Pickleball has been a part of Taylor Jarvis’ life for more than a decade.

Jarvis, 18, grew up playing the sport with his family. The former Severna Park teen turned to the sport even more during the COVID pandemic, playing on local courts in Anne Arundel County. A requirement that players bring their own pickleball nets to play, however, served as a catalyst for a passion project that has dominated the last few years of Jarvis’ life.

“It didn’t take long before we got frustrated with existing nets and decided to create our own,” he said.

Jarvis and his dad began tinkering with recycled metal parts in their garage, and after testing multiple designs, the father-son duo came up with the Shockwave Speed Net, a portable, extendable regulation pickleball net that reduces setup time from 10 minutes to one. A patent is pending for the design, which will be sold by Jarvis’ company, Menace Pickleball.

The design process didn’t come without challenges, though. The duo struggled to make the frame stable enough to withstand tension and dealt with prohibitive production costs. A factory told Jarvis that it would cost $4,000 to create one injection mold, a mold used to create the frame, but the teen was able to 3D print his own molds with resin, lowering the cost to $25 per mold and saving more than $16,000 when starting out.

Jarvis shares his success with his dad.

“Our dynamic as partners allows us to hit ideas off of each other but also have different viewpoints, different ideas,” he said. “And ultimately, when we have disagreements … it leads us to a better solution.”

The four-part, 25-pound net, which has wheels and unfolds with a scissor mechanism, is simple to assemble: players snap both feet of the net to the frame, extend it across the length of the court and place it down.

The lower number of components makes setting up fast, too — Jarvis says he can do it in 58 seconds. The speed is something that has pleasantly surprised supporters. The net’s suggested retail price is $299.

“When we say that it sets up quick, we mean it,” he said. “It really is way faster than any normal net.”

The teen also credits his engineering and entrepreneurship classes at Severna Park High School for setting him up for success. His entrepreneurship teacher, Heather Barnstead, was one of his “number one supporters.”

“Just the people around me being supportive of the creative nature and the desire to be an entrepreneur was really helpful, and their ability to kind of cultivate that and help it grow into what it’s been,” he said.

To help with investment and production costs, Jarvis, who now lives in Utah, set out to raise $10,000 on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform that brings projects like this to reality.

By Thursday evening, three days after the Kickstarter launched, more than $56,000 had been pledged by nearly 300 supporters preordering nets.

Following a factory visit this month, manufacturing is expected to begin in September and delivery is set for the end of October.

Jarvis is “beyond excited” to see people rallying around him.

“We’ve been working on this for two years with nothing coming out of it, so to see this is really encouraging, especially being a young entrepreneur,” he said. “It just gives me lots of excitement for the future of Shockwave, and also just for the future of designing more products and releasing them to the world.”