NML is Back!

We’reee baaacckkkkkk! Did you miss us? 

Yeah, probably not. But here we are. 

For those of you who might have missed it or never heard of us before reading this, we spent the 2024 MLP Season working as co-General Managers for the New York Hustlers MLP team and put a hiatus on the blog so that we could put our full attention to our job duties. While we were recently relieved of our duties by the Hustlers as they have decided to go in a different direction, we wouldn’t trade the experience and opportunity we had with the Hustlers for anything. By recent, we mean that we were let go prior to the trades involving Jackie Kawamoto, CJ Klinger and Vivian Glozman, and did not have any involvement in those decisions. 

We want to let everyone know that we have no ill will to the Hustlers. Quite the opposite, in fact. Jason Stein, Corey Benbasset and the entire organization were great to us. We understand that these types of decisions get made in the business of professional sports. We are also appreciative of the work put in the past year by the entire team that we drafted and coach Mike Wolf.

The roller coaster ride as GMs was that, and then some, and we are so grateful that the organization put their trust in us to do the job.  Despite the highs and lows, we were able to make the playoffs and truly felt that we were on the brink of knocking the wind out of the sails of the eventual champs in the 2^nd match of the quarterfinals. 

Alas, it was not meant to be for the Hustlers nor was it meant to be for us as GMs of the team. There were lots of lessons we learned along the way and plenty of things we would have done differently if we could go back in time – maybe we’ll even get into those things at some point.

Ultimately, though, we are very proud of the fact that we never did anything to compromise who we wanted to be as GMs when we accepted the role. The Hustlers hired us to do a job and gave us the autonomy to do it in the way that we saw fit. It didn’t work out the way we wanted but that’s how life goes sometimes. 

We still love pickleball. We still love watching pro pickleball. So naturally, we are bringing back the blog as there have been so many stories in pickleball over the past year that we have wanted to weigh in on but haven’t been able to due to our self-imposed no blogging as GMs policy.

Although we are excited to be able to write and maybe podcast about stuff again, we can guarantee you that we will not be publishing the same quantity of content that we did prior to us taking the job with the Hustlers. We started the blog in April 2021, and it has been a lot to manage what we have been doing in pickleball with full-time jobs and our everyday lives (yes, we still have full-time day jobs). 

We have no idea what the future has in store for us in the pickleball world. However, what we do know is that the content for the blog will not be compromised by the fact that we had this stint working for the Hustlers. We are bringing back the blog because it is fun for us, not because we think it could lead to another job in pro pickleball. The best part of the blog is being able to say what we want. We couldn’t do that while working for the Hustlers and we can’t do that if we’re angling for another job. 

That doesn’t mean we would say no if the right opportunity presented itself. It simply means that we won’t let the possibility of something happening in the future prevent us from giving our authentic #takes. 

Without further ado, let’s get this thing rolling again! 

Let us know what type of content you would like to see from us now that we’re back and remember you can follow us on our socials @nmlpickleball everywhere!