7. Michael Manglardi, Co-Founder and VP Operations at Diadem Sports – State of Pickleball
Farrell Sports Business Podcast
Interviews with unicorns from sports business and their unique stories, dreams, ideas, insights, innovations, flops and career paths. Get a unique perspective of the inner workings of jobs working in sports beyond just pro sports leagues. Hosted by 30-year sports business veteran Matt Farrell, President of Farrell Sports and CEO of Bat Around.
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Farrell Sports Business (00:00)
On this week's Farrell Sports Business podcast, we're going to look at the sport of pickleball an inside look at the growth trends, challenges that have come with the explosive growth and even some interesting segments and groups and ages that are growing faster than others in the sport of pickleball.
Today we're going to look at Diadem an emerging company in both tennis and pickleball, and their unique perspective and how they've carved out their spot in the market. I'm the host, Matt Farrell, today's guest, VP of Operations and co -founder at Diadem Sports, Michael Manglardi.
Farrell Sports Business (00:50)
Michael, welcome to the podcast. Glad to have you.
Michael Manglardi (00:54)
Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.
Farrell Sports Business (00:57)
Well, first of all, before we dive into so many topics, pickleball, can you just reset for us a little bit? Tell us about Diadem sports. Tell them your role.
Michael Manglardi (01:07)
Absolutely. So my name is Michael Manglardi. I'm the vice president of operations and one of the co -founders at Diadem Sports. If you don't know what Diadem is, thanks for being here and thanks for listening. We are a performance sports equipment company. We specialize in the tennis and pickleball space and we are the manufacturer of
paddles, rackets, balls, strings, footwear as of earlier this year, and really anything else under that sports equipment category. My role as the vice president of operations in a startup -ish type company is to wear a lot of different hats. So I do all sorts of things, but a lot of my focus is really around
sales and marketing strategy, a lot of the hiring and team building. I'm involved in the product development, product design, and really anything else that needs to get done any given day. So it's a whole lot of fun and every day is different, but that's what we're doing here at Diadem of Sports.
Farrell Sports Business (02:16)
What was it a company that started tennis and then flipped and added pickleball or what was the origin of the two sports at Diadem?
Michael Manglardi (02:26)
Yeah, we got into the business before pickleball was.
really anything more than a retirement community sport, which is where a lot of people, especially younger people, know of pickleball. They know of it as the sport that maybe their grandparents played in a senior living community or a sport that they play in many parts of Florida, but was unknown to the rest of the country. So originally we were in the tennis business. The two original co -founders were both...
tennis coaches, they were actually former tennis pro players, and they knew a ton about the equipment space and the tennis industry, and they had developed a really unique type of string. And so the whole company was centered around this one product, a tennis string that started to gain some momentum and some traction. Fast forward to 2019 and 2020 and...
the era of COVID and we were forced to do what many businesses did and find other channels for revenue and for growth. And Pickleball was something that we had had on our radar and we knew had a little bit of momentum. And that was when we invested heavily into developing our first generation of paddles, ultimately opened up the Pickleball division of Diadem in 2021. And then the last,
Three years or so we've been able to add a wide range of paddles of course everything from entry level beginner paddles all the way up to some of the most innovative tech driven paddles on the market and then expanded into you know other categories within the sport like balls and
bags, apparel, grips, and all the other things that you would need to be a successful pickleball player.
Farrell Sports Business (04:30)
So as you know, a lot, I mean, with the growth of Pickleball, a lot of companies are coming into that space. And so if I'm looking at the rack of paddles and balls, how do you try to differentiate yourself, whether product or marketing wise with Diadem, that's becoming a crowded space?
Michael Manglardi (04:51)
It certainly is, it's gotten to be very crowded and very competitive, which overall is good for the sport, you know, the more competition and the more.
Businesses that are driving pickleball forward and investing into the space the better off the sport is going to be Where we've really gotten a name for ourselves even prior to launching the pickleball business was by being the innovator We had always done things a little bit different We've tried to make product that when you are staring at the wall and you have all of these options There's something about whatever product it is whether it's a racquetball or
string that jumps out at you and that goes back to that first product that Diatom was founded on, a tennis string. What was unique about it was that it was a star -shaped polyester string so it had a lot of points to the string.
What that did is it gave it a really rough, aggressive texture, and it allowed players to generate more spin than they were used to seeing on their shots. And so we took that same sort of mentality and applied it to all of the other products that we've developed over the years. And with pickleball paddles especially, we saw a big opportunity because we were...
an early mover into the sport. Although it's only been three and a half years, a lot of pickleball's growth has happened in that amount of time. And so when we got into the space, although there was brands that existed, there was a prime opportunity.
to do things differently. And so we had a lot of fun playing with molded construction and different grit surfaces and paddle face surfaces that when you presented it to players, they could actually feel a difference and they could see a performance benefit.
unlike anything they had had before. And there's a couple of different paddles we can reference to there. We came out with the thickest paddle on the market back in 2021. It was the first ever 19 millimeter core pickleball paddle. Everything prior to that had been up to 16 or 17 millimeters in thickness.
We were one of the first brands to implement foam into the core of our paddles to help with vibration dampening and people that were having arm sensitivities when they were playing. And so that was something that we've always tried to develop around was having a feature or a characteristic that players could actually notice the difference in.
And one of the big knocks that you'll hear from tennis players is that all of the tennis brands come out with a new racket every 12 or 18 months, and they claim to have the greatest tech that's ever been invented. But when you try the racket, it really doesn't feel that different. And you're making small incremental improvements. With pickleball, it was a bit of a different ballgame where you could make a paddle that.
a player could try and instantly say, wow, paddle B is so much better than paddle A and what I was playing with before.
Farrell Sports Business (08:09)
It's really interesting. It also sounds like golf of just like people just throwing money at new drivers all the time. So.
Michael Manglardi (08:17)
Every new driver is going to put you 20 yards deeper, but yet none of them hit the fairway, right? They're always still getting dug out of the woods or splashing into the pond.
Farrell Sports Business (08:24)
course.
And yet still fall for it. but especially with, with you being the VP of operations, I find this really interesting with, I think most people who follow the sport, even a little bit know that it's the fastest growing sport from my recollection. Golf during the pandemic is the only thing remotely close. And it's not even in the same stratosphere with the, with the growth of pickleball participation.
My question is from an operations standpoint, there's a lot of unpredictability about the growth of a sport. It's, it's not like crest toothpaste where you've got decades of patterns of sales. How do you manage the growth, from an operations and product standpoint and wondering if it's a bubble every year proves it's not a bubble.
How do you try to manage that from a product standpoint?
Michael Manglardi (09:30)
Yeah, that's been one of the fun challenges of growing the business. Now you talk about the risk of a growing sport. We'll backtrack to 2019, 2020 when we were starting to develop pickleball paddles. And at the time we had no employees. It was me and the two other co -founders and we had a, you know, a small but growing tennis brand. But when you look at it from that lens, there was really...
not a whole lot of risk because what was the worst that could happen. Now it's a little bit different because the market has developed and grown. But if we did something that wasn't working, we would stop doing it and try something else. And what eventually happened is we tried enough things and one.
of them worked really well and we said okay let's do more of that. Now in the last couple of years you know this this pickleball craze has only gotten crazier and there's more of a demand for marketing and new products and new colors and variations and so we've had to account for not just the growth in production and
SKU counts and going from a brand that had a couple hundred SKU to now over 2 ,000 different products that we are manufacturing and selling, but also accounting for the team. We were coming from a place where...
We didn't have a marketing department. When we launched Pickleball, we had a couple of outstanding salespeople. Fabio and Corbin were two of the guys that are still with us. And if anybody follows Dietim, they probably know both of those guys by name. But besides that, we ran a really, really lean company. And so we were able to take some of those risks that the bigger players weren't able to take during the early years of Pickleball and really like that peak.
world of COVID that we were working through.
Farrell Sports Business (11:25)
So fastest growing sport in the United States the last three years. If you break that down into segments, is there any particular segment or group of that that stood out of being like, wow, I didn't see that segment of the market quite like it happened?
Michael Manglardi (11:46)
There's been one segment that has just blown up in the last 12 months and that is the younger lifestyle players that are generally falling into the non -athletic.
group of people. These are people that are in there maybe early to mid 20s, maybe moving to a new city for a first time job out of college. Maybe they wouldn't categorize themselves as athletes, but what is.
attracting them to pickleball is that accessibility that even if they aren't a former tennis player or they didn't grow up playing sports their whole life, they're able to go to a pickleball court and make friends and break a sweat and get active. And generally they're able to improve pretty quickly because, you know, there's such a small learning curve to pickleball. And so we've seen a growing demand and what I would call like the 24 to 28 year old
non -traditional athlete, especially in women, you know, and that's incredible for the sport. But I think the accessibility of pickleball makes it so attractive to people. And that was what gave this sport legs from the very beginning was that friendly personality saying, come on out and play with me, or being able to go and learn.
one time and play for an hour and feel like you've gotten significantly better over the course of the hour. And so that's what excites me about the sport. Of course, there's a lot of things happening at the moment.
top end of pickleball with, you know, performance players and pros. But what fires me up every day is that this is a sport that you can literally bring to anybody in any part of the world and it's going to put a smile on their face and it's going to give them an opportunity to play, to compete, to be healthy. And just a quick story because it's top of mind, but I was at a family reunion this past weekend in Brunswick, Georgia, out in the middle of the woods, and we have
had about 35 of my family members, mostly extended family, all getting together for a long weekend to catch up and play games and do all that good stuff. And so my dad, like many others, has gotten the pickleball bug. And so he found the one plot of concrete on the campgrounds. And of course, he taped out a pickleball court, and he brought his temporary net. And when we got there, to when we left,
The pickleball court was by far the most popular activity that anybody at the family reunion was participating in. It was just so cool to see my 16 -year -old cousin playing with my grandpa. That's just not something you're going to see with really any other sport, for that case, any other activity. It's just what makes the sport so exciting to us.
Farrell Sports Business (14:50)
Well, I love it. I started playing about two years ago and I'm an avid golfer. I love to play golf, but they're polar opposites in terms of welcoming sports to people of teaching the game and having the patience to teach you the game. And so it almost sounds too good to be true of how welcoming the sport is, but I found it, it really is. It's the real deal.
in terms of just being a great community to it.
Michael Manglardi (15:23)
Yeah, I wear my Diadem shirt almost every day, seven days out of the week, you're gonna see me in a Diadem shirt. And so I'm always selling Diadem, but I sometimes feel like I'm selling pickleball more than I'm ever even selling Diadem. I'm like, this sports just so great. You don't like sports, go out and play. You love sports, you're gonna love pickleball. It's just like, and that's how most pickleball people are. It cracks me up. I'm sure you're either one of them or you're slowly becoming one of them, but like, you just wanna tell other people, you're like, this, this.
This thing's so cool, you gotta come out and try it.
Farrell Sports Business (15:55)
Well, it's, it's so good. So with any sport that grows fast, and I don't even mean this in a negative context, Michael, but just were there unintended consequences of that explosive growth of like, wow, I didn't see that coming. We're going to have to manage that to keep it under control of, because growth usually is associated with being good, but I have there been challenges.
challenges that come with it.
Michael Manglardi (16:27)
Yeah, of course, like any business in any industry, when you have rapid growth, you're gonna have some road bumps along the way. And the one we already talked about would be scaling up our inventory and stock and being able to make a great product, launch it, and then go.
crap, we gotta make thousands more of them to keep up with the demand. And my favorite line is always, that's a good problem to have, but it is a problem. If people want your paddle and you don't have any to sell to them, that's a problem. So that's been one that we've managed, but we definitely had to deal with it, especially 2020, 21, 22, as the world was dealing with supply chain issues and other problems.
relating to manufacturing. The other one that goes hand in hand with that is of course cash flow and managing cash in a fast growing business where you're selling hard goods. We're not selling a software that we can scale a million X.
very little cost. Every time we're growing, it's growth because we're producing more, bringing more into our warehouse, hiring more people, selling more to the market and accommodating that demand. And then the last one that I would say is just growing a team, which has been one of the most fun parts of Diadem over the last four years, but it certainly presents its challenges. Like I told you, in 2019, we were sitting at zero employees and then in 2019,
2020, we hired a couple of guys, a few of which are still with us. And a few weeks after they started, we got hit with COVID and we said, you're going to have to work from home, I guess, for a few weeks and we'll figure it out and see what the world brings us to where we are now, where we're generally somewhere between 45 and 50 employees. That's a lot to be bringing on in that amount of time in a sport that...
like you said, doesn't have a whole lot of comparables. There's very few sports in history, but especially in recent history, that have seen the kind of growth that pickleball has seen at a recreational level, especially. And you reference sports like lacrosse. Lacrosse saw a huge boom, but that was at.
you know, juniors, high school, and then the collegiate level, but you weren't having, you know, 65 year olds or 25 year olds going out and doing pick up lacrosse after work with a group of friends. It just wasn't something that could happen. So, you know, pickleball's seen this explosive, explosive boom and there's been a lot of...
Farrell Sports Business (19:02)
Right?
Michael Manglardi (19:23)
changes to the business and really changes to the industry that have happened just in a couple of years.
Farrell Sports Business (19:30)
So we're so close to the U S phenomenon of growth with, with pickleball. What are pockets around the world where you're seeing global growth or are there areas that it's just not growing quite as much or hasn't, hasn't taken hold quite as much around the world.
Michael Manglardi (19:51)
Yeah, that's one part of the sport that is really untapped in its growth model is what's going to happen at the international level.
In the US, everybody knows it. Pickleball is mainstream. It's a piece of culture. It's a piece of sport. Everybody is talking about it. Canada would be the next best pickleball market. And that's not a surprise because usually Canada and the US share a lot of those trends. We have a team in Europe. We have our European headquarters in Germany. And...
we made a committed effort two years ago that we were gonna be one of the leaders in pickleball growth internationally. And so our team over there is doing everything they can to introduce this sport to people all across Europe. The UK has grown tremendously over the last two years. And then there's other pockets that are popping up. We've also got a really strong team and a great presence in Japan. And that's another market that...
people in the world of pickleball are excited about because if Japan gets on board with pickleball, it's going to be a whole new level of international buzz and mainstream accessibility across the world. And we think that Japan is perfect for pickleball. You know, they...
Farrell Sports Business (21:19)
That's interesting. Do you see Japan as being a bit of a global tastemaker, if you will, or influencer?
Michael Manglardi (21:25)
Well, Japan's already got an incredible tennis market. Of course, they got the ping pong and badminton market. And so generally they like racket sports. That's something that their culture really gravitates towards. They also have a lot of constraints with space. They're not able to just build a football field or a baseball field in every city that they want to have one in. And...
Generally speaking, the Japanese culture is not necessarily going to be one that's going to lead a new trend or a new sport. But once that sport has proven its staying power, they are typically the ones that begin to innovate, dominate, and really take a hold of the sport.
And they've done that across many of different sports. So with our team that we have there and a couple of our key players in Japan, we're doing everything we can to lay the groundwork and see some of that growth that we saw in the US in 2020, 2021.
Farrell Sports Business (22:35)
I want to maybe talk about you a little bit and how you got into this. You, you said earlier that you're, you're the guy who probably just wears pickleball stuff or Diadem And every, every day of the week, you're talking about it at the grocery store or, you know, any, any, anywhere you go, but your, your background is interesting. And there's some manufacturing, some like hard, good products, some technical, even like executive recruiting. How did you get.
over into the pickleball world.
Michael Manglardi (23:07)
Yeah, I've always just had a fascination for startups and, you know.
growing businesses, being involved in businesses, even just as like a little kid, like my parents joke about it all the time. They're like, you always were looking to sell something or do something. We just knew you were gonna get into that world. And so the early part of my career is spent doing a lot of different things, mostly within the world of small businesses and startups. My career started in the...
tech industry doing, like you said, recruiting and consulting work. And that ended up being a really valuable skill as we moved into Diadem and started growing because the core role that I played in that position was finding talent, interviewing talent and hiring.
You know, that role gave me the ability to come over and do that same sort of thing here at Dyad. And we were looking to bring on new salespeople or we're looking to build out a marketing team. And we had the confidence to be able to go out and hire and find the right people. From there, I moved into a lot of operations and management responsibilities in the construction industry, moved a little bit into manufacturing, and then ultimately met Evan and AJ.
before it was pickleball, at the time it was just tennis and they had started to expand the product line and we're having a lot of success with it. And then as we moved into the COVID days and saw what pickleball was becoming, that was when we started to develop our first paddles and move into that space.
Farrell Sports Business (24:52)
So I'm sure you get hit up all the time and hopefully this doesn't open up the floodgates for you, but students, young people want to get into the sport of pickleball. I'm sure people ask you those questions. Any advice that you give them, any jobs or trends that you see in the sport that are really going to create opportunities?
Michael Manglardi (25:14)
Yeah, there's gonna be a lot of opportunities in pickleball. And I think those opportunities are going to be around the facilities in the next one to two years. As the sports have grown, there's been this massive influx of investments to opening indoor pickleball complexes, expanding tennis centers to also have pickleball courts and then some of these.
of like eatertainment pickleball complexes that are starting to pop up where it's food and beverage first, but then they'll throw in a couple of pickleball courts. And so that's an interesting space. Over the next two years, we're going to see.
Hundreds if not thousands of new pickleball courts pop up and at some point, you know, there there may be too many I hope there's never enough pickleball courts and this sport just keeps growing But I think that's where you're gonna see a lot of job openings of course, there's the marketing side of Pickleball and so you have you know ad agencies and influencers and PR firms that are all
you know, starting with Pickleball as one of their key pillars. You know, they want to be the Pickleball specialist. And I think that a lot of marketers are going to be able to find opportunities that way. But, you know, I was watching some of your content, Matt, and what I love that you do is you talk to those college -aged students and you give them tips to taking on whatever's next in their career. And I would say that,
pickleball and really just the sports industry is no different from any other industry. Although sports can be sexy and fun and you know personally I love sports. I think you know you would say the same and so it's fun that we live in this industry. At the end of the day I think that employers want people that are hungry, motivated, driven and have some sort of...
tangible skill that they can bring, whether they're ultra creative or they're an outstanding salesperson. I mean, we we'd make the joke all the time. If you're a great salesperson, it doesn't matter if you're selling pickleball paddles or a box of pencils, you're going to be able to make it. You're going to be able to sell. So that's the biggest thing that I would encourage college graduates to try and do is develop a skill set, develop a couple of core skills that they can go to a company and say, here,
Here's what I can do and I'm proud that I can do this thing really well for your company because that's going to bring us a great amount of value.
Farrell Sports Business (27:56)
Well, it's, it's great advice and perspective. And I've probably said this before. Sometimes this concept of working in sports means working for an NFL team or a minor league baseball team or, and there's just a wealth of opportunity in very creative and unique ways, to, to work in sports and your, your job in the pickleball space is one of them. So I'm going to give you the last word, Michael, anything that I.
didn't ask you that I should have asked you, even a shameless plug to get in.
Michael Manglardi (28:32)
I won't won't plug diet Diadem I'll plug pickleball. If you haven't played yet, grab a paddle. Doesn't matter to me which paddle it is, although if you've watched this full interview, you should have a good idea of which one you should pick up. But go find a court.
hit up a couple of your buddies. If you don't have any buddies because you're in a new town or you just moved, go find the nearest public park or the nearest facility. See if there's somebody there with a friendly face and ask them if you can jump in and learn to play. You won't regret it. You'll have a great time. And I'd be willing to bet you'll go back for more.
Farrell Sports Business (29:07)
love it. A longer story for another day, but I was starting to learn how to play pickleball. I went and did a round robin. I think they were three to three fives or something like that. And I came home and told my wife, I'm like, Hey, I've got a I've got a date with Martha next Wednesday night. And she's like, What are you talking about? I'm like, Martha, I just met her on pickleball. She's my double partners, the devil's partner next Wednesday. So I've lived it and and love it. So Michael, man, I just really appreciate your time and
expertise and insight on this. So thanks for joining.
Michael Manglardi (29:40)
Thank you, Matt, appreciate what you do.
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