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Inside the OWL Paddle's Secret USAP Approval | Pickleball.com
Courlo Team · · 2 min read
The OWL paddle's USAP approval was provisional and kept internal for two years. We asked USAP's CTO how it happened and got answers on the record.
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For about two and a half years now, the OWL paddle has occupied a strange spot in the sport. It's best known for its carpet-like surface texture that significantly dampens the sound of hitting a ball, but players who have spent real time with one, especially after it breaks in, will tell you it produces a level of spin higher than anything else on the USAP approved list. The paddle testing community (John Kew, Pickleball Studio, etc) has said the same thing in public, yet the paddle has carried USA Pickleball's full tournament approval the entire time, sold across an expanding product line, with nothing on the approved equipment page to suggest the approval was anything other than ordinary.
As someone who's played against the OWL many times, I've been trying to understand how that approval came to be, and after a long exchange with USA Pickleball I have a much clearer picture. The short version is that the approval of the OWL lineup is actually provisional, but that detail was kept from the public and the rest of the industry. OWL paddles couldn't be approved through the traditional process as the surface roughness test that every other USAP approved paddle needs to pass was waived because OWL's Acoustene surface couldn't be measured by it. USAP has reasons for all of that, and I am going to lay those reasons out in full, in their own words, because they deserve a voice in the discussion, but the reasons don't resolve the part that actually matters. What is a compliance standard worth when one company's products can be exempted from it without notice and sold freely for years while everyone else is still held to it?
OWL entered the market through USAP's Quiet Category, which was created to address pickleball's noise problem, one that is very real. The sound of the game has become a genuine obstacle to its growth in certain areas leading to municipal ordinances and building codes that restrict where people can play, and USAP is right to treat it as a priority. When the category launched, the announcement was explicit that this was a way to get quiet products in the market even if they weren't fully competition legal.