Inside Selkirk's high-tech pickleball lab, where they use a 'performance cannon' and 'Thor's hammer' to make top-of-the-line paddles

• Selkirk is a leading pickleball equipment brand founded by two brothers and their dad in 2014.
• As the sport has exploded, so has the competition. The brothers stay ahead by investing heavily in R&D.
• I toured Selkirk's million-dollar innovation lab, which features a CT scanner, durability cannon, and other machines.

Selkirk isn't just producing pickleball paddles. They're running science experiments.

One such experiment involves firing pickleballs at a stationary paddle at up to 120 miles per hour — over and over and over again.

When the ball leaves the "durability cannon," which the engineers nicknamed Mjölnir after Thor's hammer, and makes contact with the paddle, it emits a booming sound that resembles, well, a cannon. Impressive for a perforated plastic sphere.

Thor's hammer is just one of the fancy and expensive pieces of machinery I got to see in action when I toured Selkirk LABS, the research and development division of Selkirk Sport, in mid-January.

Selkirk is a leading pickleball equipment brand. If you play the sport, chances are you or your opponent is wielding one of their sticks. The shipping department manager, who works out of the company's 87,000-square-foot warehouse, told me they fulfill roughly 1,000 orders a day and up to 2,500 during the holiday season.

The company was founded in 2014 by two brothers, Rob and Mike Barnes, and their father, Jim, well before pickleball became popular.

"Pickleball had a connotation of being a senior sport for a while," Rob told me at the Selkirk headquarters in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, where the brothers grew up and started their first business as teens selling airsoft guns out of their dad's basement.

They sold the airsoft business to pivot to pickleball, a game they discovered in 2009 and couldn't get enough of. It seemed impossible that it wouldn't take off. They were right about that, but it took years, and a global pandemic that encouraged socially distant activities, before the rest of the world would catch on.

As the sport has exploded, so has the competition. The Barnes brothers believe in staying ahead by continuing to invest in R&D and deliver premium products. They have the only private sports science lab in pickleball, which they've invested roughly $1 million into, and one of the few private sports labs in racket sports in general.

The youngest Barnes brother, Tom, joined the family business after a career in the Marines. He's the director of R&D and spent nearly three hours walking me through the lab, explaining in detail how each machine works and why it's important.

While the paddle is their hero product, Selkirk also makes shoes, apparel, balls, and nets — "everything except the court surface," said Tom, as long as it's in the pickleball realm. He and his brothers don't have any interest in expanding into the myriad of racket sports: tennis, padel, squash, etc. "We will only ever do pickleball. This was intentional from day one. It's called Selkirk Sport; it's not called Selkirk Sports."

Tom greeted me at the unassuming entrance of the facility, nicknamed "Aqua." It makes up about 22,000 square feet of Selkirk's 160,000-square-foot campus.

The lab portion of the building, which has been up and running for about a year, is split into two rooms. We started in the larger of the two, which houses a bunch of machines, including this one designed to perform a "pull test." They'll place a specimen of the paddle material between these two clamps and essentially rip it apart to test its resilience.

"This is aerospace material science," Tom told me — a phrase I never thought I'd include in the same sentence as "pickleball."

He also showed me what's called the "optical profilometer," a digital microscope that lets you examine the paddle's face in detail. The texture — or, grit — on a paddle is important. It creates spin and influences ball control.

Thanks to the fancy microscope, "we can see every little crystal of our grit," said Tom. "We can see every dot of the ink on here. And we can see defects."

Here's a much better photo of the machine than the one I snapped:

Next up is my personal favorite: Thor's hammer. Tom describes it as "a really fancy potato cannon."

After scanning a fresh paddle, engineers will place it inside this big, red cage, and the durability cannon will fire pickleballs at it every six seconds, about 1,000 times. Then it goes back to the profilometer for another scan to see what happened to the surface after all the abuse.

It's a bulky machine they sourced from China and originally intended for tennis racket testing. Tom describes it as "big and slow," but it gets the job done for now. He was excited to share that his team is working on their own version of Thor's hammer that will be smaller and fire balls even faster.

There's also a CT scanner in this room. While the profilometer performs an external scan, the CT performs an internal scan.

I asked what he's looking for in the images. "Everything," he said. "We can look at every microscopic detail inside the paddle and make sure everything is where we want it to be."

Before they had the CT scanner, the only way they could see what was going on inside the paddle was to saw it open and manually inspect it. The method worked, but destroyed the paddle.

"You can only do that once," said Tom. Whereas, with the CT scanner, the paddle is still playable after the inspection. "This is the biggest, most important thing we've ever bought for non-destructive testing."

The second, smaller room of the lab has machines that test for swing and twist weight. It also houses what Tom likes to call their "academic research cannon" or "performance cannon." Its main job is to help figure out the physics involved in the sport: What happens when a plastic ball hits a paddle?

Like Thor's hammer, it involves firing pickleballs at a stationary paddle.

"It's measuring how efficient the collision is, which is basically how efficient the paddle is — not too dissimilar to how many miles a car can go on a gallon a gas," said Tom. "The reason this is important is because in our sport, due to our limited court dimensions, we cannot have this ball come off too fast. We have to limit the power because if you don't limit power, the court gets really small and the game doesn't work anymore."

Aqua isn't just for R&D. Some of the paddles get finished here. About 30 employees work various stations of the production line, adding edge guards, caps, and grips to the paddles.

This employee is finishing the popular Boomstik paddle, which Selkirk launched in the summer of 2025. It's their most premium model, retailing for $333. He's spraying it with "InfiniGrit" — a spin coating that took thousands of trials and years to develop, said Tom: "We call it that because it's gritty and it's infinite because it lasts really long."

This Boomstik is very close to being done. It just needs a grip.

The gripping station is fascinating, where employees use a machine that spins and guides the grip onto the paddle. The speed at which it spins is controlled by a pedal.

Once the paddles are gripped, they head to quality control for inspection. To pass, "it needs to look perfect," Tom told me.

The ones that don't pass — maybe they have a scratch or a chip or a scuff — are deemed "seconds" and sold as used paddles or turned into demos.

Here are the boxes of "seconds."

The lab setup is overwhelmingly impressive, but Tom isn't yet satisfied.

"Even today, with all of this, I feel like we're 5% of the way there," he told me. "Five years from now, I think our company will be insane."

I guess I'll have to return in five years to see what they've cooked up.