Pickleball paddle technology Q&A with Selkirk Sport’s Tom Barnes

Selkirk Sport director of research & development (R&D) Tom Barnes sat down with Elliot Rothstein of theTUNDRA ENthusiast News Network to chat about the future of pickleball paddle technology and engineering.

What do you do in the Selkirk Labs brand to further innovate and progress pickleball paddles?

It's largely materials science, and Selkirk Labs is getting a lot more sophisticated than we've been in the past, both in materials engineering and manufacturing. So you have all these different fabrics to choose from, fiberglass, carbon, and maybe an aramid nowadays. And you can use those in different combinations with different core types, different weights of the core, different plastics in the core, or now foams are becoming more commonly seen and are more complex substructures and substructures.

A lot of what you see in pickleball are hand-me-downs from the aerospace industry, from one or two decades ago, because it's using very similar fabrics. It's not as precise, it's not as high-performance fabrics for the generic paddles, because performance fabrics are expensive.

We do utilize premium first-issuance fabrics and new fabrics and fresh fabrics, things that aren't necessarily rejects from Boeing. A common thing [in cheap pickleball paddles]: you're getting fabrics that are old and disused. And overseas, there are also a lot of inferior fabric types being used.

And then we always try to be in the mid-range for costs, all the way up to the same stuff that they would be using in aerospace today. So a big part is the fabrics and the epoxies that hold them together, the adhesives to the core and the cores themselves. And then the coatings technology, spin technologies, grip, plastics in general, that's the bulk of it.

Materials science and materials engineering are where the most of the work has been done for the last 10 years. And that's where the goal and the trick is: we can make this thing now, but how do we make 10,000 of them? How do we do that consistently? How do we give a consistent experience to the user? How do we get that USAP (USA Pickleball) stamp on them and make sure that we're always well within spec so that we're not selling out of spec materials, which is a problem in the sport right now. At the end of the day it’s largely a manufacturing issue. It's hard to keep it consistent, and you really have to be involved and you really have to pay attention and know how it works to keep the quality management where you want to be.

So that's a big focus for us. We want that consistent experience. We want that pickleball paddle that will last. If we have some sort of failures, that's why we also have our our lifetime limited lifetime warranty to ensure that if you do have a quality failure, we're going to fix it fast and you're going to get back up and running in no time.

When you're thinking of coming up with a new pickleball paddle, you're testing things out. Do you have a blueprint you're going for from the start? Like you're looking for a more control paddle or a more power paddle? Or are you trying out these different combinations of fabrics and with and foam and different densities and then testing those out in the lab, figuring out which is something that could be marketable or that could actually be a final product?

Or is it something that you had a vision for from the beginning and carry it out through trial and error?

So you have best practices, like how you make a paddle, all of that is due to regulation. Like (for instance) it has to can't be bigger than this, and it has to pass deflection, it has to pass surface roughness, and it has to pass coefficient of friction, etc.

So that is a large constraint and for good reason. That's for safety. The other half is if you make a paddle too hot or it has way too much spin on it, then the court dimensions no longer work. We have to make a paddle that's responsible and doesn't ruin the game and change the game to a point to where it turns women's doubles into a tennis match and it turns men's singles into whoever can slam it the hardest.

So there are those design constraints. How do we make a paddle that doesn't mess up the spirit of the game?

And then we have our materials. So we have best practices, which includes safety and quality and scalability and customer experience, that are our basic guidelines for how to build a paddle. And then we have a material catalog. We have hundreds and hundreds of fabrics. We've tried thousands of coatings. We have a mature catalog with thousands of of of entries. We classify them and categorize them and we test them. And then we we give our outcomes and do some risk management on that. For example: if we're using this thing we have use different equipment with, we have to bump up our our safety gear, etc.

So you just take the large parts: you take your journals, catalog, you take your best practices, and then now, what do we want to make? Do we want to make make a control paddle that targets this kind of player? Do we want to make a power paddle towards this kind of player? Do we want to make a really good hybrid control paddle that targets 80 percent of players?

For instance, take the Selkirk VANGUARD Control or the Selkirk LUXX pickleball paddles. Those are great paddles that can work for 80 percent of people. They may not be everyone's preference, but they are just great paddles. They are awesome all around and work for beginners and people like Jack Sock are happy to use it.

So then we figure out what do we want this to be and then we can build something. We can now get it into people's hands and get people's hands for the right price. And that that causes questions like: what materials can we use, who's going to buy it, are there enough people that are going to buy it? So we can actually afford to do this in bulk, to do it in large quantities so we can make it more feasible.

Is there any research out there on how much difference a pickleball paddle really makes? Like if I was a professional pickleballer and I were to pick up like the Selkirk LUXX Pro and use that one and another one, and I played 10 matches, would there be a sizable difference? Has there been any testing on that or are there people that just played permanently better with a better paddle?

I'm not aware of any quantitative published studies on that. But I'm sure that's something we'll see here soon if we don’t commission it ourselves.

The problem now is you're going to have to adapt to a pickleball paddle that keeps changing. We what we want to see is a paddle that's consistent from when you start and then maybe has a very slight consistent degradation from there so that you're not experiencing paddle problems. So we'd focus more on sacrificing a slight bit of performance to give you a much more consistent wear curve, that's where a change of paddle really changes. You're changing performance dynamics, which heavily change your game. You don't want to have to adapt to new paddles, changing every game.

You mentioned how there were other non-observable factors that you have access to being the director of R&D, but that a YouTuber wouldn’t be able to analyze just by cutting into it?

Unless they have a background or they had somebody walk them through it, but you don't have to have a background in composites to look inside a panel and understand what's going on. But finding equipment or inventing equipment that can actually measure the non-observable factors correctly, do it in the right way, and translate the data in the correct way is another story.

So you're actually using the scientific theory to get an output that means something and has a high efficacy, which means that it actually is adherent to what the original goal of that testing was.

What is the future of Selkirk Labs?

If you make something generic, maybe you're doing the wrong thing. But if everyone thinks I'm wrong and I think I'm right, then let's try it. Let's try on a small scale and see if it works.

That’s where the Selkirk Labs brand came from. We try it on the small scale, we see how it works, then we go from there. Right now the Labs brand is becoming the core of everything. If we're trying a new manufacturing process out there on the line, it goes to Selkirk Labs first.

We try on the small scale, we test it and go from there. Where we're dealing with new software products, we test it in Labs. We get it going here with new materials and new products in general. Selkirk Labs is becoming the test bench for everything new for us that can't directly embed into our our current Selkirk Sport ecosystem. It's been very helpful if we just want to try something.

I just had one of my guys come to me and say: “Hey, I want to try this crazy idea and think it can work.” And it wasn't super cheap. He's the expert in this field and I said: “Can you make it work? Is there a 90 percent chance we're going to be using this five years from now? Will we get our money's worth five years from now?” He said there is more than 90 percent chance.

So we're going to buy that thing and give it a shot and try something completely new. We've been doing a bunch of new things as far as how to build paddles, going back to that blank slate approach. We're really excited to see what comes out of that and prove it as a functional product.

2025 will be the best release year for Selkirk Labs.