Players to Courts Ratio

The Quick Points

☎️ Is the APP there? NML is a leading voice in professional pickleball commentary and analysis. They echo a lot of our thoughts from a few months ago.

🍒 Cherry-picked nuggets:

• LevelUp Camps is one of the leading national instructional programs. They’ll see 5,000 participants this year across 200 camps and do at least $2.5 million in revenue.

• Pickleball is 5th most popular intramural sport after one season at the University of Arizona.

• Drew Brees Nola Pickle Fest saw 500 paying participants from over 21 states. Center court was PACKED and looked like a lot of fun between Irena, Thomas, Drew, and John McEnroe.

🍞 Make bread with Head. A quality work in pickleball full-time role with Head USA in Phoenix. They are hiring for a Promotions and Partnerships manager. It honestly sounds fun.

🗣️ Or bread with Pickleheads. Pickleheads is growing the team and looking for a pickleball content writer to focus on buyer's guides and product recommendation articles.

🤝 Partnerships Galore. Two highly visible pickleball businesses recently announced new partnerships. First, DUPR (the leading pickleball rating platform) announced a partnership with MyJourney Technologies, which provides one-on-one pickleball coaching via your phone. The two platforms seem complimentary, as conceivably those looking to raise their DUPR score will be in the market for additional instruction. Since most regions lack formalized coaching programs, and knowing who a ‘good’ coach is can be challenging, DUPR is effectively aggregating demand for coaching on their platform and bringing it to the platform aggregating the supply of coaches. Next, the PPA is partnering with Hyperice, a high-performance wellness brand. Hyperice will provide recovery products courtside and in training rooms during tour events.

What’s on our mind

🔢 New numbers. We all have heard, and continue to hear, about how the rise of pickleball may introduce $400 million in new healthcare costs. Now we have a big figure to cite around the construction of courts. Pickleheads and the Sports & Fitness Industry Association estimate in a recent report 25,000 courts have to be built at a cost of $900 million (~$35k per court) in order to achieve a healthy 500 active players-to-court ratio.

If you have a public parks and rec hat, you don’t have nearly enough courts. Your citizens will devour whatever you provide. Build, build, build. Design with proper spacing, layouts, and sound mitigation so you don’t have any regrets.

If you have a private club hat on, we say build, build, build as well. Provide value with programming, leagues, and developing a sticky local community. You don’t have to worry about oversupply at the moment.

Eatertainment concepts don’t have it so easy in our opinion. You are ultimately a F&B concept competing with other restaurants and bars. You are directly competitive with a certain type of core customer (families, corporate) with other eatertainment pickleball concepts. Be extremely mindful of where you decide to do a $2M build-out.

🧸 Hard to be a bear. We have to get this off our chest. It has become increasingly hard to find reasons why the growth of pickleball will slow. While we are personally pro-pickle, our work in the industry is rooted in analysis and research. And that would mean sharing nuanced perspectives whether it was positive or negative. Two minor headwinds for pickleball:

1. Sound mitigation: converting existing tennis courts and designing brand new facilities to exist successfully in communities.

2. Court supply: municipalities typically don’t move “fast enough” and if that continues to be the case, private clubs and courts will fill the void. Ideally, parks and recs directors understand what this welcoming, low-cost investment can do for their constituents.

We ask every sophisticated operator and investor to share their bear case and rarely do we hear answers beyond this. These feel very manageable in time. Not only do we see:

• Daily announcements of public court constructions across the country

• Weekly openings for new independent clubs

• 150+ franchises coming online in the next 2-3 years

• Increased mainstream exposure via celebrity news and tv streaming

• Dozens of industry networking events each week

• Average private club is introducing 50+ net new people per week to the sport

• Cities investing in larger scale tournament$

• The list goes on

But we also know these areas are largely untapped:

• College: club (starting to pop), intramural (coming), NCAA (midterm), team building competitions between non-racquet athletes

• Urban + young + cool: NYC, LA, SF, Dallas, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta are so early stage given court supply, cold weather, early beginner play

• Youth: a “new” fun and cheap PE activity, the year around new foursquare for elementary + summer programming

• Professional game: developing storylines + personas, increasing production value, connecting to intermediate rec player

Here we go. 🚀

Breaking Ground

The Reset tracks publicly available court construction data to better understand the locations, costs, and development priorities going into projects across the nation. Our tracker can be found here.

Featured Developments:
Seacoast Pickleball is opening an 8-court indoor fitness facility in York, ME. The facility is being built by Harry Wesson to bring residents a premiere indoor experience given the inclement weather that the region can face. We like pickleball-native focus of the facility, with covered courts, drilling courts, ball machines, stationary bikes, locker rooms, lounge areas, a pro shop, and a small cafe. It’s easy to understand the pickleball player profile that will find this attractive, and they have two main memberships, one for $125/mo that gives you unlimited access to everything, and one for $45/mo, which offers discounted hourly rates on courts, ball machines, and advanced reservations.

Another city we can get behind. The City of Wichita, KS is in the process of building the South Lakes Pickleball Complex, a 29-court public facility at an eye-watering price of $6.15M. The site plan calls for 9 indoor courts, and 20 outdoor, over the course of multiple phases, as well as areas for food trucks, seating, restrooms, and parking. They expect the first phase to be completed by February’24. The city is now in the process of running a noise study, as the complex is just north of a neighborhood, which we suspect will fight to stymie the development.

Pickleball Kingdom continues its expansion, with new franchisees opening a location in Bryan/College Station, TX. This location will be the second planned site in Texas, with the first coming on the back of five sites planned for the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. The company also plans to open adidiotnal locations across Wisconsin.

Best of the Rest:

• The City of Medina, OH converted two dilapidated tennis courts to six pickleball courts.

• The City of Wayne, NJ is building at least four new pickleball courts, for ~$605k.