Pickleball — sport's continued explosive growth, October 2025
So like, the thing about pickleball that nobody who writes about pickleball actually wants to engage with is that it's a real estate story before it's a sport story — the whole reason you've heard of it, the whole reason it has the cultural footprint it has rather than being one more retiree hobby alongside mahjong and pinochle, is that it solved a specific problem for a specific class of property owner at a specific moment, namely: what do you do with all this fucking tennis infrastructure.
Because here's what happened. Tennis participation in America peaked in the late 70s/early 80s (the Borg/McEnroe moment, the wooden-racket-to-graphite transition, all of it) and then declined more or less continuously for thirty-plus years, but the courts didn't go anywhere. The courts are capital improvements, they're on the books, they're part of the amenity package the HOA sold the units on, the country club's dues structure assumes them, the municipal parks budget allocated for them in 1978 and the line item never got removed. So you've got this enormous installed base of tennis courts in America — public, private, semi-private, the whole spectrum — built for a participation level that no longer exists, sitting there racking up maintenance costs and producing no revenue, and the sport that was supposed to use them has been bleeding players to golf and (briefly) to running and (more durably) to literally just sitting indoors.
And then somebody figures out — and this part is genuinely beautiful, in a depressing way — that you can stripe four pickleball courts inside the footprint of one tennis court. Four. The conversion costs almost nothing (paint and a portable net), the new sport is dramatically easier to pick up (the underhand serve, the small court, the fact that anyone with intact knees can play passable pickleball within an hour where tennis takes years to be non-humiliating), and crucially the demographic that already owns property adjacent to tennis courts — suburban, aging, time-rich, looking for low-impact social exercise — is precisely the demographic for whom pickleball was designed. The sport is a key cut to fit a lock that was already there.
So the explosion you've been reading about for five years now isn't an organic cultural movement so much as the resolution of a long-deferred capital allocation problem — what do we do with the tennis courts — meeting a long-deferred social problem — what do retired Boomers do with their afternoons now that the kids are gone and the golf course is six hours and seventy bucks. The HOAs were going to do something with the tennis infrastructure regardless. Pickleball was the path of least resistance.
Which is why, by the way, the lawsuits — and there are a lot of them now, this is a real legal subgenre — are mostly about noise. Pickleball makes a distinctive percussive pock sound that the suburban built environment was not engineered to absorb (tennis is much quieter, the felt ball, the longer rallies), and the courts get built right up against the property lines because they were already there as tennis courts and nobody thought about the acoustic profile when they restriped. People are losing their minds in Naples and Scottsdale and the inner-ring suburbs of basically every metro because the amenity that was sold to them as "courts, beautifully maintained" has become "courts, beautifully maintained, in continuous use from 7 AM to dusk by people who could not possibly care less about your home office's Zoom calls."
And the manufacturer story is its own thing — the paddles cost forty bucks to make and sell for two hundred, the carbon-fiber paddle market has the same profit margin structure as golf clubs which is to say criminal, the pro tour situation is its own consolidation story with the PPA absorbing the MLP — but that's a different essay. The real story is that you're watching the fungibility of recreational real estate get arbitraged in real time, and the question worth asking is what happens to all this pickleball capacity in 2040 when the demographic wave that drove the conversion ages out of being able to physically play, because you can't easily stripe a pickleball court back into a tennis court (the surface degrades differently, the lines confuse everyone), and you definitely can't stripe it into anything else productive, so what you've actually built is a one-generation amenity that's going to sit empty across an enormous geography, racking up the same maintenance costs the tennis courts did, while the next demographic cohort — which is going to want something we can't predict yet, because nobody in 1995 predicted pickleball — looks at all this striped concrete and thinks, well, what the fuck do we do with this.
jbbartram-illu
jacobvanloon
prguitarman
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