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The Dink Awards: A Niche People’s Choice Made the Industry Co-Promote

The Story

In January 2022, Shields launched The Dink Awards, framing them as “the People’s Choice Awards for pickleball” (Source 1).

“This was brilliant, because you can get all of the people nominated to share so they can win the award” (Source 1).

He partnered with the top organizations in the space: “PPA – Professional Pickleball Association, Major League Pickleball, APP – American Pickleball, USA Pickleball, Selkirk – a top pickleball equipment manufacturer, PicklePlay – a top pickleball app in the space” (Source 1).

“These outlets then shared it on their social media as well” (Source 1).

Major League Pickleball — one of the partner organizations — won Event of the Year in the inaugural Dink Awards and published a press release about it on January 6, 2022. MLP spokesperson Brooks Wiley said: “It’s a real honor for everyone involved in MLP Season One to have fans vote for our first-ever event as The Dink’s Event Of The Year. A lot of people worked incredibly hard to make the event happen, but at the heart of it are the players” (Source 2).

Other inaugural winners included Anna Leigh Waters (Women’s Player of the Year and Women’s Most Improved Player), Ben Johns (Men’s Player of the Year), and Lee Whitwell (Best Reactions of the Year) (Source 2).

The Dink got mainstream press too: “They put out a press release when it went live, which got them media coverage like Yahoo Finance” (Source 1). And on the subscriber side: “you did get a little nudge to subscribe to be able to see the winners” (Source 1).

By 2023, Shields had run it two years in a row (Source 1).

Lesson for Creators

A media brand can manufacture industry-wide gravity by creating the awards the industry secretly wants but no one else has bothered to authorize. The Dink Awards worked because of three asymmetries: (1) nominees have a strong incentive to mobilize their own followings to vote, doing distribution for free; (2) winning organizations like MLP issue press releases about the award, distributing it through their channels with their authority attached; (3) the host (The Dink) becomes the de facto judge of “who matters” in the space, which is itself a recurring authority claim. The mechanism scales without requiring scale: even with 50,000 subscribers, an awards program can pull in promotion from organizations with hundreds of thousands of followers each, because winning is valuable to them. Pick a niche where no canonical awards exist, invite the gatekeepers to be partners, and the rest is mostly press-release plumbing.

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