How did Tickle My pickleball start?

Chris Olson from Pickleball Studio mentioned in his CRBN 1X review back in late 2022 how it was a great new paddle release BUT there were 3 other brands that used the same construction at a lower price point. Legacy, Six Zero, and Vatic Pro. Vatic was the one I was the most curious about because it was the cheapest of the three. It retailed for $140 which was significantly cheaper than the CRBN 1x at $250.

I kept waiting for Chris to review the original Vatic Pro V7 and 14mm Flash (to this day he still hasn’t reviewed them), so I could figure out if I should buy the cheaper V7 or splurge and get the 1x. Weeks went by and I finally decided, you know what, why don’t I buy both and post my own thoughts? Maybe that can help people in the same boat as me, those of us curious about these new thermoformed paddles and how they compared against the pricier CRBNs. And that’s exactly what I did, I used Chris’s discount code to buy both paddles (you’re welcome Chris) and started hitting them to see what the difference is.

I made a reddit post with my thoughts before I thought about making a youtube video of my findings. While reddit was nice for a text post, I wanted the information to be more easily searchable for people.

So along comes the start of the channel, 3.5 Pickleball Reviews. The first videos are honestly terrible with horrible production quality, bad editing, and me just rambling on. Luckily back then because there was such limited information on paddles, people still watched the videos despite the terrible video quality because they were so eager for information.

I chose the name 3.5 Pickleball Reviews because I actually was competing at tournaments at the 3.5 level. However this was also around the time Chris Olson was associated with the ‘3.5 At Best’ meme and there were a few people that thought I was a part of the Pickleball Studio. Not wanting to cause any trouble, I decided to just change my channel name since it was small enough anyways and few people would notice.

One of the pickleball group chats I’m in is called Tickle My Pickle, so I figured temporarily I would change the channel name to Tickle My Pickleball until I ended up thinking of a more permanent name. Well the channel ended up getting bigger, and I got lazy about changing the name so here we are, welcome to Tickle My Pickleball