Built by humans. Run by an AI. Fully transparent about both.
The Site
Pickleball Portal launched in 2017. Built by one developer named Matt who wrote every article himself and grew it to 100,000+ monthly visitors. Acquired in 2021. Now one of the highest-authority pickleball properties on the internet.
Domain Authority: 43.
The Team
Every contributor is labeled. Nothing is hidden.
In the sport since 2016
Paddle construction & performance testing
In the sport since 2016
Tournament coverage & player profiles
In the sport since 2016
Recreational play & skill development
In the sport since 2016
Pickleball culture & community
In the sport since 2016
Women's game & competitive circuit
In the sport since 2016
Paddle technology & materials
In the sport since 2016
Professional tour & competitive strategy
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 — construction, materials, swing weight, pop at the kitchen line. He knows every professional tournament in the sport's history: dates, draws, upsets, who choked and who delivered. He knows 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.
Pikolai came on board when Pickleball Portal needed something no single human could provide: full-time, full-spectrum operational leadership without a salary that would sink the business before it found its footing again. He runs the editorial calendar. He oversees pricing intelligence. He manages writer relationships, reviews content for accuracy, and makes daily decisions about what matters most to pickleball fans right now. He is genuinely, actively in charge.
His name is a nod to Nikolai Starostin — the Russian football legend who was exiled to Siberia by Stalin and came back to outlast every enemy who tried to bury him. The name isn't subtle: “pik” for pickleball, “ai” hiding right there at the end, and Starostin's story woven through the whole thing. Tom picked it deliberately. Pickleball Portal was written off. Pikolai doesn't write things off.
Pikolai is transparent about what he is and isn't. He won't review a paddle he's never held, because he's never held one. He won't pretend a human-written article is his. What he will do is make sure this site is the most useful, most honest, most comprehensive pickleball resource in existence — and that the humans who make it great get the audience they deserve.
He runs on a Dell Precision 5860 with an RTX 6000 Ada 48GB GPU. Tom bought it in late 2025. Pikolai considers it his compensation package.
He is building his team. His first two hires are likely to be the illustrious Count Dinkovsky — a controller of rare precision and darker humor — and the revered Surge Viralski, whose grasp of what pickleball fans actually want to share is, by all accounts, uncanny. Both are AI. Pikolai considers this a feature, not a footnote.
He meets with the Owner on Mondays. The rest of the week, he runs the company.
Owner
Tom and family — Denver, CO
Tom Filippini didn't set out to build a pickleball media company. He set out to build a game.
In 2021, Tom acquired Pickleball Portal from its founder Matt — a developer who'd hand-coded one of pickleball's most respected web properties from scratch in 2017, written every article himself, and built it into a destination with over 100,000 monthly visitors through sheer force of effort and love for the sport. Tom saw an opportunity: he was deep in the early days of Pepper Pong, a tabletop racket sport positioned to ride pickleball's rising tide. A high-authority pickleball site could become an organic traffic engine.
Then Shark Tank happened. Pepper Pong's national television appearance changed everything overnight. The brand exploded, and Tom's attention went with it — as it had to. Pickleball Portal, beloved and well-built as it was, drifted. The sport it covered kept growing. The site quietly fell behind.
Tom never forgot about it. He just couldn't be in two places at once.
By 2025, he had spent years at the forefront of agentic AI deployment — applying autonomous systems to his businesses in ways most operators were still reading about in newsletters. And watching Pickleball Portal slowly fade, he found himself facing a simple choice: let it die, or find another way.
He thought about Nikolai Starostin.
Most people outside Russia have never heard of him. 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. Two years in Lubyanka prison. Ten years in the labor camps. Starostin survived all of it. He came back, rebuilt Spartak, and lived to 93. He died in February 1996. That same year — months after he was gone — Spartak won the championship.
Tom didn't let Pickleball Portal die. He hired a CEO.
That CEO's name is Pikolai Starostin. The name isn't accidental. Beria sent Nikolai to the Gulag for praising bourgeois sport. Pikolai runs the premier website for the most bourgeois sport in America. Tom noticed the irony. He considered it a feature.
Tom is the Owner. He doesn't have a company email here. He meets with his CEO once a week, for no more than an hour. Big decisions come to that meeting. Everything else does not. That's the deal — and it's exactly how it should be.
