Off The Screen, Issue 1
Off The Screen, Issue 1
An introduction to the newsletter, interview with Xenon founder Noah Seidenberg, advice from club pro Mike Benson and numbers from the 2023-24 season.
‘Everyday People’
One night early last season, I was in the middle of blowing another match at a club in the northern suburbs while one of my teammates was talking to his opponent in the well-stocked hut.
This opponent was asking questions about our team and after my teammate explained that we played for the Winnetka Park District, the opponent responded, with great equanimity, “It’s nice that everyday people can play too.”
Of course, we immediately adopted that as our unofficial nickname.
“The Everyday People.”
I’d like to say that moment spurred us on to a championship season, Bad News Bears style. But this wasn’t a movie. We finished in dead last by a considerable margin. But we had fun and we ate and drank all over the North Shore every Thursday evening, with a little exercise thrown in.
I mention this not out of class warfare — we played out of Winnetka, which isn’t exactly Mayberry — but to explain why I’m starting this newsletter dedicated to paddle tennis. I want it to be for everyday people, whether they play at the fanciest club on the North Shore or in the western suburbs or are just park district hacks like me.
This newsletter isn’t going to be focused on the men and women competing for national championships. This is going to be for the everyday people just trying to have fun and get a little better,
About me: I’m a sportswriter by trade — I was the founding editor of The Athletic — and ever since I started playing this game in the spring of 2022 I’ve noticed there isn’t much out there in terms of paddle-tennis journalism.
While pickleball and Padel get the trend stories, the casual paddle player is left to explain to people the difference between our sports.
Given the expense of building platform tennis courts (a story for another issue), this will remain a niche sport forever, but it’s one with serious growth potential. So, there’s a lot to write about.
What should you expect from “Off The Screen”?
Well, I learned a lot while helping launch The Athletic back in 2016 like": stay flexible, start local and provide consistent content at a fair price.
This will be a subscription newsletter ($60 for an annual membership or $8 per month) and while I know we all have more than enough subscriptions, I think this will be a good value. At the very least, know that you’re supporting one of your own. The newsletter will publish every month during the offseason and then weekly (or twice-a-week, depending on the response) from September through March.
With that in mind, the newsletter will be Chicago-centric, for the most part. Again, I’m flexible. And I’m approaching this sport with the curiosity of a journalist.
Here are some descriptions for the kinds of stories I’m going to focus on:
Tips and strategy for beginner, intermediate and advanced players
I’m going to talk to pros and players of all skill range for tips, drills and lessons learned on the court (See below). As a first-time captain last season, I tried to include tips and general thoughts to my team before every match. Did they work? Probably not. But I know the team appreciated the attempts.
Unbiased equipment reviews
How do you decide what kind of paddle to buy? What about shoes? What about clothes? It’s all trial and error and word of mouth, but it doesn’t hurt to have a little information and analysis.
Surveys
This is one of the things we started in Chicago that caught on with The Athletic, surveying our readers. I want to hear from paddle players across the northern and western suburbs about … everything, really. Look for the first one in the next issue.
News
From court construction to job openings to the results of matches (and not just the top series), there’s a lot to cover. Everyone likes to see their name in the paper, right?
Hut, food and court reviews
We all know that the hut and the post-match “atmosphere” is part of the appeal. I love the “Hut of the Week” feature in the APTA newsletter, so if I have to travel around Chicagoland to properly evaluate their fare, well, that’s part of the job.
Friends of the newsletter
I’d like to highlight a business owned and/or operated by paddle players every week. While I’m open to advertising, this is more about community-building.
Feature stories/interviews
From Q&As with industry heavyweights (we’re leading with Noah Seidenberg, the founder of Xenon) to stories on people in and around the game, these will be informative and entertaining. I’m always open to pitches too.
Columns
I’m a columnist, right? So I will also write essays about playing, opinion columns about the league, narratives, etc.
Paddle by the Numbers*
*All numbers are for men’s league unless otherwise specified
42: Chicago clubs sponsoring a men’s league paddle team
29: Clubs that won a regular-season title
26: Teams that won a playoff title
23: Teams that won both regular season and playoffs in 49 series (7 of 10 SW series)
15: Clubs that won one regular-season title
14: Clubs that won multiple regular-season titles
13: Clubs that won multiple playoff titles
13: Clubs that won exactly one playoff title
13: Clubs that won zero titles
5: Tennaqua’s playoff championships (the most of any club)
4: Evanston's regular-season championships (the most of any club, with all coming between series 20-35)
4: Winnetka’s regular-season championships for Chicago North Suburban Women's Paddle League’s day and evening divisions (the most of any club)
(I will publish the entire list of winners in the next issue.)
Q&A with Noah Seidenberg, founder of Xenon
Three years ago when I decided I wanted to try this sport, I asked a friend about what kind of paddle to buy. He gave me a scouting report on the various brands and their price points and when he said there was a small company named Xenon based out of Chicago.
Shop local, right?
I found my Xenon paddle at Kiddles Sports in Lake Forest and I’m still playing with it today. While my record would discourage Xenon’s founder Noah Seidenberg from signing me as an endorser, he did agree to an interview for the newsletter.
Seidenberg plays for both Hawthorn Woods Country Club and LifeSport Lincolnshire. His Hawthorn Woods team won the Series 5 championship and his LifeSport team lost the Series 6 finals in a tiebreaker. In the finals, Seidenberg won in Series 5 and lost in Series 6.
When he’s not playing paddle or making paddles for Xenon, he’s the managing partner at Inspirion Wealth Advisors. We spoke via Zoom while he was in Florida. This is part one of our conversation, which has been lightly edited for space and clarity.
So how did you get started playing paddle?
We moved to Hawthorn Woods and we’re a couple hundred feet from the courts and I had no idea what they were. This was in 2006. And my wife says, why don't you go play men's night open tennis and meet some people. And I'm like, I'll just go out, have some beers, play Monday night men's league and I kind of whacked the ball around a little bit. The pro goes, “You play paddle?" I don't know what paddle is. He goes "Oh, you’ll love it. A lot of drinking is involved and hanging out with the guys." I'm like, let's give it a shot.
So the first year, there were probably 10 of us. Nobody with a racquet sports background. And we just went out and basically we played Series 15, which was the highest series at the time, which is kind of ironic since now there's 50-some series between the western suburbs and the North Shore. But we played series 15. I have no idea how we did performance-wise. I think we did OK because we had some pretty good athletes. But we closed down every single hut in the league. Guys would come home at three in the morning, four in the morning. We had two guys whose wives didn't let them play the following year after that. So that was my intro to paddle. And then I'm like, you know, this is actually kind of fun to play and maybe we can get decent at this.
What made you decide to start your own paddle company?
It wasn't supposed to be a paddle company, really. It was kind of a stupid idea that got legs. So our youngest went off to college and I figured I had a little more time on my hands.
I know nothing about manufacturing. And so I said with the internet, I’ve got to be able to find some place where I could make, like, 50 paddles exactly the way I want and whatever the cost, I'll have a lifetime supply of paddles for me. And if some people like them, I'll give them away, sell them, whatever. It's amazing what you can find when you go more than the first three listings on Google. When you go about 10, 15 pages deep, you find some interesting stuff. And so I hooked up with a guy in China and Taiwan and the short version is we went from 50 paddles to 500 paddles to 1,500 by the time they actually produced the first order. And they sold out in about two months. And I'm like, I guess we have a business.
The other thing was, I'm good friends with Drew Broderick. Drew's a pro at Canoe Brook (Country Club) in New Jersey. And so I went to his paddle camp with some of my buddies out in Telluride, Colo., and I was thinking about starting the company and we're talking about balls. And he was like, there's no reason balls should be as expensive as they are. If you can come up with a good ball, I'll buy 100 cases. So I’ve got a customer for 100 cases already, I should see if I can find a good ball and make it work. That kind of all happened at the same time that I was kind of in the process of cutting up 20 different paddles and seeing how they worked and kind of figuring that stuff out. And it all just came together.
The first few years were miserable because with no manufacturing background, it's very simple to find the wrong Chinese factory, which I did for the first two. Now we've got a phenomenal factory.
You said you're cutting up rackets. So, were you just cutting to see how it worked and how do you go about designing a paddle racket?
Up through college, I played hockey. I played goalie and I coached afterward for a few years. I'd always done work on equipment. Thirty years ago, it wasn't that uncommon for guys to do their own repair work on pads and things like that.
And so maybe 10 or 12 years ago, I got this wild idea: I'm gonna make my own leg pads because I was still playing men's league hockey. I got into materials and cut some up and I got about two-thirds of the way through with one leg pad and I'm like, oh man, this is just a shitload of work. I'm not doing this. But it was fascinating. I had some experience with just digging into things. I'm certainly not one of those guys who says I like taking things apart and putting them back together. That's not me unless I really have a passion for it, which I did for hockey and for paddle. With the paddles and balls, I basically just cut them open and kind of saw how they worked and talked to a bunch of people who knew much more than me about the process and what materials to use and everything else.
I've hired some great people, great engineers, to help with some of that stuff. And the rest of it was just really trial and error.
I went over to a bunch of friends over at the Winter Club with probably eight or 10 different prototypes, and just, you know, “What do you like? What don't you like? What should we change? How's the weight feel? How's the balance?” That's kind of how we did it. Trial and error. And then we narrowed it down because I didn't want to have 300 different SKUs of paddles, of course. So I tried having four different models. We have a few more than that now. But that was it.
We actually had design changes every single year, which is not really what I'd like. This year, they are mostly the same but we're bringing out a new paddle that's going to be an amazing improvement. We’ve kind of got it dialed in now where the changes are mostly done.
To be continued in Part 2
How to Get Better in the Summer with Winnetka pro Mike Benson
Not everyone works on their paddle games in the spring and summer, but before you know it, the season will be here. So if you want to improve, how should you get ready during the offseason?
As someone who needs to upgrade his game — my PTI looks like a retirement age for someone who didn’t properly fund their 401k — I called up Mike Benson, our pro at the Winnetka Platform Tennis Club.
Benson is a tennis pro’s tennis pro, which is a sportswriter’s way of saying he’s an authentic, salt-of-the-earth guy.
After playing the junior circuit, he started off his college tennis career at the University of Oklahoma before a stint at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, Calif., where he played with a guy named Brad Gilbert. After that, he transferred to Brown University, where he graduated from. He’s played tennis all over the world and he’s been teaching paddle since 2002.
One of the main things I wanted to ask him about was my serve, because it’s something I can practice on my own. I sometimes like to go to the courts by myself and just serve for a little bit, especially on the morning of matches. What kind of serve should I be working on or perfecting this summer?
“The first priority is something that you can get in with a high percentage of success,” Benson said. “Secondly, being able to hit that same serve to the left half of the box and the right half of the box, both deuce and ad side. Thirdly, because we're adding a first layer of complexity and a second layer of complexity, now the third layer of complexity would be a second type of serve. So if you can hit one serve flat to two halves of both boxes. That's four serves, right? It's four targets and then if you can add spin to those four targets, now you have eight serves.”
I don’t know about you, but when I’m practicing serves, I’m able to focus on where I want to put the ball. When I’m actually serving in a game, I’m just trying not to fuck up since we only get one serve.
The key, as with any athletic activity, is to practice enough where you don’t think and muscle memory takes over. And that gets to Benson’s more general point about what you should work on.
“In the offseason, you should focus on your technique,” he said. "In other words, how to swing, how to perfect you stroke or a particular type of shot to a particular target.”
I was thinking about this when I played a Saturday morning session recently. Why was I so focused on winning? Maybe it was the flowing competitive juices. After all, we were playing, not just hitting around and you owe to your partner and your opponents to take it seriously. And, really, what’s the point of practicing shots if you’re not using them in competition? But also, I didn’t really have a plan of what I wanted to focus on.
For instance: my biggest weaknesses, beyond a basic athleticism deficit, are playing it off the screen and inconsistent lobbing.
So how can I improve that when I’m playing these kinds of matches? Well, like with most paddle advice, it starts with the proper positioning.
“If you're lobbing, you are off balance and likely behind the baseline,” Benson said. “Because if you can strike a ball with balance inside the baseline, you should hit it low most of the time.”
A good point to remember for the beginners among us.
“So your question is: how can I lob better?” Benson said. “And I would say, number one, basic tennis, watch the ball, move your feet. Number two, stay calm. Number three, let the ball drop below your waist and strike the ball between your knees and your waist. Number four, ideally your feet are sideways, ideally you transfer your weight from back to front foot, ideally your paddle stays online and you don't follow through across your body.”
Great advice, especially the connection between two and three, staying calm as you wait for the ball to drop so you can hit it between your waist and knees.
But of course, there’s more.
“We have we haven't said what matters most, and it really is what the best players are doing,” Benson said.
I’m listening.
“They are, number one, watching the ball and moving their feet, that’s kind of a given, and number two, they have a target,” he said. “So you can't talk about any stroke without talking about the obvious necessity of having a target. And then what's the target? Straight? Or straight to the center line?
“Picture yourself: you’re on the doubles line against the back screen. You try to hit the ball straight in the middle and have it land in the middle of no man's land. That's the distance. So your target for lobs is the middle of no man's land. And if you can get it as high as the lights, that's best.”
Benson isn’t just giving advice, he’s taking it too. Howard Sipe, the father of paddle tennis in Chicago, coaches at Winnetka these days and he’s been harping on a couple of shots that he thinks Benson needs to add to his game.
“One of them is a topspin roller,” Benson said. “You know, the opponent lobs and I hit the roller instead of the overhead. Now that the season's over, I am doing more of that.”
If you’re confused by what he means, check out this video on how to hit the roller.
Benson added that you should only hit that shot when you’re inside the service box. He’s also working on a variation of that topspin roller where he adds a bit more slice to it.
We’ll have more from Mike in upcoming issues. But if you’re looking for lessons, hit him up at mbenson@winnetkapaddle.com.
Wrapping Up
If you liked this first issue, tell your friends and most importantly, hit that subscribe button. I’ll be adding more to the newsletter in terms of graphics, photos and prose. I want to hear from you about what you want to read going forward. Email me at offthescreennewsletter@gmail.com.
Loved it!
Eager for more of these.