We started planning an indoor pickleball club in our basement. No playbook. No other pickleball-only clubs to call and ask how it was done. People were honest with us. What is pickleball? Nobody will pay to play. You’ll be out of business in a year. Some of it stung. We kept building anyway.
Pickles opened in Hanover, Massachusetts in March 2021. Lisa was behind the counter sixteen hours a day. Dustin was cleaning courts at 3 a.m. There was no point-of-sale system built for pickleball, so we adapted one from a tanning salon. We learned programming, memberships and events in real time, one decision at a time. And thousands of players walked through the doors.
“The dream part doesn’t work unless the doing part does.”
We’re proud of that chapter and deeply grateful for it. But the sale isn’t the story. The story is everything before it. The days that felt like survival. The nights spent figuring it out. And the people who made it worth doing.
We kept thinking about the personalities we met on our courts. So we gave them names: the Dinky Dozen, twelve characters for everyday players, not the pros. Today they’re licensed worldwide through Westbridge Licensing, and on products you can buy now.
We didn’t get everything right. The Open Playbook is what we learned, nothing held back, written as simple exercises you can do with your team. Take what helps. Leave the rest.
If you’re going to be a dreamer,you’d better be a doer.
Four free playbooks for club owners. Start with one exercise.
