Saturday Semi-Off-Topic: Pickleball!!

This post will come back to marketing in a moment ... I'm nudging you in a direction here.

Pickleball!

Can I show you a few things? Just watch a few points from a 2016 pro women's bronze medal match (click here) ... watch up to maybe 60 seconds. It's a slow-motion low-skill train wreck. At that time, this was pickleball at the highest level. My wife and I play close to this level today. Now, if you were "born" into the pickleball community from 2010 - 2018ish, this was the "best practice" ... you hit a soft third-shot drop, you ran up to the kitchen, and you tried to out-dink each other. Notice the low camera angle to capture all of the dinking "action".

Something happened in 2019 that lurched the game in a completely different direction. That thing? A precocious twelve-year old woman who won a National Championship with her Mom as partner. What did they do different? Watch a few points here ... what shot are they attempting on their third shot? They're blasting their third shots ... hitting drives until the opponent makes a mistake. You don't see them doing a lot of "soft" play unless they are forced into it ... otherwise it is bombs away.

It shouldn't surprise you that "everybody" took notice. Within a year, the style of pickleball changed. Yes, players adhered to the "old style" ... those players lost games. An awful lot of players told those employing the new style that they were "doing it wrong".

Do me a favor here. Watch just this one point from a pro match a few weeks ago (click here). I mean, the game isn't even recognizable from a few years ago, is it? Hands are fast, there are extended gunfights, you have to be able to execute soft play, you have to be able to execute power, you have to be able to play excellent defense in the transition zone, and you have to have a ton of strategy. Also - the twelve-year-old from the second video is playing in this match as an eighteen year old ... and ultimately loses!

Did you notice something across the three videos?

One of the players is playing in each video ... Catherine Parenteau. She's playing at the highest level in each year, and her playing style in 2025 looks NOTHING like the tepid, gentle, unrefined style she leveraged in 2016. As the game changed, she changed.

By now you're probably saying to yourself "What in God's name does this have to do with marketing and e-commerce?"

Plenty.

Look at how the game evolved over just nine (9) years.

Your business is likely to be "evolved" over the next nine (9) months. This means you get to be Catherine Parenteau in the videos above (constantly growing, changing, improving, evolving). If you don't evolve through the challenges coming our way, you'll look like the video of game play in 2016. During COVID, we re-invented how we work. During tariffs, we'll re-invent how we merchandise our brands. This isn't something we "hunker down and get through". Nope. Not at all. Hopefully I'm proven wrong. If proven right?