Off The Screen, Issue 2
Off The Screen, Issue 2
A survey, a shoe, a chart and the second part of an interview
Another week closer to the paddle season …
A sincere thank you to everyone who has subscribed to the newsletter. We’ve got a solid base of free and paid subscribers from the first issue and I know it’s going to grow exponentially as we get closer to the fall season.
I’m working on a larger story on how the team selection process works at different clubs, so look for that in August or early September. If you’re involved in that onerous undertaking and want to chat, shoot me an email.
In the early years of The Athletic, we learned that people liked doing surveys. In fact, we had people who paid us (i.e. subscribed) to take them. That goes against conventional thinking, right? Once my former boss Adam Hansmann brought that detail to my attention, we couldn’t get enough of it.
So with that in mind, I created a paddle tennis survey. I have questions about your game, your equipment, some demographic info, etc.
An important note before you click: I’m not requiring any log-ins to monitor how many times you take it, so we’re on the honor system here. I’m also not tracking individual answers so it’s all anonymous. While some of the questions may seem like it (paddle preference, etc.), I’m also never going to sell any information about subscribers. (I’m not sure I’ll take paddle-related advertising either.) Please forward to your friends, teammates, etc.
I’ll reveal the results in an upcoming issue.
I haven’t played in the past month because of some annoying plantar fasciitis stemming from the one and only time I’ve hit the courts since the end of the season.
But it did push me to buy a new pair of shoes.
I’ve been playing in a pair of Nike Air Zoom Vapor Pros for the last two years. Maybe it was just wearing court shoes for the first time in years. but they felt too clunky. I did get used to them this season, but with the injury it was time for a change.
I’m a “shop local” guy, but in this case, the local was in the Shadyside neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Since I was a little kid, I’ve been shopping on Walnut St., where Tennis Village is a mainstay. Every time I come back to this area, it makes me happy that it’s still around.
Tennis Village is a classic tennis store with merchandise crammed everywhere and old posters on the wall. It’s a time capsule, sure, but it’s very relevant to the modern tennis community in Pittsburgh.
After a full day at the Kennywood amusement park, my son owed me, so he sat peacefully while I tried on shoe after shoe. I wasn’t really happy with the array of Nikes I was trying on and then, I noticed the sales guy had included a pair of K-Swiss to the pile. So I tried on the Hypercourt Express 2. Immediately, I was sold. They felt light and supportive. I see a lot of guys wearing them and the salesman said K-Swiss was probably the most popular brand in the store. Sometimes, you have to trust the wisdom of crowds.
I’ll have a review once I get back on the court. If you have another recommendation for a shoe for me to buy, hit me up.
In the last issue, I went through the numbers of the 2023-24 men’s paddle season, how many clubs won a title, how many won multiple championships, etc. It took a lot of work to compile those numbers, reminding me of one my favorite Seinfeld subplots, when George made the “candy lineup” to entrap a mechanic who stole his dangling Twix out of a car dealership’s vending machine.
I use this as an example whenever anyone spends too much time on frivolous research.
Like George, I soldier on. So to get that info, I went through every series on the APTA website and compiled the winners on a spreadsheet. Here is the full list of winners from the men’s side last season.
If you’d like to look at it on Canva, click here. As a bonus, here’s a copy of the original spreadsheet with my notes. Next issue, I’ll post the research from the women’s leagues.
After the first issue came out, Xenon founder Noah Seidenberg told me he was going to subscribe just to read part two of his interview. And he did!
Maybe that will be one of my subscription growth strategies: interview every person who plays paddle tennis in the greater Chicago area. I could be the Studs Terkel of the platform tennis world.
Well, Noah, here is part two (it’s lightly edited and truncated). Thanks again for the talk and the sub.
When you were creating your own paddle was there anything you wanted to fix or innovate?
The big thing — kind of our trademark, I guess — is all of our paddles have longer handles. They’re around 1 inch longer than most paddles with the basic idea that more and more better players have two-handed backhands. It was just uncomfortable, I think, for myself and a lot of players with a two-handed backhand with a smaller, length handle to get both hands on it.
So I'm like, that doesn't make any sense. Why not just have a longer handle? You're not sacrificing anything by having a longer handle if you don't have a two-handed backhand. But if you do, it's fantastic to have more room.
The other thing we tried early on for the first two years — I think we got rid of after the second tier — was there's a paddle brand that lasted about a year called Aztek that had kind of a bump on the top of the handle that, again, if you had a two-handed backhand, it sat really nicely. The ergonomics were great in your hand. And so we tried something similar. They actually filed a patent for it and went out of business before the patent got issued.
But I just thought it felt really good and so I tried doing that. I had a bunch of guys who loved it and a bunch of people who were like, well, what happens if the ball hits here on the bump? If the ball hits the bump on the top of your handle, you probably have some other issues going on.
I got tired of having that argument after a few years and so I said, all right, we'll go more traditional. So the longer handle stuck, the bump on the top didn't. But, of course, as soon as we got rid of the bump I had a gazillion people that are like, well, I love that. So I actually do still have one of the molds. If certain players want that, we've got some available.
One of the things that we did that I thought would have been super popular, it ended up selling a lot but not maybe as much as I would've thought, we did the first paddle with the heated handle. So it's got a battery inside it lasts two hours on the charge, it heats up to about 50 degrees over the outside temperature.
For a lot of people that have Raynaud's, which is a neuropathy where you lose the feeling or are very sensitive in your extremities, they like it. But the problem is there's so much weight in the handle, because the battery is there, that it limits some of what you can do with the paddle. We sell a good number of them but I would have thought we would have sold a ton of those annually. There's certainly a niche market for it.
How many people work for you with Xenon now? You have an engineer. You've got obviously your designers and stuff like that, right?
Yeah, those are all people I contract out work for. I do the bookkeeping, I do whatever marketing is done. I've got a couple of contracted sales guys now. I do the design work, but I have people do the technical aspects. So I contract out for certain things that I need, but I am the only employee.
Have people tried to buy you out? Like the big racquet companies?
Yeah, there was a big tennis company or pickleball company that talked to me a little bit, but again, it's a passion project. So if someone came along and offered me a stupid amount of money, I would, of course, look at it and do it. But this is my fun project. It keeps me busy.
You said the first order went to 1,500. What do you sell a year now in paddles? How big of a company has this gotten?
Those are trade secrets. No one will talk about that. But it's significantly more than that. Let's say that.
What are the big paddle markets?
So Chicago is is certainly a big one. Chicago is a little bit different, Chicago is somewhat of an island.
If you go out east, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut are absolutely enormous but they're all separate. And so, Fairfield County in Connecticut is going to be its own entity, Westchester County, New York City, their own ones. And then there’s New Jersey. In Chicago, it’s one big league that encompasses everybody. You can get from New Jersey to Connecticut in an hour and a half. But in Chicago, that's like driving from Hawthorn Woods down to Midtown at 5 o’clock for a match.
So, the Tri-State area, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, is big. Chicago is big. Boston's big. Philly is very big. Those are going to be the main markets, for sure.
And then, you've got some solid secondary markets. I would say Cincinnati and Columbus are solid secondary markets. Baltimore-DC is definitely a very solid secondary. Even though those guys are an hour away, the traffic is so bad that they don't really intermingle too much. Now you get some little stuff that's coming up in Virginia. You've got Detroit with a few clubs.
I feel like it's really tough for people to figure out what shoes to wear, what paddles to buy sometimes. It’s all word of mouth, right?
I think the thing with paddles is that as much as I would love everyone to only use our paddles, the reality is much like most sports equipment, if we’re being honest, it's all very subjective, right? I don't know if you golf at all, but how many drivers are sold because you borrow your buddy’s driver on a tee, you hit one great shot, and you go, “I gotta go get this.” And you run out and get it and you still stink at golf.
Paddles are kind of similar, right? It's subjective. If you grab it and it feels good, that's probably the right paddle for you. If it doesn't feel good or there's something that you don't like, then it makes sense to make a change.
Balls are easier. Balls at the end of the day, they should feel good and they should last because balls are not inexpensive. The reason is there are like two factories in the world that make balls. Getting into the ball factories is like Fort Knox.
You’ve been playing for a while, what should people be working on in the offseason?
(Editor’s note: Seidenberg talked at length about the Volley machine, which we’ll cover in a future issue.)
Beyond that machine, the biggest thing is screens. You have a lot of racquet players that come in and can't figure out the screen to save their lives.
I am always fascinated by guys who are D-I tennis players, obviously tremendous racquet skills, but they never really get to the same level of accomplishment at paddle as they could in tennis. And I think it's because they want to play the way they want to play and not play the way that you should play paddle. So I think the screen work is the biggest thing. Just should work on the side and the back the whole time.
Also, work on serving. You only get one serve in paddle. It always kills me when you see guys who are decent athletes who hit these serves where they’re pushing the ball. I'm not very good, but I've got a really good serve, I will say that. I put a lot of a lot of spin on my serve. I make a lot of good players look kind of silly because my serve is really good. The rest of my game, not so much.
When I started out, I'd serve a couple of buckets of balls every single week. And I got a really good serve doing that. … I played Series 5 and 6 this year and guys that had poor serves would get killed. I mean, they have great parts of their games but if you have a poor serve, you're only going to get to a certain level.
Last question: what's your favorite hut in Chicagoland?
There's a lot of good ones now. All the new ones are great. Evanston is probably the best. This is a very Chicago-focused thing, because if you go out to any place outside of Chicago and you expect the huts to be like Chicago, they're not. You go out and most of the huts in other parts of the country don't even have indoor plumbing. I remember playing in a tournament in Cleveland years ago. There was no indoor plumbing at any of the huts. I think now it's like one or two have indoor plumbing. Even at the Boston Nationals, they're using a porta-potties at the courts because there's no bathrooms nearby. So we're very, very spoiled in Chicago.
If you made it this far, you’re a diehard paddle fan. Please tell your friends about “Off The Screen.”