While it may once have been considered the domain of country clubs and retirement homes, the sport of pickleball is making a play for the mainstream. As professional pickleball leagues earn serious attention – and investment – from the sports world, food and beverage brands see it as an emerging cultural trend, and they’re looking to get in on the ground floor.
If you’re not familiar, pickleball closely resembles tennis and badminton; the game is played with paddles on a small court (about 1/3 the size of a tennis court) using a hard, lightweight ball that offers a reduced bounce. Since the 1960s, the game has been a go-to recreational activity for players of all ages, though until recently the player base skewed toward older folks.
But the sport’s profile is quickly changing. This year, sports stars like LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Draymond Green, Kevin Love, Drew Brees, Tom Brady and James Blake have all become team owners within Major League Pickleball (MLP), a professional league founded and run by billionaire and former hedge fund manager Steve Kuhn. Pro games have also been broadcast by ESPN and CBS Sports, among other networks, helping position pickleball tournaments to potentially become significant spectator events.
Beyond the slate of A-List athletes investing in pro teams, food and beverage companies are also jumping on board. Coffee brand BLQK and yerba mate maker CLEAN Cause both purchased MLP teams last year ahead of the league’s first season, and last week Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB) announced it has also acquired an MLP expansion team, which will begin playing next year. Financial terms of the AB deal were not disclosed, but the average price to purchase an MLP team has been reported to be in the seven-figure range.
But it’s not just about ownership. On Monday, Boston-based Grillo’s Pickles – seizing what has to be one of the most obvious brand sponsorship opportunities imaginable – was named the Official Pickle of Major League Pickleball.
“Friends who were my age were starting to play pickleball out in Los Angeles, and they’d send me photos of them wearing the gear, playing pickleball … as well as eating pickles and drinking the juice on the sidelines,” said Grillo’s brand manager Eddie Andre. “So we quickly realized, as the sport starts to get more and more popular, that these are also athletes, and a lot of athletes already enjoy Grillo’s Pickles. So we found it to be a no-brainer.”
MLP is now in its second year, but the pro pickleball ecosystem extends far beyond it; the organization is one of three main leagues, alongside the Professional Pickleball Association (PPA) Tour, and the Association of Pickleball Professionals (APP). There is also USA Pickleball, the national governing body for the sport, which has existed since the 1980s, and provides membership for local pickleball clubs across the country and also sanctions professional events.
In addition to the already named brands, MLP has secured a wide range of partnerships with food and beverage companies since launching in November 2021; Richard’s Rainwater, Ranch Rider Spirits Co. and Michelob Ultra were sponsors for the first season.
The PPA Tour, meanwhile, has brought multiple alcohol brands under its wings and in October named Molson Coors-owned Vizzy as its Official Hard Seltzer. The league has also partnered with tequila brand Casamigos and FitVine Wine. Since last year, USA Pickleball has also announced several new brand sponsors including CBD-infused seltzer Day One, Shamrock Farms Rockin’ Protein, and bar brand Tosi.
Day One has itself sponsored seven individual pickleball athletes and according to CEO Chris Clifford the brand has handed out over 60,000 samples at events. As a sponsor of USA Pickleball, he said Day One has flexibility to partner with players across pro leagues as well as attend amateur events.
“What’s exciting about it is this community is so welcoming.,” Clifford said. “There’s a real sense of community, even when you go to an amateur events or you go to a pickleball facility, you’re standing on the side and people are asking you, ‘Hey, do you want to join?’ You don’t really get that in tennis. So it’s just a fascinating sport, to say the least, we’ve loved it because it’s been a great opportunity for us to be a part of an authentic community and have a lot of sampling grounds for us.”
What Do These Sponsorships Look Like?
CLEAN Cause founder Wes Hurt said that when he pitched the idea of purchasing a pro pickleball team to his board of directors, it wasn’t an immediate “slam dunk.” He credits Kuhn with convincing him of the sport’s potential – a bet that he said is now paying off as pickleball’s buzz has grown louder.
“The investment has grown significantly, like massively, in a matter of a year-and-a-half or so from when our original investment was,” Hurt said. “While I was betting on the ROI of the person, from a brand standpoint it was about awareness, activation and network.”
The team, also named CLEAN Cause, has already seen some success in the league – member Federico Staksrud is currently ranked 10th out of the league’s 48 total players, with teammate Dekel Bar ranked 14th.
Aside from having players wearing the CLEAN Cause logo on their uniforms, the brand is also able to activate at tournaments with sampling and signage. Moreover, the partnership is meaningful for the company’s mission – CLEAN Cause gives a percentage of all its profits to programs supporting drug addicts in recovery – and Hurt said the pickleball team helps to grow awareness of the social message.
“I’m blown away that someone can say ‘Let’s create a national professional league’ and then you go to an event and it looks like a damn event that’s been going on for 10 years,” Hurt said. “There’s activations for brands that were there, we were handing out cans to people, and it was a public broadcast. And for a league in its infancy, the engagement, views and the interest was great. So, my expectations have been met and surpassed.”
According to Bruce Bundrant, head of sponsorships for MLP, the league’s tournaments are currently designed to be intimate affairs, estimating an attendance of around 2,500 to 3,000 people throughout the three-day event.
As pickleball’s popularity increases, he said the league sees the sport as having cross-demographic appeal, with potential to reach all ages, races and economic levels – for both spectators and participants.
In securing sponsorship deals, he said MLP is flexible in what it can provide for companies looking to get involved. In addition to on-court signage and event activations, the league also works to promote its brand partners online and has VIP areas where it can place products or sample stations as well.
“It just really depends on what the objective of the brand is, and then we provide them what they need,” Bundrant said.
In the case of Grillo’s, Andre said the brand wants to take the sponsorship off court and into grocery stores, suggesting the company could introduce promotional tie-in packaging or sweepstakes to give consumers free trips to MLP tournaments.
Another option, Andre added, is Grillo’s branded pickleball equipment and sportswear. The company has sold sneakers and other clothing items in the past, so – although it’s still just an idea on the whiteboard – he said a pickleball sports line would be readily executable.
“They’re just ideas, but we want to incorporate the pickleball partnership a little bit more broadly into our in-store marketing and really own it,” Andre said. “If we’re going to be the official pickle of pickleball, then we need to kind of lean into that, especially as the sport grows.”
But for a sport only just now getting its moment in the spotlight, these brand relationships go a long way towards growing pickleball itself. With AB coming on board with its own MLP team, Bundrant said the deal is a “game changer” as the beer giant will be working closely with the league to promote its new team and draw even more eyes onto the game.
“It gives us just a massive amount of legitimacy, to be honest,” Bundrant said. “[It says] that this is a sport that is doing so well, is going to be so big, that what is arguably the number one sports marketer in the world has gotten behind it, not only from a sponsorship perspective, but they purchased a team…. For the perception of our sport, but as well as all the activations they’re going to do – on-premise, off-premise, it’s going to raise the awareness of the sport.”