How College Football's Wild West is a Warning Every Pickleball Player Should Hear with Jay Paterno
Dinks On Tap: The Happy Hour Pickleball PodcastShow Notes
This week, Casie and Lauren sit down with Jay Paterno, son of Penn State coaching legend Joe Paterno, and author of Blitzed: The All-Out Pressure of College Football's New Era.
This one is part sports conversation, part cultural temperature check, and we did what we do best: take a sports story and find the human behavior hiding underneath it. Because it turns out that money, pressure, loyalty, ego, and identity do not stay neatly on the football field. They show up everywhere people care deeply about something, including a 20X44 pickleball court with a plastic ball and a surprisingly complicated rulebook.
In this episode we talk about:
The trick Jay uses to tell the truth (and why it lands better when it comes with a little plausible deniability)
The NIL era, and what happens when college football starts operating more like a franchise than a tradition
What the pickleball community should probably get in writing before growth outruns the pickleball culture
Why the most intense person in any pickleball competition is rarely having the most fun
The chaos of a game growing faster than its guardrails and what a pickleball strategy looks like when the rulebook is still being written
The women in Jay's book who keep asking the inconvenient questions
And the question underneath it all: when something you love becomes valuable to everyone else, does it still feel like yours
The pickleball lessons here have nothing to do with your backhand and everything to do with what happens when a sport you love starts growing faster than the values that built it. So whether you're following NIL headlines or just wondering where pickleball goes from here, this episode gives you plenty to chew on.
Pour something cold, hit play, and spend some time with the man who knows what happens when a game gets bigger than its guardrails.
Cheers,
Casie and Lauren
Dinks on Tap
You can purchase Blitzed!: The All-Out Pressure of College Football's New Era by Jay Paterno here.
Other ways to connect with Jay Paterno:Website
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Let’s keep the conversation going! Connect with us:
Instagram: @dinksontap
Facebook: @DinksonTapWebsite: dinksontap.com
For those wanting to fortify their mental game on the court, check out Lauren’s Mental Caddie offerings on her website or book a Chemistry Call.
More from Dinks On Tap: The Happy Hour Pickleball Podcast
How did a game three grown men made up on a badminton court, because a 13-year-old was bored, turn into the thing your group text runs on? We found the kid who complained, and he still can’t believe it either. In this episode, we get into our summer vault, full of conversations, stories, and a little pickleball drama we never got around to airing. We sat down with Frank Pritchard, the bored kid himself, who can answer “When was pickleball invented?” because he was there when his dad, Bill Bell, and Barney McCallum made up the game on Bainbridge Island. We also cover Picklr’s Chapter 11 filing and the “is pickleball dying” headlines that followed, Genie Bouchard’s paddle-tap walkout and what it says about pickleball etiquette, and why the drinks after play keep the pickleball community together. You’ll learn: Why it's called pickleball, and the Pritchard family member who came up with the name A firsthand account of who invented pickleball, from the teenager whose complaining started it What the original pickleball paddle was made of, and which founder designed it The pickleball history most players don’t know, including how scoring and serving used to work Why Frank took a 30-year break from the game, and what brought him back What Picklr’s Chapter 11 filing means for your local club, according to the general manager of the Picklr in DFW How the pickleball business can struggle while the number of people playing keeps growing Why Genie Bouchard skipped the paddle tap, and whether we think she was justified How we won a tournament this summer by giving a screaming team a taste of its own medicine
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