just played every day, multiple hours a day, just because I enjoyed it so much.
• 49:41
  Ben Johns: And that year 2017, I actually won the US Open. So that was kind of the point where I was like, I guess I am pretty good at this game. So I mean, I was already going to keep playing because it was really fun. But then I was going to school in 2017. Fall 2017 was my freshman year in college in Maryland. And I knew from there that you know, I was going to do my best to juggle school and travel to tournaments and do my best there, I knew I wasn't gonna be able to train very much because I didn't have anybody to play with in Maryland, really. And whatever, you're not playing as much, obviously, it's gonna be hard to get better. But I did know I wanted to travel and play tournaments, because that's that's what I really liked doing. So that was kind of my plan. And that's what I did. I had a heck of a year of pickleball in 2017. And then from there on out, I was juggling school, you know, taking tests and exams and then flying on Thursday to go play Friday, Saturday, Sunday, fly back and have class on Monday,
• 50:33
  Randall Kaplan: who was supporting you during all this time? How are you making money or getting money to fly to all of these tournaments?
• 50:42
  Ben Johns: Yeah, so I mean, we were certainly not making good money at in pro pickleball. But kind of the pickleball culture was certainly helpful in that.
• 50:48
  Ben Johns: You can almost always stay with Sounds like you just be like, alright, which pickleball player lives in this area, let me go stay with them. And they were really good about that they've had a ton of wonderful hosts and people in pickleball. And I still stay in touch with as far as traveling kind of airfare and stuff. I got my first sponsor in 2017 and gauge pickleball, which is still in pickleball. So they were definitely helpful in kind of covering expenses and giving equipment and stuff. And then, of course, some, you know, limited prize money. I felt like the most prize money I probably made in one tournament in 2017 was like $1,500. But I was like, let's go, I'm rich. You know, I can cover three flights with this. So yeah, there was that and you know, I was coming out ahead, not not really far ahead, but by the end of 2017, or 2018, I was like, you know, I can come out a couple $1,000 ahead, playing for the year counting all my expenses, which is which is great because I get to travel and play pickleball and have fun. I'm not losing money on it.
• 51:46
  Randall Kaplan: Thanks for listening to part one of my amazing conversation with Ben Jon's the number one pickleball player in the world and the greatest player of all time. Be sure to tune in next week for part two of my awesome conversation with Ben