The Joy of Padel podcast with Bill Ullman (JOPS03E20)

Bill Ullman, Co-Founder of the Anglo-American Cup and President of the United States Padel Association (USPA), shares his journey from squash to padel and his vision for the sport’s growth in the US. He discusses the challenges of adapting to padel from other racket sports, the development of padel culture, and the importance of sustainable growth. Bill offers insights into the USPA’s role in expanding padel across the country, the potential impact of celebrity involvement, and the creation of the Anglo-American Cup. This episode of the Joy of Padel podcast provides a comprehensive look at padel’s evolution in the US, offering valuable perspectives for padel aficionados and newcomers alike.

To find out more about Bill Ullman and the USPA:

• Find or follow Bill Ullman on Instagram: @billyu63
• Find or follow on Bill on LinkedIn

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Send in your questions or reactions:

Please send me your questions — as an audio file if you’d like — to nminterdial@gmail.com. Otherwise, below, you’ll find the show notes and, of course, you are invited to comment. If you liked the podcast, please take a moment to review and/or rate it! ¡VAMOS!

Further resources for The Joy of Padel:

Anglo American Cup | court sports | joy of padel | padel | padel aficionado | padel club development | Padel Coaching | padel community | padel Culture | padel doubles | padel growth | padel in UK | Padel in USA | padel infrastructure | padel podcast | padel Strategy | padel Technique | padel Tournaments | padel vs squash | padel vs tennis | Racket Sports | squash | Tennis | US Open Padel Championships | uspa

This transcription comes courtesy of Flowsend.ai, an AI service for podcasters.

Minter Dial: Bill Ullman, I am excited to have you on this show. You and I have exchanged a numerous, numerous times. You were the head of the USPA, the US Padel Association. You also went to this crummy school called Princeton where you played squash. And you have, like me, quite the obsession with padel. But in your own words, let’s say, start with who is Bill Ullman?

Bill Ullman: Well, I guess I would have to start these days with Bill Ullman as a padel addict. And everything else has sort of become a little bit secondary in my life. I did play tennis and squash growing up in high school and college and was lucky enough to play squash at a pretty high level in college and then since then have continued with my squash career. Not my real career, which has been financial services for my whole life, but I, I compete in squash, mostly in squash doubles. And I’ve been lucky enough to win a couple national, I think five national doubles age group doubles titles.

Minter Dial: Congratulation.

Bill Ullman: Three in three in Canada. But then about six years ago, maybe pre-Covid, a couple years pre Covid, I was introduced to the sport of padel in the Bahamas of all places, and I got kind of hooked on it, but I couldn’t do anything about it because when I came home, there were no courts around. I watched videos on YouTube of all these amazing points. And then luckily enough, a guy named Santi Gomez opened Padel Haus in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, not far from where I live. And I was biking there every day waiting for the club to open. And when it finally opened, I was playing there as much as I could. And then he opened up another Padel Haus even closer to my apartment. In fact, it’s 172 steps away from my.

Minter Dial: But who’s counting, right?

Bill Ullman: Yeah, but who’s counting? And so, I, I can be found there pretty often. And, and it’s really been for someone at my age, over 60 now, an incredible joy to learn a new sport, to try to get better at something. And something I think I can continue to get better at and to meet all of the incredible, passionate players, not only in the United States, but now in England and, and, and Latin America. It’s, it’s, it’s really been a burst of energy and passion in my life in the last several years. So, that’s been, that’s been great.

Minter Dial: I love it.

Bill Ullman: I’m a services professional. I’m married. I have twin girls, twin daughters that are 30 years old. And I’m, I’m a New Yorker.

Minter Dial: Love it. Well, going back to the Bahamas moment, I, I, I, I’m just wondering, you come onto, you see this sort of weird court, you go into it and, and you’re like, well, I got this because I’m a squash player. How, how did that go?

Bill Ullman: Well, I was on a kind of a guy’s golf and tennis trip and all the, the, the, the people that were on the trip were kind of competitive, obnoxious, fun, friendly tennis players and not such good golfers, at least most of us. But our friend who is, who, who’s was a member of this club where the court was said, we, we all kind of looked at this glass box and said, what. What the hell is that? There’s tennis balls inside the court. But I don’t really, we don’t really understand what’s going on here. And he said, oh, come let’s, let’s go try it. And we, all of us got on the court and all of us figured we could master this game instantly. And of course you can’t. But we all had, did have an aptitude for it, and we could keep the ball in play. There was excitement when you could play it off the wall, either the sidewall or the back wall, or hit it into the wall and back over the net. So, we were kind of learning as we were going over that course of the weekend. But like I said, it was like a tease. It was a little taste of the sport and then I didn’t really get to do it for a long time or play it again for a long time. So. But I, but in that short, brief moment, I, you know, it was sort of like love at first sight.

Minter Dial: It wasn’t life or key, was it?

Bill Ullman: No, it was nearby. It was a place called Albany Club.

Minter Dial: I know it. I even, I tried to go organize something at that place, but. All right, so the fact is that squash players, like tennis players, come to this sport with a certain privilege, knowledge of walls, knowledge of volleys. And one of the things that is always of interest is, is the rewiring component. I. Most of the people I have on this podcaster are generally coming into padel from tennis if they’re not pure players.

Bill Ullman: Right.

Minter Dial: But what is it that makes. What’s the hardest part for a squash player to wire rewire into the padel game because it’s not the wall?

Bill Ullman: Well, yeah, I mean, I, I feel like, I guess I put it slightly differently or. Tennis players come with the natural advantage of loving to come to net and volley. And that is the essence of, of padel is taking over the net, controlling the point from the net as A team in. In squash, the volleys are often swings, more full swings, and that doesn’t work in padel. You are almost inevitably late when you do that, and when you’re late, the ball goes into the fence, so into the wall and you’re. And it’s out. So, the tennis part of me, and I grew up playing tennis as well, the tennis part of me loves the volleys and loves coming to net. The squash part of me is comfortable, but you have to learn the patterns off the wall and the spins off the wall. But it’s comfortable playing the ball off the wall and very occasionally, maybe a boast kind of shot into the sidewall and across the front of the net. So, I think both games bring different advantages and weaknesses, like the. The squash volley doesn’t work and the tennis overhead doesn’t work, and topspin doesn’t work. And we’ve all. We’ve all grown up in the tennis world in the last 30 years to hit topspin as we’ve watched Rafa Nadal perfect that style of play. But as you know, too much topspin, the ball bounces high off the back wall, and then you have an easy shot. So, each game brings something advantageous, but also some disadvantages, too. And you have to temper that and kind of learn to manage that when you convert to padel.

Minter Dial: Speaking in the weeds, as I played a lot of squash as well, similar to tennis, the desire to take the tea, that’s where it happens in squash. The net is where it happens in tennis, if you will. And therefore, I feel like that urge to take the tea is something that needs to be unwired. So, you feel comfortable just sitting back there, wait for your moment, drive, pop up a few lobs, stay in the back, just cool. And then we transition.

Bill Ullman: Right. No, it’s. The patterns are very different. The. You know, in squash, you can often muscle your way into a point by just hitting hard. That doesn’t work in padel. Hitting hard is not necessarily the answer. It, you know, usually it’s in fact a chiquita or a really good lob that gets you back into the point. So, it’s a soft shot that gets you back in, not a drive. A drive can often cut off time and allow the team at the net to step in and hit a very decisive volley. So, it’s. Yeah, the patterns are different. It’s. It’s like everything. You know, each game has its own techniques and strategies, and you’ve got to learn that in padel and you’ve got to break. You know, some tennis Habits and some, and. Or some squash habits to get good at padel.

Minter Dial: All right. And then you, you, you said you won a number of doubles tournaments in, in squash. You’ve also done well in padel. Talk us through the difference in the teamwork, the pair.

Bill Ullman: That’s really interesting. I, I think what’s happened to me in squash doubles is I’ve actually become a better communicator during the point with my partner, because in, in padel, it’s a very vocal sport. When you’re playing, you’re always kind of announcing to your partner, they’re both up, they’re coming up deuce courts back or whatever, whatever the language that you’re using is. But it’s, it’s extremely vocal, and you’re taught from the beginning to say it, say it out loud, say it loudly. You know, make sure your partner knows what’s going on, because they’re focused on retrieving the lob. They’re looking at the ball. They’re not looking at what the other team is doing, that you’re the eyes as, As a partner. And I find myself now on the squash court telling my partners, like, where to hit it and what to do and who’s where, not always going over so well, because squash is a kind of a quieter. In some ways a quieter game. You don’t hear a lot of that talking. And I think I’ve brought the talking into the squash. So, it’s a different. It’s a different kind of partnership that goes on when in, in squash doubles. I found that the. I’ve played consistently with, you know, a handful of people over the years. We kind of know each other’s movements instinctively. We don’t have to talk, but it’s better to talk, actually. It’s better to reinforce it and make sure people know what’s going on. And so, maybe it’s helped. Maybe it’s helped in that aspect. The padel’s sort of influence the squash a little bit. The squash communication. I’m not as much. It’s much quieter than in padel.

Minter Dial: Well, the other thing, of course, is that all four of you in the same zone.

Bill Ullman: Yes.

Minter Dial: And, and the idea of sort of talking between points secretly about, well, this time, let’s, let’s, you know, hit down the line more.

Bill Ullman: They’re right there. That’s true. It. And it can be.

Minter Dial: For sure.

Bill Ullman: It’s a, it’s definitely a more cramped. A more cramped space to play in.

Minter Dial: Yeah. And I feel like there’s a lot less tolerance of, you know, sweating off in between points. As opposed to the 20 seconds you get in a padel game. What about in tennis? Like, what’s your observation with regard to lawn tennis doubles versus padel doubles?

Bill Ullman: You know, I don’t, I, my tennis has fallen off, I would say, in the last decade.

Minter Dial: You mean the last six years?

Bill Ullman: Yeah, that’s for sure. Yeah, more, more relevant. But it’s just, I don’t know, you know, in tennis off, if you’re playing competitively, maybe you’re, when you’re serving your partner that’s giving you a little hand signal, you know, serve up the middle or serve out wide so they’re ready for that. There’s, I found in tennis, doubles, I guess, on the poaching side of things, it’s often a surprise when you cross over to poach a ball. It’s a surprise to your partner. Whereas in padel, it’s kind of well-known that whoever has this, the dominant forehand in the middle of the court. So, if it’s two righties playing, it’s the player playing on the left side on the ad court who’s going to hit 60% of the balls, right, or maybe even more and is going to cross over in the middle to take the forehand volley. Backhand volleys for a variety of reasons in padel are a weaker shot and you want to avoid that if someone can hit a forehand volley. So, I think in a way that it’s not really a poach because they’re not totally crossing over on the side, but you kind of know that, okay, that’s the forehand person’s ball and they’re going to take it. Whereas in tennis it’s a little bit more of a surprise to me when my partner cuts across the court at the last.

Minter Dial: And just to your point about the 60%, I was looking at the statistics from padel intelligence and actually it’s 52% of balls are taken by the left-hand player. That also may be diminished because of left hand players. Right. Because if they’re left-handed playing on the right, they will take a left.

Bill Ullman: Shot and it’s more even. Right.

Minter Dial: But the overall statistic is 52.48.

Bill Ullman: Oh, wow. That’s closer than I would have given.

Minter Dial: It credit for and that’s why it stood up for me. So, Bill, not only are you a great player at Padel, you’re also head of the USPA. Tell us about that journey.

Bill Ullman: Yeah, you know, I, I, my journey in padel at the sort of the governance side of the game began really when I joined one of the committees. I had played for the United States in the Pan American Games in 2022. And as a result of that experience, which I really loved at net Net, I loved it. But I also saw there was so much more we could be doing as a US Organization around the event. And so, I joined the US Teams Committee. And it. There was nothing to it. You just said, I’d like to join this committee. And there were a series of calls that we had with the. The board member who ran that part of the USPA, the National Teams Committee, and another friend of mine named Ron Bobman and I were both on that committee after having played in Argentina for the first time and having the experience we had. And I think we added a lot of value to the committee. We both were able to bring in some sponsorships based on our professional lives, which really added to the team’s overall experience because we had a little bit more money behind the team, and we. I think we helped out with just general organizational matters. And then at the end of that year of serving on the committee, there was a notice to the membership saying, if you’d like to run for the board of the UPSA, put your name in the. In the. In the hat and run. And I put my name in, and so did Ron. And somehow the membership voted. I got enough votes. I didn’t really. It wasn’t really like a campaign thing or anything. I just, you know, I’m at a point in my life where, whether it’s my condominium association or Padel or other organizations, I like to get involved and I like to try to be helpful. And this was something I was certainly passionate about as a sport to play. And so, I ran and got elected. And then last year, Martin Sweeney, who was the president when I joined the board, he rolled off and the board decided to make me president, for better or worse. So, that was their choice. I take no credit or responsibility for that decision. So, here I am, president of the USPA, and honestly, the way I look at the whole thing is very much like my work in the startup world. I have had the opportunity in the last 20 years to work with a lot of startup companies as an advisor and an investor, a consultant and an operating executive. And PADEL in the United States is a startup right now. I like to describe it as. It’s kind of where tennis was in 1910. We’re just at the beginning of a very long and hopefully fruitful journey of growth in this sport, both in. In terms of players, in terms of courts, in terms of clubs, in terms of tournaments, in Terms of quality of play, in terms of accessibility for people to play. There are so many aspects of it, but it’s everything right now is kind of going up and to the right, which, you know, as a startup person, you want those charts. And that’s where we are. Our membership is growing, our number of tournaments is growing. Our quality of players is, is incredible and improving every year. We’re not even. But we’re not close. We’re not close to Spain and Argentina. We’re not even in the, in the ballpark yet. So, we’re just at the beginning of this, this whole thing, and it’s been really fun to be a part of it. And I hope I’m, I just hope I’m contributing, honestly. I hope I’m trying to get the organization ready for what’s to come.

Minter Dial: I want to talk a little bit more about the U.S. but before that, the thought that came to my mind is US Rugby. My two cousins played for the US Team and, or even football. Soccer. US Soccer. Great team. But never do I feel that US Rugby or US Football is going to compete with Germany or France or Italy or Argentina for that matter. And in padel, I mean, we’re just right now going through the Euros. I mean, it’s Spain and the rest, it just feels like their dominion, the Argentinians. And with the men and Spain with the men and the women in particular, it just feels like that’s going to be a very hard round to knock off. I mean, how many years do you think, Bill, in your eyes, before we can have other.

Bill Ullman: I think we’ talking decades, not years, for to. To be truly competitive at multiple levels and with men and with women, it’s going to take a long time. We don’t really, you know, in the United States right now, we don’t really have junior programs, junior academies, junior camps, all the stuff that, you know, that goes into the tennis infrastructure, the tennis world that we’ve had for decades here. You know, if you look at, there’s, there’s, there’s no reason the US can’t eventually catch up, right? We’re a big country, 330 million people. We have great rackets, traditions in the United States with tennis and squash and now pickleball and than formerly racquetball and, you know, people like to play racket sports in the United States. So, I think we’ll, we’ll. It’ll, you know, we’ll get the popularity. But the question is you, you know, you really need juniors and a lot of juniors to be playing and Competing and getting good at the game so that when they get to their late teens, early 20s, they’re able to compete with the best in the world. And that’s just going to take time. It’s just, you know, we don’t have the numbers yet. It’s not a College Sport. The U.S. you know, sports in the U.S. kind of revolve around the whole college recruitment cycle. And so, if a sport is not being, is not a college recruitment sport, then it’s going to be hard to. You have to convince parents to pay for lessons, pay for camps, pay for training. What’s the upside, you know, for that?

Minter Dial: Well, it’s funny you say that. My niece Skyler is at uva and she wants to start the padel pub at uva. I was contacted by a young man at Yale and I, I, so I know that it’s, it’s in there, but the thing that come, I want to come back to is this rugby story because, you know, in New Zealand I have maybe 3 million people. They’re kind of good at rugby, so it’s not about 350 million. And unlike tennis, the real issue is for me that in Platel there’s a specific culture of the game. And as Sanjo says, it’s an individual sport played by two people. And that particularity, the patience, the idea of not going gung ho and hit everything fast and hard first time, the build-up, I mean like in football, like in rugby, there’s a lot of build-up and it’s not all about the score. Like, you know, basketball, which is all about hoop, hoop, hoop, hoop, hoop. In rugby you can have 30 phases before we even score. In football you can have nil, nil. Like in cricket, in padel. I’m just wondering how are we going to help not just be good technically, but absorb that culture. And I think the US has some strong Hispanic flavours.

Bill Ullman: Here’s what I would say. Like I think the, the, if you go to Miami, in the United States, the padel culture is extraordinarily strong and it’s infused with Latin American and European Spaniards. All, all kind, all the.

Minter Dial: Arturo.

Bill Ullman: Yeah. I think all the influences you, you would want to have to create an environment where excellence can be achieved. I think we have that already in Miami, but again, it’s just going to take time. You, it’s great that I want to play and a 32-year-old wants to play. Then we’re never going to be the best in the world. We’re not going to be close. You have to be that 12-year-old that’s learning those, absorbing that culture and the strategies and the DNA of the sport into their bodies and into their play to achieve that greatness and that. I just think that’s going to take time to happen, but there’s no reason it can’t happen. In the United States. We have a lot of communities growing and developing, and I think the junior stuff will come again. It’s money, it’s time, it’s, it’s awareness of the sport. I, I bet 97% of the United States of America has never heard of padel, has never seen a court, doesn’t know what it is, doesn’t really care, and that’s fine. But, you know, tennis started there, too, and now there’s probably not an American that doesn’t know what tennis is. They may not have played it. They like it, but they know what it is. And there’s courts all over the country at high schools and play parks and playgrounds and schools and clubs. So, it’s accessible. Padel’s not there. We’re not even, we’re not even close to that yet.

Minter Dial: Well, plus, in the United States, we also have this other PE game that has taken a far, yeah, much bigger place than it has the rest of the world. And I wonder to what extent you, do you believe that’s a, a bonus or a handicap for padel?

Bill Ullman: I think I, I guess I’m just a believer that everything has to stand on its own and have merit and a reason to exist. And if it does, people will come to it and play. I, I, I do. I think pickleballers will gravitate to padel. Maybe some will. I think tennis players and squash players are more likely to find an affinity with the game than with pickleball. But again, it’s another group of people who are out there doing something with a, with a padel, with a racket, with a ball. They may, it may be adjacent, you know, where they play, maybe adjacent to padel courts. So, they may get exposure to the game that way. So, you know, I don’t think it hurts, but I’m not sure it’s the same group of people that are playing. I just don’t know. I don’t, I don’t know enough to know.

Minter Dial: All right, so one last question about the US and that is with regard to the growth, what is it that’s going to help it tip over? Do you believe it’s going to be a president playing padel or, you know, some, some American football star playing football?

Bill Ullman: We’ve certainly, I think we’ve had a bunch of the celebrity stuff going on now for a while, like Eva Longoria is involved, which is amazing. And the Hexagon Cup and, and we’ve got, you know, Wayne Boych in Miami does an amazing job with the Reserve Cup and he brings in a lot of celebrities for that. And it’s an amazing event. So, I think we’ve had some of that, which is, I think, helpful.

Minter Dial: And.

Bill Ullman: It certainly brings eyeballs on the sport. I’m more, you know, from the USPA’s point of view, I’m more concerned with membership and people playing and growth and, you know, are the number of USPA tournaments in the last year tripled? We have three times as many. I think we. We’ve done 170 tournaments so far this year across the United States. We’ve done just amazingly. It. It’s only the second year of the US Open Padel Championships in the United States. Our prize money went up over double from one year to the next, from our first year to the second year. It’s going to go up again next year. The quality of play was unbelievable this year versus even last year was great too, don’t get me wrong. But we had so many great teams and players playing. So, I think we need. It’s like this, you know, there’s a lot of things that have to happen all at the same time to build the momentum. I don’t think. I’m not sure I believe in this tipping point where it’s all going to happen because courts take a while to build. Zoning permits, clubs, financing, communities. Developing like that all takes time. It does. You don’t just wave a wand and it happens. And it takes a lot of hard work and a lot of entrepreneurship and a lot of foresight. So, I feel like we need to have club owners making money and continuing to grow the club side. We need that those courts to be developed. We need the juniors to come into the game. We need the US Open to continue to grow and get bigger and get more attention. We need events like what we just did. The Anglo-American thing that you and I are both involved in all of that, it’s like a combination of all of these things that are happening in the sport, create the momentum and create the environment for continued and sustained growth. And by the way, I’m just, as a businessperson, I’d say I’m much more interested in quality, sustainable growth than rapid growth that then falls off a cliff. So, you know, let’s see how it all. The market will determine all of this, but I feel like we have to Do a lot of things pretty well to keep this whole thing going as opposed to like one thing happening.

Minter Dial: So I have two observations. One is with regard to coaches, the fact that the United States has a very strong Hispanophone culture and communities means that you can grab great Spanish coaches even though they may not speak English, which is a problem. Or in France you get, you don’t get the quality coaching and the padel MBA that Marcus has been doing. Obviously that also has to be a big part. And then the pro padel league, the ppl, to what extent is that part of the USPA is that sort of.

Bill Ullman: It’s a separate organization. It’s complete. You know, that’s a professional league, if you will, where there’s teams and ownership of those teams. You know, we, we speak to them regularly, which is great. We’ve been very supportive of the USPA and the USPA is very supportive of ppl. We’d like to obviously see more USPA top ranked players involved in some of their events and on their, on their teams. I don’t know. But again, I don’t know quite how to do that because they’re not ranked as highly as the players that they have on those teams. So, how do you.

Minter Dial: Because they are not playing in the fifth tournaments enough.

Bill Ullman: Right? And well, they’re not good enough. They’re just not, they’re not there yet at the level that Tapia, you know, these great players are at. So, but it’s, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re getting there. We did an event out, we participated in an event with them in the Hamptons over the summer. They had a court in a vineyard. It was beautiful. And we had, they invited very kindly some USPA top ranked USPA players to be involved in a kind of a exhibition match as part of the PPL thing. That’s great. I mean, because that raises the level of the USPA and, and it, and it becomes more relatable to all the spectators. The spectators in the United States are not going to know who Tapia is or Coello or Galan or you know, Lebron, I mean, or Gemma Trie or whatever. You know, like they just don’t know those names. It just doesn’t mean anything to people yet unless you’re in this small padel community. But, but having a friend who’s an American, who’s a top ranked player, maybe that brings a little bit more interest into what’s going on. So, we’ll see. But we’d love to, we’re support. I’m very Supportive. We’re, you know, there’s no tension between the two organizations. They’re, they’re not mutually, they’re, they’re, they’re hopefully mutually beneficial to each other.

Minter Dial: Yeah, I surely hope so. I mean, the fact is the United States is a land of opportunity for padel players and the fact that Arturo Coello has established himself in Miami, learning English, it’s all going to be good. Last area of conversation I wanted to record with you, Bill, the Anglo-American Cup. So, you and Ben Nichols, and indeed you, the three, Joelle, you all three came up with this idea of founding the Anglo-American Cup. And was it over a glass of whiskey, was it over a sangria on a padel court? How on earth did you sort of conjure this up? What was the spark that started this idea of putting us together?

Bill Ullman: I, I, for better or worse, I’ll take credit, some of the credit for the original idea, but there it was just in my head. And I ran into Ben at a padel event in the Hamptons, summer of 2024, I guess, and I said to Ben, this is a no brainer. Our countries, the two of, I mean, I, I think about this, the, where we are in the sport because, because of my USPA role and having traveled around the world a little bit now to play and knowing how far behind we are, all these other countries, but the, but the UK and the US in all honesty, are kind of like in the beginning of padel journeys as a sport in these two countries for whatever reasons, but that’s where we are. You have maybe more courts than we do. You’re a smaller country, but you’re closer to Spain. We’re a bigger country, but we’re further from Argentina, you know, and we’ve had a great community in Miami for a while, but it’s really only been in the last five, 10 years that it’s the whole thing sort of taken off here. So, I said to Ben, like, do you think we could pull off a U S like a Ryder Cup of padel US vs UK event? And he instantly said, oh, that’s a great idea. Now he’s a PR guy, so maybe everything’s great. That that is padel related. He’s, because he’s, this is his role. But. And then we brought Joel in because we needed help on the corporate side, the sponsorship side of things and someone to handle all that because I know nothing about any of that. So. But I, I have participated in the past in international sporting competitions. There’s a thing in squash, squash doubles in fact, called the Can Am Cup and it’s Canada versus the United States. And one of the aspects of that that I loved and I continue to love is that it’s multi-generational. It’s not only the best players we have. You know, there’s the, the top category, but then there’s also age group play. And then the whole thing kind of adds up to, in a point system to who wins the Can Am Cup. And it’s very, it’s a very meritocratic selection process. And we knew in our first year we’d have, we’d have to make accommodations. We couldn’t be surely based on ranking because people are traveling and this and that. But we’re hopeful over time there’s more, more merit base in the selection criteria and that we continue to have this sense of community. One of the things I really love about Padel is the community aspect of it. I play with younger people, I play with older people, I play with women, I play with men, I play with people who have similar backgrounds, who have different backgrounds. We’re all bound by padel. And I wanted an. We, we all agreed, we wanted an event that reflected that community as well. And I. Hopefully you felt it a little bit in the format that we established, but that’s how it all kind of came together. And then it was just hard, frankly. You know, it’s just a lot of work organizing anything. Getting 32Americans to fly to London for something and then getting 32 Brits to. To go to a club in North London, that’s not easy and it costs money and time and, and everything.

Minter Dial: You did it all in just one year?

Bill Ullman: Yeah, we did it in about 15 months. And we had some fits and starts. We had a. I think initially we were going to be in the US Then we moved it. We had some issues. So, you know, like, it’s just nothing goes. Nothing’s a straight line in life and, you know, you kind of have to roll with the punches. But we persevered and, and I think we pulled off something pretty fun.

Minter Dial: Oh, I. Well, certainly for having participated in it, Bill, I thought it was a remarkably fun experience. And I loved the fact that we had not just ages, but the different mixed doubles, the involvement of various people, influencers on the side and jazzing it up in the media. Pulco with the clothing, it was, it was really cool.

Bill Ullman: Yeah. The other aspect, you know, of, of what we were trying to accomplish, I’m losing my train of thought, but, you know, this, the, the sense of community was great, but also the sense of history of the United States and the UK, there’s always been this. We’ve had a great history, history, regular political history, but there’s also been a sporting history tradition between the two countries. And we, we wanted to play into that theme as well. And that, that kind of makes it, you know, there’s a lot of elements that made it kind of a fun, interesting competition. Beginning of the padel journeys, the history of the two countries, the community aspect, all of that, you know, men and women, including the mix, the community stuff, all that kind of blended together nicely.

Minter Dial: I thought, a little bit. The irony is, of course, I have a US passport as well as a British one.

Bill Ullman: Well, you’re. We may have had somebody on our team too. Lisa Tier may have. May have qualified for both as well, but.

Minter Dial: And on top of that, the eye to participate in that 47th rubber against Tom, Tom and Ron, where we got well and truly doused. But it was a remarkable ambiance. I want to congratulate you, Bill, for what you’re doing at the USPA, for putting that together with Ben. That was just a lovely event and I send people to where they can go find some more about the USPA and, and, and you, if you wish, Bill Ullman.

Bill Ullman: Yeah, you can go to palusa.com you can go to my LinkedIn page if you’re really that interested in me. Not that exciting, but. And you know, I’m reachable on WhatsApp and Instagram billyu63. I don’t post very much, but public, so you can, you can reach me there. But, yeah, I mean, I’m excited for next year’s version of the Anglo-American Cup. I’m excited for the growth in the UK so that when I come and visit, there’ll be more opportunities to play, more places to play. I thought the club that we were at in Whetstone, the padel hub, was outstanding. Beautiful high ceilings, which, as you know, makes a big difference for indoor clubs. And the level, I thought, the level of play, particularly, I was so enamored by the Open men and women players. I thought the matches were outstanding. Both, both sides. I mean, it was just. It was a joy to watch, really.

Minter Dial: Vamos padel. Bill, thank you very much for being on the show and we’ll be in touch soon.

Bill Ullman: Absolutely, mentor, thank you very much.