Why Pickleball became a training ground at BRANDTHINK

We put more thought into pickleball than people might expect from an agency. There is a reason.

If all you see is court bookings, games and people spending time together, it is easy to mistake the activity for the point.

The point is what the activity lets us practise.

We created the BRANDTHINK Athletic Dept. because sport gives us a place to work on things that are difficult to teach in a meeting room: handling pressure, being bad at something, taking feedback, repeating boring work until it improves, winning well, losing properly, showing up when you said you would, and learning how to work with people outside your usual circle.

Pickleball happens to be very good at all of that. It is easy enough to start, difficult enough to expose your weaknesses, social enough to mix people together and competitive enough that, sooner or later, your real reactions begin to show.

Of course, the Athletic Dept. does not replace the work of fixing workload, management or process problems when they exist. Those need their own solutions.

We see the Athletic Dept. as preventative. It gives people somewhere to build relationships, habits and resilience before those things are tested by a difficult client, a tight deadline or conflict inside a team. By the time the pressure arrives at work, we would rather people had already practised how they respond to it.

Being bad at something is useful

You can be very competent at work and still be terrible at pickleball. At least at the beginning. You mistime the ball. You make the same mistake repeatedly. Somebody explains what you are doing wrong and you still do it again on the next point.

That experience is useful. As people become more experienced in their careers, there are fewer occasions when they willingly put themselves back into beginner mode.

Sport does it very quickly. You have to deal with not being good yet. Can you listen? Can you take correction without becoming defensive?

None of that is really about pickleball.

Getting better is often boring

Playing games is fun. Drilling the same shot fifty times is less exciting. Knowing what to do and being able to do it consistently are different things. 

Work is similar.

Improvement sometimes means learning something new. Other times it means fixing a basic thing you already know you should be doing. Checking the details properly. Writing a clearer brief. Following through. Organising your work better. Applying feedback the next time without needing the same conversation again.

There is nothing glamorous about repetition. It is still how a lot of competence gets built.

Pressure changes how we behave

A friendly pickleball game can become surprisingly serious when the score gets close.

You miss a shot you normally make. Your partner is depending on you.

Now you get to find out what happens inside your head when things stop going your way. Do you get angry with yourself? Do you blame the person beside you?

Work creates the same problem with much higher stakes. A presentation goes badly. A deadline gets tight. A client challenges the work. Somebody makes a mistake at exactly the wrong time.

You cannot learn composure from being told to stay calm under pressure. You need somewhere to practise it. Sport gives us somewhere relatively harmless to do that.

Winning is a test too

We talk a lot about learning how to lose. Winning deserves some attention as well. How do you behave when you are clearly better than the person across the net? Can you play seriously without making a beginner feel stupid? Can you win and still make the other people want to play with you again?

We like competitive people. We also want people others want on their side. Those are not always the same thing.

Even the RSVP matters

This sounds small until you are the person who booked the court. If you say you are coming, somebody plans around you.

Then you arrive twenty minutes late. Or cancel after everyone has already organised themselves.

It is only pickleball.

But reliability doesn't suddenly appear when the stakes become important. RSVP properly. Turn up when you said you would. If something changes, tell people.

Small habits travel.

The court changes who you know

Companies naturally break into smaller circles. People work with the same colleagues, sit near the same people and spend most of their time solving problems with their immediate team.

Over time, it becomes surprisingly easy to know very little about everyone else.

Sport rearranges the organisation chart. Your partner might be somebody you rarely work with. Someone junior can play with somebody senior.

Two people who barely speak during the working week suddenly have to communicate, cover each other, adjust and figure something out together. You begin to know the person rather than just the function they represent. That matters when everyone goes back to work.

It becomes easier to ask for help.

Easier to start a conversation.

Easier to disagree without turning the other person into “that team”.

We cannot force relationships. We can create more opportunities for them to form.

The Athletic Dept. is one of those opportunities.

A healthier working life

We also have a fairly simple view of work-life balance. It should not mean trying to work as little as possible so you can spend more time doing everything else. We want people who care about their work and want to be good at it.

But doing ambitious work should not require living an unhealthy life either. Agency work can involve a lot of sitting down, staring at screens and disappearing into whatever project happens to be consuming the week.

The Athletic Dept. gives us a reason to move. It creates time for exercise without pretending everyone will somehow find the discipline after a long working day. It gets people out of the project bubble. And it gives us another way of spending time together that is not a meeting, a deadline or a client problem.

That matters to us.

We want people to become better at their work without becoming worse at living.

Why we take this seriously

It would be easy to treat company sport as recreation. Book a court. Play. Go home. There is nothing wrong with that.

But if we are going to invest company time and attention into something, we would rather it do more.

We want the Athletic Dept. to give people a place to practise behaviours that matter when they return to work.

Learning when you are not yet good. Taking correction. Handling pressure. Recovering from mistakes. Showing up. Working with somebody different. Doing the repetitive thing because that is what improvement requires. Winning without becoming unbearable. Losing without falling apart. And looking after your body while you are doing all of it.

None of this means playing pickleball automatically makes somebody a better colleague. It doesn't.

But character is difficult to build in theory.

You need somewhere to practise.

For us, a pickleball court happens to be a pretty good place to do it.