By Neil Turitz
Photographs by Abigail Fenton

Keith Goldberg never set out to make shoes. The Miami native was a filmmaker and had found some success as a documentarian. His 2010 film “Boys of Summer,” about Curaçao’s Little League program, aired on ESPN (and can now be seen on Pluto TV), and he worked regularly in the travel and event space. Someone would hire him and, at a moment’s notice, he might have to fly halfway around the world for two months to film something.

But after he and his wife, Lucy, moved from New York City to Montreal for her career in 2017, work dried up for him. He loved living in Montreal, but wasn’t working, and the couple realized they needed to be closer to New York. After first looking for a place in the Hudson Valley, they ventured east to the Berkshires, where they fell in love with a house in Richmond and bought it two days before the world shut down in March of 2020.

“Four months later,” Goldberg recalls, “our realtor asked if we’d sell it and make a 30% profit on it.”

They decided to stay, and with COVID keeping people at home, Goldberg’s work prospects remained dismal. He had suffered from depression in the past, and found himself descending into a new funk when he and Lucy took a trip to Los Angeles. Though he didn’t know it at the time, it was a trip that would change his life.

“We were in Venice,” Goldberg recalls, “and I saw a friend who looked great. I asked him, ‘Dude, are you hitting the gym all the time?’ He said no, ‘All I do is play pickleball.’ I started playing a little bit, too, and that’s when the light bulb went off.”

Goldberg had been talking to his best friend, Rich Goldstein, and Rich’s older brother, Dave, about working together. The Goldsteins were fourth-generation shoe guys who specialized in private labels for department stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Macy’s. “In their career, they manufactured millions of pairs of shoes,” Goldberg says. “Not performance shoes, but they had the chops, and it was in their blood. So while I was in Venice, I texted the guys and said, ‘Dude. Pickleball! Let’s do a pickleball shoe.’”

The Goldsteins were initially reluctant, as it was out of their comfort zone, but then they read the tea leaves and that tipped it for them.

“Everybody was doing the same thing,” Goldberg says. “They were just making tennis shoes and rebranding them as pickleball shoes. We read about all these injuries, so we talked to tons of players and podiatrists, and it felt like a lot of these injuries were due to fatigue, or jumping in full bore without doing the prep work, which also leads to missteps.”

The trick was to create a shoe that would maximize energy return, offering a sort of trampoline effect, to minimize the chance of injury. There was also the design.

“We wanted to eventually become the lifestyle shoe for the pickleball crowd,” Goldberg says, “but lifestyle that performs, so the design had to be important. We wanted to pay tribute to some of the classic shoe designs, like Air Jordans and Stan Smiths—evergreen shoes that looked just as good with jeans as on the court.”

While the Goldsteins live in their native South Florida, Goldberg has planted roots in the Berkshires. He loves the region’s natural beauty and, as a Florida native, “I never had seasons growing up, and I love having them now. Our first fall here really did it for me.”

So when it came to testing the shoe, Goldberg stayed local, turning to Tyler Besse, the racquet sports and simulator manager at Bousquet Sport in Pittsfield. Goldberg walked into the club, introduced himself, and asked if Besse was game to try out the new shoe. “I loved the shoes instantly,” Besse recalls. “I got compliments from people right away asking, ‘What are those shoes you have on?’”

Besse made some recommendations, like the addition of a small rubber strip on the outer instep to prevent the shoe’s leather from ripping but, more than anything, he was impressed. “The biggest thing to me is the way the shoe grips your foot,” he notes. “If I put on another shoe, I can feel my toe actually going forward and hitting the front. I wore the same Adidas shoes for five years, and I didn’t notice that that was a thing that happened until I put them back on after wearing these for such a long time. So now, even with the other sports I play, I wear DAPS for all of them.”

That grip on the wearer’s foot is the shoe’s secret weapon. You’re actually slipping around inside of most shoes. Goldberg and the Goldsteins knew what would set their shoe apart would be that it wouldn’t allow that slippage to happen.

“They say this is a game of inches,” Goldberg explains. “So every time you take a step and you’re moving, your foot’s moving a millimeter. That means you’re stopping a millimeter slower. Those millimeters add up. After 26 steps, that’s an inch, so that’s where you get your inches back.”

The shoe’s price is on the high side, starting at $150 (for comparison, Asics has a pickleball shoe for $85, and K-Swiss’ shoe goes for $115), but that’s because DAPS has a $60 insole, sharper treads, and a performance-based rubber sole that’s softer than the standard tennis shoe. Goldberg likes to compare DAPS to a sports car. “You’re not putting all-weather tires on a Porsche, you’re putting performance tires on a Porsche,” he explains. “They don’t last nearly as long, so certain types of players might burn through our shoes a little bit quicker, but what they’re going to gain in performance is just remarkable.”

Lucy Goldberg, who works for the Bloomberg Network, is not part of the DAPS team, but does provide her husband “emotional support.” She was also willing to take on the role of sole breadwinner for the family as Goldberg and the Goldsteins developed the shoe.

After two years of development, DAPS launched in June of 2025, and with its exponential growth, her faith has been well founded. The DAPS team is taking meetings with potential investors who want to help grow the brand, while strategizing internally about the most organic ways to get there. Goldberg won’t talk on the record about what DAPS stands for, but he will acknowledge with a laugh that Rich Goldstein said on a Los Angeles radio show that it’s an acronym for “dope ass pickleball shoes.”

“I was like, dude, we want to maintain an air of mystery behind the name!” he says jokingly, but the mystique is far less important than how people are responding to the shoe. Testing against established brands like K-Swiss and Asics at the renowned Heeluxe footwear lab in California, DAPS won every single dynamic performance metric. Pros have begun wearing them and are winning tournaments with DAPS on their feet, and Goldberg has even been recognized at airports in his DAPS gear.

“There’s a lot of people in these parts who still think of me as a filmmaker,” he says. “Now, if I met you at an airport, I’d probably tell you, ‘Yeah, I’m a shoemaker,’ and I feel pretty good about that.”