Pickleball has entered a second phase focused less on grassroots growth and more on the thing that drives all sports: money.
On Tuesday morning, pickleball club owners, manufacturers, retailers and promoters will gather in a conference room outside of DallasThey will sit through panels called “The Business of Pickleball and the Opportunities That Lie Ahead” and “Driving Your Pickleball Business With Impactful Marketing and Social Media.” They will discuss all the ways to further grow a sport that appears to have no discernible ceiling.
Dundon, the billionaire owner of the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes, purchased the PPA in 2021. Back then, he says, pickleball felt like a promising mom-and-pop business. But with so many companies and investors racing to get involved, the sport is growing up fast.
What’s yet to be seen is whether the industry can sustain all the companies elbowing for market share.“When the piston cars came, there were 400 car companies in Detroit. Eventually there was four,” said Bahram Akradi, founder and chief executive of Life Time, the fitness center chain that boasts 170 locations across the United States and Canada. “When something’s hot, everybody gets into it, but they don’t understand all the aspects of the business.
Other sports have experienced bursts of popularity with varying degrees of sustainability. Carl Schmits recalls the racquetball boom in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which inspired a flood of new clubs and courts, equipment and apparel. By the mid-1980s, clubs were shuttered, converted into gyms and aerobics studios.Schmits was a racquetball pro at the time who coached and also managed racquetball clubs.
“I got roped in playing one Sunday morning, and that was the epiphany,” he said. “That was the kind of the realization that the sport has got way more legs than people think.”
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