Experts break down the science behind the new DAPS pickleball shoes
Last Edited
Jun 05 2025
Category
Gear
By now you might have read the story of how two brothers and their childhood friend created DAPS, a new high-performance brand of pickleball shoes, or seen my in-depth review breaking down my own personal experience with the sneakers.
But what do the experts have to say about the DAPS?
We recently caught up with Dr. Geoffrey Gray, who runs the Heeluxe Performance Lab, an independent research facility dedicated to testing all kinds of shoes, from high heels to hiking boots to athletic sneakers. He ran the DAPS through his full slate of testing, compared them to other pickleball and tennis shoes and shared his key findings with us this week.
We also spoke with Stuart Jenkins, the founder of Blumaka insoles, to learn more about the NonSlip insoles that come standard in the DAPS pickleball shoes and how they impact performance.
Here’s what we learned:
The little things add up to high-level performance
Dr. Gray has been testing a wide variety of shoes at the Heeluxe Performance Lab for about 15 years, and has been doing research on pickleball shoes specifically for the past 4 years. Heeluxe works with more than 150 brands every year at the footwear testing lab to help them make better shoes.
They also work individually with several professional athletes, including tennis star Gaël Monfils and pro golfer Jon Rahm.
When the DAPS team was looking to understand more about the science behind pickleball movements and how they could apply that science to making a high-performing shoe, they turned to Dr. Gray for insights.
“There’s very little, if any, published pickleball shoe research,” Dr. Gray said. “A lot of people are just treating pickleball shoes like it's a tennis shoe, but the movements and the performance and the injuries are dramatically different. So we looked at players of all ability levels to determine what they need out of a shoe. And then we work to recreate their experience in the lab setting so we know we’re testing the stuff that’s going to help them when they’re out on the court playing in the real world.”
Shop the DAPS
DESI LOW - Men's Pickleball Shoe
DESI MID - Men's Pickleball Shoe
DESI LOW - Women's Pickleball Shoe
DESI MID - Women's Pickleball Shoe
Dr. Gray said a key indicator of how successful a new prototype or sample they get in the lab is how focused the brand is on the customer.
“We’ve had people come to us and say, ‘we want to market this existing shoe for pickleball players,’ and that’s not really good enough,” Dr. Gray said. “The DAPS team really impressed me because they had a very clear understanding of who their customer was. They really wanted a high-level performance shoe that was meant for fast movement, quick reaction times and maximum power to the ground. And when you get that focused on the details, things tend to work a lot better.”
The metric where the DAPS stood out in Dr. Gray’s research the most compared to other brands in the pickleball space was in change of direction, which is tested by how quick a player can complete a change of direction and how much force they can put into the ground while executing the movement. Those two factors combine to help a player cover more distance with their first step.
“That’s where the DAPS were head and shoulders above everything else that we have tested,” Dr. Gray said. “In a lot of other categories it met or exceeded the performance of the top competitors, which is good, but it’s that change of direction where they really excelled.”
In Dr. Gray’s experience, there are two key principles in footwear performance:
1. The little things make a huge difference.
2. Everything needs to be working in harmony.
He said he wouldn’t point to one specific thing that made the DAPS stand out, but lots of small details that add up, such as the high-quality foam in the mid-sole, the rubber compound choice for the outsole, the tread pattern, the NonSlip Blumaka insoles (more on them later) and overall flexibility of the shoe.
The specific shape of the toe region was also a big difference maker, helping to ensure that the toes weren’t jamming into the front of the shoe during a change of direction, Dr. Gray said.
“It’s a combination of a lot of pieces of the shoe working in harmony,” he said.
NonSlip insoles provide grip where it counts
Stuart Jenkins, the founder of Blumaka insoles, has been a marathon runner and trail runner for decades, but found that when he was running trails his toes were jamming into the front of his shoes, resulting in bruised and black toenails. This is also a common issue among pickleball players, who are constantly sprinting up to the kitchen line and stopping quickly.
Tons of shoe research has been done to perfect rubber compounds and tread patterns to achieve the best traction possible on the bottom of athletic shoes, but when most brands bring a shoe to market, they slap a cheap fabric insole in the shoe and call it good.
If your shoes slip on the court, it’s obvious to everyone that you lose power, stability and performance. But the same is true if you’re slipping inside your shoes.
Jenkins eventually got tired of dealing with that problem, so he set out to find a solution and ultimately created the Blumaka NonSlip insoles, which have a grippy texture and keep your foot from sliding around inside the shoe.
Athletes in several multidirectional sports like football and baseball have been using the insoles for years, and DAPS is the first pickleball shoe that has made the Blumaka insoles (a $60 upgrade) standard in their shoes.
An independent study conducted by a professional sports franchise that involved more than 200 pro athletes found that the Blumaka insoles improved performance in several key metrics:
Jenkins said every single Major League Baseball team has players using the insoles, and he recently got a huge order from an NFL team as well.
“Our insoles have technology where you need it: Next to your foot,” Jenkins said. “Why would you put the worst technology in the footwear industry next to your foot – a cheap, crappy insole? We wanted to put something right next to your foot that is actually going to improve your performance, and that’s what we did with the DAPS shoe. It’s the only pickleball shoe in the world that has an insole that will improve your performance.”
And it’s not just the NonSlip technology that makes them an upgrade over most other insoles in the footwear industry. Blumaka guarantees their insole cushioning for 1,000 miles, and they can do that because they incorporate small pieces of high-quality foam (the same foam that is used in the best running shoes) in the insole.
It all adds up to increased comfort, reduced risk of injury from slipping, reduced long-term impact on joints and higher performance.
“DAPS is paying a lot more for this insole than they can pay for a cheap, lousy insole out of China that everybody else is buying and putting in their shoes,” Jenkins said. “And it’s because they made a commitment to performance with this shoe.”