What It Means to Be Clean

Luis Rodríguez came home from Iraq carrying memories he did not know how to live with.

He had served there in 2003 and lost friends. The war ended for him when he returned to the United States, but depression and post-traumatic stress followed. For roughly 20 years, so did the alcohol and drugs he used to quieten them.

Then, on a cruise ship, he saw a Puerto Rican family playing a game on deck.

There was no deliberate search for a new direction. Luis was on holiday. A pickleball court happened to be nearby, people happened to be playing, and he joined them. The game demanded concentration, movement and decisions made too quickly for the mind to travel very far. He became particularly drawn to singles, the least forgiving version of pickleball and, perhaps for that reason, the one that made most sense to him.

“If I lose, it’s my fault,” he says.

There is clarity in that. No partner to blame, no confusion over who should have taken the middle and nowhere to hide from a poor decision. The court is contained, the rules are clear and the consequences belong to him. After years in which his life had been shaped by events he could not control, singles offered a small rectangle in which responsibility felt manageable.

Pickleball did not erase Iraq or perform the work of recovery on Luis’s behalf. No sport should be given that burden, and few recoveries are as orderly as the stories later told about them. What the game offered was somewhere to direct himself. It gave him people, routine, physical exertion and a reason to remain present until the next point.

Gradually, it became part of a life no longer organised around escape.

The company Luis later created with Yajaira “Yaya” carries the name Pico Clean. To most customers, it describes what the product does. To Luis, it also describes what happened to him.

The $10 Mistake

Pico Clean began with a damaged paddle.

Like many players, Luis had noticed the pale residue accumulating across its face. Every impact leaves behind tiny traces of plastic from the ball. Eventually, the marks become difficult to ignore, especially on the dark surfaces of modern carbon-fibre, graphite and Kevlar paddles.

Luis bought a $10 eraser intended to remove them. The paddle had cost about $300.

By the time he understood what was happening, the cheap solution had begun damaging the expensive object. Instead of lifting the plastic from the face, Luis says, the eraser was wearing away the surface beneath it.

He had spent years working with CEC non-slip marine decking for boat floors. He understood materials, textured surfaces and the difficulty of removing one thing without stripping away another. Where most players would have seen a ruined paddle and an irritating lesson, Luis saw a problem he might be equipped to solve.

He began experimenting with a liquid cleaner.

The formulation developed by Luis and Yaya uses natural coconut extract. Pico Clean says the compound lifts plastic residue without harming the paddle face and helps preserve the texture players rely upon to create spin. Those are the company’s claims and should be judged through use rather than accepted on the strength of the story behind them.

Luis’s response to the damaged paddle is the more interesting part. He did not throw it aside. He drew upon knowledge from another part of his working life and tried to understand what had gone wrong.

The name came naturally. Pico Clean worked for a bottle designed to clean paddles, while holding a second meaning for the person putting it on the label. Luis did not need to print his history on the packaging. It was present in the two words whether the customer knew about it or not.

A paddle cleaner is an unexpectedly modest object around which to build a story of war, addiction and recovery. Perhaps that is why it fits. Recovery is mostly lived through ordinary decisions, repeated long after anybody else would consider the dramatic part complete.

Ninety Minutes in a Garage

This is not solely Luis’s company or his story.

Yajaira, known as Yaya, comes from Cabo Rojo in south-west Puerto Rico. She discovered pickleball at Christmas in 2024, at a cousin’s house where somebody had painted a kitchen onto the floor of a double garage.

Within 90 minutes, she was hooked. Within a week, she had bought equipment.

Pickleball produces this sort of conversion everywhere. The setting is improvised, the court exists only because somebody bothered to paint the lines, and the distance between curiosity and obsession is remarkably short. Nobody waits for the arrival of proper facilities. A net is found, space is borrowed and another person is invited to try.

Yaya met Luis soon afterwards. Together, they began turning ideas into products.

Her place in the company is more substantial than that of a supportive partner standing beside a founder with a compelling personal history. She is the co-founder, and her connection to Cabo Rojo gives Pico Clean its Puerto Rican centre. Luis also operates businesses around Orlando and Kissimmee in Florida. Their work moves between the continental United States and the island, with products manufactured in the US and the company’s emerging community presence taking shape in Puerto Rico.

Cabo Rojo is more than a convenient setting for the business. It belongs to a wider pickleball culture built largely by people who started playing before much formal structure existed around them. In Hormigueros, players contributed their own money, painted six public courts and installed windbreaks before persuading the municipality that the sport was worth supporting. Communities in Ciales, Betances and Cabo Rojo have grown through a similar mixture of improvisation, persistence and volunteer labour.

Pico Clean emerged from the same habit of mind. Luis and Yaya entered the sport, noticed things they thought could work better and decided to make their own answers.

White Fury

The paddle cleaner was followed by a pickleball called the White Fury.

Luis’s sons, Jese and Jeremy, were involved in its development. The ball is made as a single rotationally moulded piece rather than two formed halves joined together, a construction Luis believes helps it retain its shape and resist cracking. Its smaller holes are intended to steady the flight in wind, while the bright white finish was selected partly for visibility during night play. Evening sessions matter in Puerto Rico, where the hours after sunset offer some relief from the heat.

Pico Clean says the ball has also found customers in Peru, where colder conditions can be difficult for some models. As with the cleaner, its performance must eventually make the case. The White Fury enters a market full of manufacturers promising better flight, visibility and durability. A persuasive origin story will not prevent a ball from cracking or make an inconsistent bounce acceptable.

The development process still says something about the family behind it. Luis did not stop with the original cleaner, and the company did not remain confined to a single useful idea. The ball brought his sons into the work. It required testing, adjustment and more questions to solve.

This is the less celebrated part of recovery. Stopping leaves time behind, and time needs somewhere to go. A sport can occupy some of it. A business demands more. Products need testing, packaging and improvement. Orders have to be fulfilled. Courts must be booked. People begin expecting an answer.

Purpose rarely arrives with the force of revelation. More often, it appears as a list of things that need doing before Friday.

A Reason to Arrive

On 22 August, Pico Clean is scheduled to hold its first tournament at the Cabo Rojo Deportivo.

The competition will have three broad skill categories, with space for 12 teams in each. Certified referees are planned for the finals. Local businesses, including Buena Vibra, Boquerón Brewery and Do Cutary, are supporting the event.

For Luis, the importance of the day extends beyond the matches or the opportunity to place products in front of players. After spending years withdrawing from his own life, he is now helping to organise an occasion around which other people will gather.

Players will enter. Businesses will contribute. Matches will be scheduled. Somebody will arrive late, somebody else will dispute a line call, and a new player may stay longer than intended because they have found people with whom they want to play again.

That movement, from isolation towards obligation, runs quietly beneath the company. Pickleball creates modest commitments with unusual speed. Somebody is waiting for the fourth player. A court has been booked for six. A partner needs an answer about Saturday. None of these responsibilities looks important from outside, but together they can give shape to a week.

Luis found the game by joining a family on a ship. Yaya found it in a garage painted to resemble a court. Neither entered through a programme designed to change a life. Somebody had made room, and they stepped into it.

The Cabo Rojo tournament extends the invitation.

Its success will be judged partly by entries, organisation and the quality of the finals. Luis and Yaya are building a business, not a charity, and the products should receive the same scrutiny as those made by companies without a moving story behind them. A paddle cleaner must clean paddles. A ball must play properly. Sympathy is not a substitute for either.

Yet the tournament also marks a change that cannot be found on a sales sheet. Luis is responsible for making something happen, in a place where others will expect him to be.

The friends he lost in Iraq remain lost. The years that followed cannot be returned. Getting clean did not make Luis untouched by what came before, and pickleball did not turn recovery into a finished event. It gave him another set of decisions to make: enter the singles tournament, test the next ball, speak to the local sponsor, arrange the referees, answer the message.

Then there is the paddle in front of him, its dark surface marked by hundreds of collisions.

A customer sees the pale residue and reaches for the bottle.

Luis knows something about what can accumulate. He also knows that removing it is careful work.

Chris Beaumont

Founder and Editor-in-Chief

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Beaumont is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of World Pickleball Magazine. Chris follows the global game closely, reporting on the latest news, developments, stories and tournaments from all five continents. He also hosts the World Pickleball Podcast, interviewing people at…

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