Podcast: Why the Business of Pickleball Is Booming With Chris Clark From Toss and Spin

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If you’ve ever watched Shark Tank or pitched your own business, you’re familiar with the concept of addressable market, or total addressable market (TAM). It’s an ever important metric to determine whether the thing you’re talking about has room for growth or – to put it simply – a way to quantify how many people care or could care about the thing you’re selling. I told you that to tell you this: Pickleball is booming.

A couple of facts point us in that direction, but most importantly, market size. According to Marketwatch, The global pickleball Paddle market – that’s just paddles – was valued at $126.5 million in 2019 and is expected to reach $218.2 million by the end of 2026.

People are making pickleball a business and business is booming. But outside of that, regular humans are loving the game: according to the Sport and Fitness Industry Association, it’s the fastest growing sport in the US. How big is it? 4.8 million people played it in 2021.

There’s even a major league of pickleball, which – get this, wants to bring the number of people playing pickleball in the US up to 30 million by 2030.

Investors in Major league pickleball include Naomi Osaka, Kevin Durant, Patrick Mahomes, Lebron James, Tom Brady, Heidi Klum, and Budweiser – just to name a few. By the way, pro Pickleball is going to be interesting – there’s going to be relegation and promotion – if you’ve watched Ted Lasso (or European football in general), you’re familiar with the drama of that.

So, on this week’s episode of the podcast, we dig in. We talk about how we found the game, Chris shares what led him to build a business in the racket sports space, and we generally just have a fantastic time.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or anywhere you get your podcasts.

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Podcast

About Jeana Anderson Cohen

Jeana Anderson Cohen is the founder and CEO of asweatlife.com a premiere wellness media destination that creates content and community to help womxn live better lives and achieve their goals. Before founding health-focused companies Jeana earned a degree in Journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison - and fresh out of college she worked on the '08 Obama campaign in Michigan. From there, she created and executed social media strategies for brands. aSweatLife fuses her experience in building community and her passion for wellness. You can find Jeana leading the team at aSweatLife, trying to join a book club, and walking her dog Maverick.