Eagle entrepreneur gives pickleball an eco-friendly spin
- Nina Barbero
- School of Entrepreneurship
- Contributors: James Greco & Hannah Smith, Photos
6 – minute read
The first time Dillon Rosenthal saw a business opportunity and acted on it, he was so young that he still had some of his baby teeth.
“The fidget spinner craze was a huge thing, and no one could afford them,” he says. “I ripped apart my skateboard, took the bearings out of it and grabbed my sister’s hot glue gun and a pack of marbles.”
The next day, Rosenthal sold three homemade fidget spinners for $5 each to his middle school classmates. He made more that night, sold them and eventually started buying the products in bulk to resell at school — until he was forced to stop his on-campus commercial enterprise.
“The school banned me from selling stuff,” he says with a laugh.
Nevertheless, an entrepreneur was born — one who would find his way to the Daveler & Kauanui School of Entrepreneurship at Florida Gulf Coast University. When Rosenthal graduates in May, he’ll have more than a bachelor’s degree in entrepreneurship to show for his time here. He expects BounceBack Pickle, a company he founded in early 2025 with support from the school, to start earning revenue by the summer.
Turning trash into treasure
BounceBack Pickle collects old and damaged pickleballs for recycling into good-as-new ones — literally giving them their bounce back.
The award-winning idea sprang from weekly pickleball sessions between Rosenthal and his friend Grant Twible, who graduated in December with a marketing degree. They lobbed and dinked the bright yellow balls until the balls lost their bounce. Twible suggested the battered plastic could be turned into new pickleballs, and that as an entrepreneurship major, Rosenthal should look into it.
“The more research I did, the more viable this thing seemed,” Rosenthal says. “Fast forward a few months, we’ve collected over 1,000 pounds of balls.”
According to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association’s Topline Participation Report, pickleball was the fastest growing sport in the U.S. in 2025 — for the fourth consecutive year. Rosenthal’s research showed 500 million pickleballs are manufactured every year, generating more than 770,000 pounds of plastic waste annually.
Depending on playing frequency, court surface and product quality, pickleballs can last just three to five games. Cracked and dented, they end up in the trash — a sustainability problem BounceBack Pickle aims to solve.
Participating in Azul’s Innovation Challenge, a business pitch competition launched last year at FGCU, pushed Rosenthal to map out a business plan for his innovative idea. He won the competition and $15,000 in prize money.
“That was extreme validation for me,” he says. “I just kept going at it, and the school kept supporting me and sending me to different pitch competitions.”
Rosenthal has completed FGCU’s Runway Program for entrepreneurs and pitched in the Florida Venture Forum in Orlando. Most recently, he placed third in the Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization’s Global Conference & Pitch Competition last November in Tampa. In total, he’s won $27,000 to keep working on his business.
Mentors make a difference
As of January, BounceBack Pickle is collecting used balls at 100 public parks, country clubs and pickleball stores mainly in Florida and as far away as California. The pickleballs will be pulverized and the plastic shipped to China to be molded into new ones. Rosenthal expects that after one more prototype round, he’ll be able to sell the remade product — and get 4,000 used pickleballs out of his garage and back in play.
“Our plans are to bring the manufacturing to the U.S. as soon as we have that high-quality ball that we’re ready to go to market with,” Rosenthal says. His research showed there aren’t any U.S.-based manufacturers for outdoor pickleballs yet, but the machinery is available to be purchased from China.
Dealing with international business concerns represents a big leap from BounceBack’s beginnings. Looking back on its first year, Rosenthal credits FGCU faculty with helping him develop his ideas into action.
“Most of them are successful entrepreneurs, and they just want to be there to help us out and mentor those that have real ideas or real plans,” he says.
He also meets regularly with Ken Goldman, a mentor with the Service Corps of Retired Executives, who calls Rosenthal “a natural” at entrepreneurship.
“FGCU is a hidden gem,” says the former C-suite executive. “The school has done a wonderful job to provide the tools for entrepreneurs who have that willingness to defy gravity and that ability to find white space.”
Mentors who share their experiences with students help “shortcut” the business learning curve, Goldman says. “No matter how good you are in business, no matter how smart you are, there are things you don’t know because you can only learn over time.”
A decade after his first foray into entrepreneurship, Rosenthal is excited to continue developing BounceBack Pickle after graduation.
“This is what I wanted to do, and now I’m on track to be able to do it. It’s a good feeling. I’m not there yet, but it’s a good feeling so far.”
• The final pitch event for this spring’s Azul’s Innovation Challenge is scheduled for March 25.