What Thailand Did to Us

What Thailand Did to Us

How the Pickleball Passport is turning a sport into a way of seeing the world

By Jaron Shoptaugh | thepickleballpassport.org | @pickleball.passport

The sun hasn’t cleared the river, and the air is already warm. On a terrace overlooking the Chao Phraya in Bangkok, the nets are up, and paddles are cracking. A retired dentist from Colorado is playing doubles with a Thai university student, a business owner from Sydney, and a schoolteacher from Hua Hin. They met forty minutes ago. They’re making dinner plans.

That’s Thailand. Courts have turned up across Bangkok’s riverside neighborhoods, in Hua Hin along the coast, in Chiang Mai’s old city, on Phuket’s west side. People who’d never speak to each other at a hotel breakfast end up splitting pad kra pao at a street stall by sundown. Pickleball does that here. It turns strangers into friends faster than anything else in the country.

The Pickleball Passport was built around that idea. Nine days in Thailand. Twelve to twenty guests. Five-star hotels, Michelin meals, temples, night markets, cooking classes. Sessions and clinics hosted by the best players and coaches we could find from around the world. Players and non-players welcome. You bring the paddle. They handle everything else.

What Changes

There’s a version of Thailand most visitors see: the landmarks, the guided tours, the hotel restaurant. Then there’s the version that opens when you’ve got a host who lives there, a group that already feels like friends, and a sport that gives every day a heartbeat. You play in the morning. You explore in the afternoon. You eat together at night. And somewhere between the third dink drill and your first bowl of khao soi from a thirty-year-old shophouse in Chiang Mai, the country stops being a destination and starts feeling like yours.

Mornings are active: sessions, clinics, round-robins. Afternoons offer choices: a cooking class at a local market, a bicycle ride through seven-hundred-year-old ruins, a beachfront spa overlooking the Gulf. Evenings are where the group comes together. Michelin-recognized restaurants one night, crab fried rice on a sidewalk in Bangkok’s Chinatown at eleven the next.

Free time is built in. Not as filler. The best discoveries happen when you stop planning.

The Court and the Culture

Pickleball does something no guided tour can: it gives you a community before you’ve seen a single temple. By the time the group boards a long-tail boat for a sunset cruise through Bangkok’s canals, past stilted houses with Wat Arun lit against the sky, they aren’t strangers anymore. They’ve got inside jokes from the morning round-robin. They know who’s got the backhand and who can’t keep score.

A cooking class hits differently when the person next to you helped you win a doubles match three hours earlier. A night market isn’t just a night market when you’re walking it with people who feel like old friends. The sport creates the container. Thailand fills it.

The People Behind It

Jaron Shoptaugh and Ryan Magill are cousins, but the word doesn’t carry it. They grew up together in Colorado Springs. Hockey, wrestling, tennis, snowboarding, pickup games of whatever was in season. More brothers than cousins. When the pandemic hit in 2021, they bought a house in the Colorado mountains, rebuilt it with their own hands, and partnered with a nonprofit to turn it into a sober living home for young men in recovery. That project cracked something open. They traveled to Peru together and sat in ceremonies that changed the way they thought about fear, about purpose, about what a life could look like if you stopped building the one you were supposed to and started building the one you actually wanted.

Jaron moved to Phuket on a whim. A laptop and a one-way ticket. He lived on the island for ten months, and something in the rhythm of Thailand got under his skin in a way nowhere else had. The water, the pace, the way strangers became friends over a shared plate of som tum. He found pickleball during early morning sessions, trained seriously, reached a 4.99 DUPR rating, and medaled on the APP Tour. He found a home court through Arise Pickleball, which was growing the local scene and gave him a community he didn’t know he was looking for.

Ryan saw the change. When Jaron called from Bangkok and said he’d found something worth building, Ryan didn’t need to hear the pitch twice. He left his career, came to Thailand, and the cousins who’d rebuilt a house in Colorado decided to build something else entirely.

The thing that kept happening: visiting players would show up to courts not knowing anyone, carrying that particular nervousness of being alone in a country where you can’t read the street signs. Then they’d step on a court and twenty minutes later they had a group, dinner plans, someone telling them which stall to hit and which temple was worth the ride.

“Pickleball did that,” Jaron said. “The sport was the bridge.”

The travelers who had someone to guide them through the noise had a completely different trip than the ones piecing it together from a hotel lobby. That gap is what The Pickleball Passport was built to close.

The Moments That Stay

Jaron talks about the first time he played on outdoor courts in Chiang Mai at dawn. Mist over the mountains, paddle strikes, birdsong, and nothing else. He talks about sitting riverside in Bangkok after a session, realizing how far he’d come from where he started and how far this thing could go if he let it.

“I’d done Vipassana retreats, sat in ceremony in Peru, lived in Saudi Arabia as a kid,” he said. “I’d traveled enough to know the world opens up when you stop trying to control how it unfolds. Thailand was where I finally stopped gripping the wheel.”

The first departures launch in July 2026. Every trip opens in Bangkok and branches to Hua Hin, Chiang Mai, or Phuket depending on the season. Thailand is the foundation. It’s where two cousins who rebuilt a house in Colorado discovered that the same instinct could work on the other side of the world.

“Ryan and I found our people,” Jaron said. “We found our community. And every time I watch someone step off a plane in Bangkok looking a little lost and then see them three days later moving through the city as if they own it. That’s the whole thing. That’s what we built this for.”

The best things Jaron and Ryan ever did started with letting go of the plan. Yours might too. Sometimes it starts with a paddle and a one-way ticket.

Come play the world with us. thepickleballpassport.org