Time Flies – We’re already thirty days in!
Plymouth Pickleball hosted our first public session Sunday, September 4th, just over thirty days ago from the day I am writing this post. Leading up to that first day, we hosted some experimental sessions helping us learn the game, the rules, and practice teaching our friends so that when we taught others, we had a few of the kinks worked out.
What all happened before we hosted our first event?
I’ll keep this part short since I recently talked about it in a previous post, but we had a lot to get done before hosting public sessions at Plymouth Pickleball. We had to choose our brand, buy our web-domains, design and build our website which meant creating a lot of content.
We needed to create our social presence on Facebook and Instagram, market and find players, and get gym-time.
There were a lot of details and gotchas that required late nights, but we did it and launched Plymouth Pickleball in time for the public on September 4th.
What did we accomplish in the first thirty days at Plymouth Pickleball?
We have exceeded our expectations on many fronts because this all started as just an idea caused by a problem we personally experienced. Paul and I discovered pickleball over the Summer and wanted to play, but we couldn’t find anywhere to learn near our home of Plymouth.
Rather than moving on to something else, we wanted to try and create a solution to our own problem by teaching ourselves, but also find a way to teach others.
We have seen so much growth since launching Plymouth Pickleball just over thirty days ago!
What have we accomplished?
- Secured gym-time September through end of 2022 and into 2023.
- Hosted five multi-hour sessions focused on teaching pickleball to new players.
- Taught over fifty players how to play pickleball.
- Re-welcomed over twenty return visitors.
- Launched two session-types, Learn & Play, and Just Play for Beginners.
- Established early relationships with all three Michigan paddle manufacturers, Paddletek, TMPR Sports, and Revolin.
- Secured seventeen community paddles from partnership support as well as from our own contributions.
- Secured an additional portable net to expand our courts.
- Successfully launched a local marketing campaign using the Pumpkin Pickler Scarecrow in downtown Plymouth.
- Grew our Facebook and Instagram followers from zero to over eighty followers.
What’s next for us in the next thirty days at Plymouth Pickleball?
We have a lot of work ahead of us at Plymouth Pickleball to continue to offer the best pickleball in our community. While we have had a good start with tremendous growth, but we have a lot to learn about the sport, the culture of the game, and how to run a good pickleball experience for players.
Paul and I are still new very to all of this, and we appreciate the feedback we’re getting from our players so that we can continue to iterate each session.
Here’s what we’re focused on through the month of October!
Successfully host our scheduled sessions for October
First, we want to make sure our scheduled sessions go well for our players because that’s our top priority. We have already updated our sign-up forms to help us give our players better visibility into an accurate count of how many spots are available which is a big win. These sessions are almost full, so we want to give these players the best experience possible.
Launch a new session-type, “Just Play for Beginners”
We are hosting our first “Just Play for Beginners” session, which is a new session-type for us. We’re excited to offer this to players because it’s giving players who just want to play a way to do just that. Prior we were only offering a “Learn and Play” session where we actively taught players how to play pickleball, but now we have this new session-type where beginners can take that next step to practice through play. This session should be a lot of fun and we are currently designing it.
Open registration for our November dates and sessions
November is just around the corner and we are working on launching those session-blocks in a couple of weeks. We are reviewing our website form submissions to help us offer the right type of sessions in November. Early data tells us that we will offer more “Just Play” sessions, but time will tell.
Improve our operations and player-experience
Last, we have a lot of room for improvement on the operational side of Plymouth Pickleball. Currently, all of our registrations, communication, and management of sessions is done manually which takes a lot of time and energy. Well, Paul and I both have day-jobs and families so we need to find a more automated way to streamline some of this stuff. We have a few ideas we are working on and we expect to walk into November more organized and with less effort from our parts so that we can focus on more pickleball.
As always, thanks for playing with Plymouth Pickleball!
We want to thank the Plymouth Pickleball community for your continuous support. We have a lot of wonderful friends and family members who are volunteering time to help us ensure our sessions are a success, and we can’t thank them enough.
We also have the best player-community we have ever experienced. Everyone who has played with us has been so excited to play. Everyone has been kind, open, willing to learn together, and that’s what pickleball is all about. Thank you!
We’ll see you on the court!
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