Today we’d like to introduce you to Laurie Lambert
Hi Laurie, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I grew up playing tennis and it has always been my favorite sport and the best way to meet people when I moved into a new town. I began teaching tennis when I was in college as it paid better than most other jobs for my age. After my husband and I moved to Park City with our newborn, tennis became a great job as a mom – I could make my own schedule and still be home for my family. Over the years, I changed my role from a teaching pro into the Business Manager at the Park City tennis facility.
In 2012, I left that job and became the Executive Director of Utah Tennis Association – the state office for the United States Tennis Association (USTA). In this role, our organization runs outreach programs, tennis tournaments, leagues etc. and our mission is to grow the game of tennis in Utah.
In 2020 – our Board of Directors saw the similarities between tennis and pickleball and decided to add pickleball into our offerings. Over the next few years I became deeply involved in pickleball – including 1 year running the junior portion of the PPA tour across the country.
In 2023 we decided to launch a team based pickleball league, modeled after the success we have seen through USTA tennis leagues, across the country.
Our team created and executed the National Team Pickleball League and held its first National Championships in 2024 with over 10,000 players competing nationwide. 86 teams and 13 states were represented at our inaugural National Championships.
We re-branded ourselves in 2024 as Triple Team Pickleball – and are growing quickly across the country.
Triple Team is a totally separate company, and is unrelated to the USTA, but it builds on our knowledge from running tennis leagues for many years. Team competition in a league format is new to pickleball and we know we can provide a quality product that allows for great team camaraderie, competition and the opportunity to compete against other states.
I am the National Program Manager for the Triple Team Pickleball League and have staff and league coordinators helping us from around the country. The excitement for this program across the country is very motivating for me and everyone on our team.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Getting Triple Team off the ground requires a groundswell of passionate supporters across the country. We have to first find people in cities everywhere who also see the vision we have of a national team based league product. There is an enormous amount of hand-holding to get new programs up and running and get the word out about our product.
The other obstacle has been getting facilities or parks/recs to allow us to reserve courts for our league play. Many places do not want to put any programming on public courts so that has been difficult.
We believe that as pickleball evolves, it will become easier to bring new facilities and players “into the fold”, as we know how powerful it is to play for a chance at a National Championship.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Pickleball has obviously been growing quickly across the country. After years in the tennis business, I can see that pickleball is following the same developmental path that tennis has gone through – only in warp speed.
Tennis was first a “come one, come all” drop-in culture… just like pickleball has been for the past few years.
Then Tennis became a tournament culture – which is where pickleball is now.
For the past 15 years, tennis has evolved into being a league culture. We believe that pickleball will do the same.
We are creating what we think will be the next phase of pickleball competition: Team-based League play.
Team-based play brings friends together and gives them an opportunity to play for themselves and their team. This is highly motivating and fun.
We are one of the first organizations across the country to start this culture shift for pickleball.
League play is more affordable than tournaments, happens regularly (once a week usually) and allows for people to participate in new challenges of playing unknown opponents as opposed to playing the same people from your same club every week.
Our team is highly experienced in running tennis leagues, so we understand all the details that need to be ironed out to be successful.
We are called Triple Team because there are 3 pairs of players that play 3 rounds of play in each team match.
Our team has run hundreds of tennis and pickleball tournaments and leagues, so we are extremely conscious of what details make a program work and how to execute them successfully.
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
We believe that pickleball will move into a league culture with less emphasis on tournaments. There will be a continued emphasis on ratings to create an even level of competition. League play fits well with people’s daily lifestyle, is inexpensive and brings people together as teams to play for themselves and win for their team!
Pricing:
- League play is generally much less expensive than tournaments
- Each city will set pricing on their own
- Teams will advance to a National Championships where there will be fee for the league to play.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://tripleteam.org
- Instagram: tripleteampickleballleague
- Facebook: tripleteampickleballleague – utah
