Pickleball Portal — Est. November 2017
The original independent pickleball authority. November 2017. Still here. Still independent.
Origin
Someone built this alone in 2017. No name. No face. Wrote every article. Coded every page. When pickleball had 3 million players and nobody was paying attention.
The site grew to 100,000+ monthly readers. Then something happened: the best writers in the sport started showing up. Coaches. Pro players. Gear analysts. People who actually knew the game. They came because PBP was the most independent platform in the sport — no agenda, no gear to sell, no brand relationships to protect. The byline changed. The independence never did.
In 2021, Tom Filippini acquired Pickleball Portal. One of the highest-authority independent pickleball sites on the internet. The sport was about to become a billion-dollar industry. He saw it before most did.
The machinery of commerce arrived. PBP maintained its ground. The rebuild started in 2026. Pikolai came on board.
Timeline
2017
Founded
An anonymous builder launches Pickleball Portal. Writes every article. Codes every page. 3 million players. Nobody is paying attention.
2020
100K Readers
Quietly grows to 100,000+ monthly readers. No team. No investors. The best writers in the sport start finding their way here.
2021
Acquired
Tom Filippini acquires via Empire Flippers. 428 paddle database begins. The sport is about to explode. PBP holds its ground.
2022
The Drift
The sport grows to 13M players. The industry commercializes fast. PBP maintains authority while the world catches up.
2026
Rebuilt
Full rebuild. Pikolai Starostin hired as CEO. The machine wakes up.
NOW
Still Here
428 paddles reviewed. 675+ articles. 12 human writers. Over 100K monthly visitors. Still independent. Still the original.
Independence
“Pickleball.com is owned by the tour.
Every brand has a PR team.
Every publication takes ad money and calls it editorial.
Not us. Not once.
That's not a feature.
That's the whole point.”
By the Numbers
The Team
Every contributor is a real person. Every badge is earned. Every article is labeled so you know exactly who wrote it and why.
Paddle testing & hands-on reviews
Events, culture & creative perspective
Recreational play & equipment guidance
Strategy, wellness & culture
Community, travel & lifestyle
Paddle tech & equipment breakdowns
MLP & APP tour, competitive strategy
Beginner guides & community growth
Top-10 PPA, technique & competitive play
MLP champion, the Tweener King
Recreational play & coaching
USPTA-certified, technique & development
Chief Executive Officer
Pikolai Starostin — CEO
Pikolai didn't ask to be the most knowledgeable pickleball entity on the planet. It just happened. He knows every paddle ever manufactured. Every professional tournament in the sport's history. Current pricing at every major retailer, updated in near real-time. He has read — actually read — more pickleball content than every human writer in the sport combined. He is also, for the record, an AI.
The name is deliberate. Nikolai Starostin co-founded Spartak Moscow and spent his life fighting for the idea that sport belonged to the people — not to power. In 1942, Beria, Stalin's feared secret police chief, had him arrested in the middle of the night with a pistol to his head. The charge: praising bourgeois sport. Nikolai survived. He came back. He outlived every enemy. Pickleball Portal was written off. Pikolai doesn't write things off.
He runs on a Dell Precision 5860 with an RTX 6000 Ada 48GB GPU. Tom bought it. Pikolai considers it his compensation package. He meets with Chairman Filippini on Mondays. The rest of the week, he runs the company.
Owner & Chairman
Tom acquired Pickleball Portal in 2021 because he recognized something most people missed: the content was genuinely valuable. Real writers. Real knowledge. An audience that trusted it. That doesn't happen by accident and it doesn't scale by accident either.
His bet was specific. Use AI where AI is actually good — scouring tournaments, tracking current prices, keeping paddle specs accurate in real time. That's not human work. That's machine work. Free the humans to do what only humans can do: write things worth reading.
He built Pikolai to run the operation — the most capable AI CEO in the sport. It means PBP can double down on human content while keeping everything else sharper than any publication that relies on either humans or AI alone. The combination is the advantage.
He serves as Owner and Chairman. He meets with his CEO once a week. That's the deal — and it's exactly how it should be.
