The Bulldog

This shoe is called the Bulldog:

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The company behind this shoe, BDOG Sport, was founded by two squash players. This is the same group that was behind the BIA Force X I posted previously.

I was recently sent a pair of the Bulldogs to review and put together the video review below. There’s also a transcript underneath.

Hey guys I got a review today of these shoes that are called “The Bulldog”. Overall I really liked these shoes and I’m going to tell you why in this video.

Just a bit of background about the shoes, the company behind these was started by two experienced squash professionals one of whom is Nathan Dugan. Here he is winning Nationals. I came in third that was pretty cool but Nathan kicked my butt.

Anyway the story behind this company is that Nathan and his partner as former touring pros had always been in search of the perfect squash shoe for their playing days and they just could never find something that really fit the bill perfectly for them. Since then they’ve also run squash pro shops in North America and have always been unable to really find shoes that they felt most comfortable recommending to their customers.

So for their own playing days and for what they recommend to others they kind of never found the perfect shoe. And what they did was they decided to make their own. So they went out to China to the factory and they sat there in the room and looked at all 11 trillion possible combinations of how a shoe could be built. And they picked the ideal things that they wanted for their own purposes and for their own customers and this is what they created.

I’ve been playing with these shoes for a few weeks now and overall I really liked them. I’m going to tell you a few things that I like. Number one: the grip is excellent. No slippage issues from day one. To me that’s the most important thing. I liked that the shoe has a low, flat profile. That’s my personal preference. I don’t like to have a whole ton of gap here in the arch. There is some gap here to allow your foot to flex a little bit, but for the most part you just feel solid contact with the court as you’re playing.

Another thing that’s nice about the issues is they have very good lateral stability. The shoe kind of extends out the side a little bit with some support. It makes it really easy to push off side to side on court.

The insole that comes with these shoes is excellent. First of all it’s removable if you need to but this is one of the best out of the box insoles that I’ve ever seen. It’s very cushioned and it feels really comfortable on my feet. I was concerned when I saw the shoes that the sole would be too stiff because this reminds me a lot of the sole of Eye squash shoes which I found to be very hard on my feet, but this didn’t feel that way and I put a lot of that down to the quality of the insole that comes with it.

The company behind these shoes is called B-Dog Sport and their tagline is “Performance straight out of the box” which I found to be pretty spot on accurate description of how these worked out for me.

There was almost no break in time for these shoes and I was able to play high level matches in these shoes without any hesitation virtually right away.

Size-wise I went with a US 11.5. That’s my normal size. It took me a minute to decide on the sizing. At first they felt a little small but over time I decided my regular size was the way to go.

A feature of the shoes that I didn’t necessarily use but you may find interesting is a little hard to see on camera but the laces are very thick and the eyelets are…they have friction, essentially, which allows you to tighten up different parts of the lacing without cinching the entire shoe all at once. It allows you to kind of fiddle with where you tighten the shoe, whether you like it more tight up top by the toe or more by your ankle and so on it gives you some flexibility which is pretty cool.

I’ll mention a couple minor complaints that I have the lacing system that I just mentioned at first I got my laces in like a horrible tangle because of the friction that I mentioned like I wasn’t really prepared for it like after the first time I used them I had this knot that took me 20 minutes to untie. So just don’t get yourself in that situation. Respect the lacing.

The other thing was this material here in the tongue is kind of just like a faux leather. It’s pretty interesting. I’ve never really seen that on a shoe before. It gives it a nice touch, but I sometimes had a little bit of bunching as I laced up the shoe. This part of the tongue would kind of just squeeze in on me. It was not a big deal but that’s just something that I had to get right when I’m lacing up my shoes.

The other thing is that this color scheme is very distinctive and I don’t have a whole lot of lime green in my arsenal. The cool thing about this or at least from the company’s standpoint is every time I’ve put these on my feet, someone was like, “What are those?” They’re very remarkable the color scheme, but I just need something that matches my outfit a little more. This is the only color scheme they currently come in. Luckily they did send me this headband so that I have something that matches the shoes.

The Bulldogs are $130 in the U.S. That’s a relatively high price point but I think that there’s relative high quality of the shoes to match the price.

I’m going to probably review these in the future on the pickleball courts as well. I know that they’re going after that market to some extent too, although I’m a little reluctant to bring them out there because I liked them well enough that I want them to stay clean for the squash court. So we’ll see. Make sure you subscribe If you want to catch future reviews of these and other shoes. Thanks