Nathan Flores continues to serve after over twenty-six years when his country called. Four combat tours and a body that carried the quiet evidence of those years. At forty-six, he is a father of three amazing girls one crazy boy, and grandfather to one little boy, and still the kind of man who woke up before dawn just to feel the road under his feet the way he had as an NCAA Division I runner, as a Marine, as an Army soldier chasing the next horizon.

In December 2023, his younger brother Matt dragged him to a court with two paddles and a wry grin. “Just hit the ball, old man. Try not to pull something."  One swing, and everything changed.

The crisp pop of the ball, the chess-match pace disguised as chaos, the way the game demanded patience and explosion in the same breath; it felt like coming home to a place he’d never been. Within weeks he was playing every spare hour, chasing that same runner’s high he’d known on the cross country courses and tracks decades earlier.

But something kept nagging at him. The paddles cracked too soon. The grips wore out in a month. The shirts looked sharp in photos but turned into wet cardboard the first time he broke a sweat under a Texas sun. And when he started turning the tags inside out, the story was almost always the same: made ten thousand miles away.

Nathan didn’t rant about it. He just started sketching.

Late nights and early mornings, he’d sit at the kitchen table with a legal pad and a mechanical pencil, drawing paddle faces, edge guards, grip contours; things that would hold up when a 46-year-old former grunt decided to throw his whole body into a serve, drive, or dink rally that would never end. Cesar, the Minifactory mad scientist, took those drawings and printed them into reality. Calley, at Sew Studio, gave him the fabrics that wick sweat like they were born for South Central Texas summers. He obsessed over fits that moved like athletic wear should, not like boxy souvenirs.

He leaned on the lessons the military had burned into him: attention to detail, functionality, breathability, durability, iterative improvement, never accept “good enough” when lives—or in this case, love of the game—are on the line.

A year after that first laugh with his brother on an indoor public basketball court turned pickleball court, HEX Pickleball Company came to life. He is currently on deployment and that is how Combat Pickleball was born. Not with venture capital or slick marketing agencies, but in a modest office at home in San Antonio where Nathan could build a team from the ground up and make dreams a reality.

Every paddle is born here. Every shirt is cut, sewn, and printed by small Texas shops—many of them veteran-owned, all of them within a stone’s throw of the same courts where Nathan fell in love with the game. The balls he’s developing now? Same story—designed and built by people who play every weekend and know exactly what “durability” has to mean when the temperature hits triple digits.

Combat Pickleball isn’t just a brand. It’s Nathan’s quiet promise: that the same stubborn refusal to quit as a distance runner, four deployments would show up in every stitch, every layer of carbon fiber, every swing a player takes. It is also about giving back. Coming soon, Second Serve clothing line will give 5% of proceeds to Veteran charity and the other 95% to volunteers who will provide mentorship, counseling, employment assistance, pre-retirement counseling, disability rating assistance and so much more. 

Because when a man who’s run for his country, fought for his country, and raised a family in the heart of Texas finds something that makes him feel alive again, he doesn’t do it halfway.

He builds it here.  
He builds it to last.  
And he builds it for everyone who’s ever believed the best things in life should carry the mark of the place—and the people—who gave them everything.