Nobody Chose This: The Real Story of Racquet Sports in 2026.

Nobody Chose This: The Real Story of Racquet Sports in 2026.

By Mike Knowles

Real growth pressure. Clear thinking. No fluff. For leaders navigating the racquet sports industry right now.

Here is the mid-year conclusion nobody is publishing.

Tennis, pickleball, and padel are not merging because the industry is enlightened. They are not converging because operators finally saw the light. They are not collaborating because the federations got together and decided cooperation was better than competition.

They are being forced together by economics. And they are fighting it the whole way.

That is the real story of 2026. And I have not seen a single newsletter, trade publication, or federation report say it out loud.

So here it is.

THE 2026 MID-YEAR RACQUET SPORTS REPORT

Three sports. Three honest takes. One conclusion nobody wants to say.

TENNIS: THE NUMBERS SAY GROWTH. THE BEHAVIOR SAYS SOMETHING ELSE.

The (USTA) United States Tennis Association published its 2026 Participation Report in February. The headline: 27.3 million Americans played tennis in 2025. Sixth consecutive year of growth. Since 2019, participation has increased by 54 percent.

Those are the numbers the USTA wants you to walk away with. Here is what they do not put in the headline.

Their own data tells a different story about what is happening underneath. At least 10 percent of U.S. tennis courts have already been converted or repurposed for pickleball, according to USTA estimates cited widely in industry reporting. And the USTA's internal response has been to publish advocacy guidance and coach local chapters on how to fight further court conversions - how to identify facility directors who might favor pickleball and how to protect tennis inventory before decisions are made.

An organization that is genuinely confident in its growth does not publish a battle plan.

Racket Business, a trade publication covering this industry since 2014, went further in its March 2026 issue. Publisher Rich Neher argued that tennis ball sales data - a concrete, trackable metric - suggests the real U.S. player count is closer to 15-20 million, not 27.3 million. His headline: "Bogus Surveys, Made-Up Numbers, the USTA Deception Machine is Humming." That is not a blog. That is the industry's own trade press calling out its governing body by name.

The USTA's answer to all of this: "red ball tennis" - a smaller-court, easier version of the game designed to be played on pickleball courts. A governing body following its infrastructure onto pickleball courts is not a growth story. It is a repositioning dressed up as one.

The one number that actually matters: 20.7 million of 27.3 million players were retained in 2025 - a five-year high. People who play tennis are staying. The acquisition story has questions attached to it. The retention story is solid.

Mid-year read: Tennis is not dying. But the USTA is behaving like an organization managing a threat rather than celebrating a resurgence. The internal fight over court space tells you more about the real state of the sport than the participation report does.

PICKLEBALL: THE PARTY WAS REAL. THE HANGOVER IS HERE.

The scale is legitimate and worth stating plainly.

The 2026 SFIA - Sports & Fitness Industry Association Topline Participation Report confirmed that approximately 24.3 million Americans played pickleball in 2025 - a 22.8 percent increase from 2024, extending a multi-year streak of rapid growth. Over the past three years, participation has climbed 171.8 percent, making pickleball the fastest-growing sport in the United States.

That argument is over. Pickleball is a real sport with a real player base.

Here is the argument that is just getting started.

Courtsource, which tracks more than 18,000 venues in real time, documented 76,589 pickleball courts across the U.S. as of its March 2026 State of the Courts Report. The healthy benchmark is 500 core players per court. Pickleball is running at 1,529. The five largest metros are dramatically undersupplied. The infrastructure followed the 55-plus early adopter - not the 18-to-44 growth cohort now driving the next phase.

The business model has broken down for a significant share of operators. The Dink Pickleball reported in March 2026 that first movers rushed in to secure prime locations, sign leases, and build out clubs - and that the pressure to act quickly can cripple a facility long-term. Indoor facilities carry fixed costs that demand immediate utilization. The gap between opening and sustainable cash flow has killed operators who built for demand without building for the business.

Multiple locations have closed or restructured. The build rate has already moderated - from a peak of roughly 8,000 to 10,000 new courts per year in 2023 and 2024, down to an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 in 2026. The gold rush phase is ending. The operators who win from here will be the ones who build sustainable businesses, not just fast ones.

And this: pickleball still has three competing professional leagues - Major League Pickleball (MLP), PPA Tour , Association of Pickleball Players - none of which have merged. Three leagues. Each is spending money competing against the others instead of building the sport. The organizational chaos at the top mirrors the operational chaos at the facility level. Everyone grew fast. Nobody built the infrastructure to manage it.

Mid-year read: Demand is real and durable. Execution is now the only differentiator. The operators who survive 2026 stopped measuring success by court count and started measuring it by revenue per square foot, membership retention, and programming depth.

PADEL: EARLY INNINGS. BRING YOUR PATIENCE.

I have spent the last three issues making the full case for padel in the U.S. Much of what I know comes directly from the ground — I attended the Padel World Summit in Barcelona last month as the U.S. Development Partner for the International Padel Cluster, the organization that built and runs the event. I was in the room where the global padel industry is figuring out how to get to America.

The short version of what I found: the opportunity is real, and the timeline is longer than anyone admits. The PLAYTOMIC / PwC 2026 Global Padel Report classifies the U.S. as a "Diamond in the Rough" — high long-term potential, early stage, constrained near-term. The U.S. added 250 clubs and 330 courts in 2025. That is real momentum. It is also a market still in its first chapter.

Padel commands $60 to $120 per court-hour at peak — meaningfully above pickleball's $40 to $80. The willingness to pay is there. The infrastructure is not.

And this: a significant share of U.S. padel venues are already offering pickleball alongside padel. That is not a padel story. It is the real story of 2026.

THE MID-YEAR CONCLUSION: NOBODY CHOSE THIS

Every conference panel, every LinkedIn post, and every trade publication is telling you the same thing: racquet sports are converging into one beautiful multi-sport future. Operators are building hybrid facilities. Players are crossing over. Everyone wins.

That narrative is not false. It is incomplete in a way that will cost you money if you believe it without asking the next question.

The sports are not choosing each other. They are being pushed together by financial pressure - and the institutions behind each sport are still fighting over the same ground.

Here is what is actually happening.

The USTA says a rising tide lifts all boats. Their own data shows at least 10 percent of U.S. tennis courts have already been converted or repurposed for pickleball. They published a battle plan for fighting conversions after already losing that ground.

The conflict is not abstract. In April 2026, Seattle Parks released a draft racquet sports strategy that would end 'dual striping' and dedicate each court to a single sport. Community analysis identified 36 pickleball courts at risk of not being replaced. Pickleball players organized. Tennis players pushed back. The war is not over.

Pickleball has three professional leagues that have not merged. Three. Each spending capital is competing against the others instead of building the sport.

Padel has two rival international tours still sorting out governance and commercial control.

What is happening at the facility level is not strategy. It is survival math dressed up as vision.

The RacquetX Club Business Report, published in June 2026, put the economics in plain terms. At The Club Summit at RacquetX, Scott McCulloch of Cliff Drysdale Management - one of the largest racquet operators in North America - described what their programming register actually shows: of every hundred dollars in revenue, roughly ninety is tennis. Pickleball fills the building and barely bills for it yet. Padel, on a handful of courts, can out-earn half a club's entire operation.

That is not a vision statement. That is a P&L, and it explains exactly why operators are building multi-sport facilities without anyone telling them to.

A tennis club adds pickleball because the courts sit empty on Tuesday afternoons and the membership is aging out. A pickleball operator adds padel because the margins on pickleball alone cannot carry the lease. A padel club offers pickleball because 229 venues cannot generate the programming depth needed to drive retention on their own. Not vision. Necessity.

Gilberto (Tito) Machado, CEO of DUPR, said it directly at RacquetX 2026 while describing what he sees across 1.7 million players and 12,000 clubs on the platform: operators are building multi-sport facilities, players are moving fluidly between tennis, pickleball, and padel, and the boundaries between sports are disappearing at the business level.

He is right about what is happening. He is describing the outcome. What nobody is naming is the mechanism: operators are making these decisions under pressure, without a roadmap, inside an industry where the governing bodies are still fighting over the same ground.

CourtSource framed the math directly in their March 2026 report: the single highest-ROI development in U.S. racquet sports today is a hybrid pickleball-padel facility in Miami-Dade, Houston, or San Antonio.

That is not a philosophical position. That is what the math requires.

The mid-year conclusion: Convergence is real. But convergence imposed by financial pressure, without organizational alignment, within an industry where the governing bodies are still at war, is not a strategy. It is a collection of individual survival decisions that adds up to a trend nobody actually planned.

The gap between what is happening and what operators understand about why it is happening is where the expensive mistakes get made in the second half of 2026.

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I BUILT INSIDE THE LINES FOR

The three stories in this report have one thing in common. None of them is primarily about demand. Demand is not the problem in tennis, pickleball, or padel. The players showed up. The courts are filled. The capital followed.

What broke down - in every case - was the decision-making behind the growth. Which sport to add? When to move. What lease to sign? What to stop doing. Most operators in this industry do not have a growth problem. They have a decision problem. And that is exactly what I built Inside the Lines Advisory for.

Which sport do you add - and when? How do you build multi-sport programming without destroying what already works? How do you manage a membership that came for tennis and stays for pickleball? How do you read a market where the data is contested, the governing bodies are unreliable, and the business model is still being figured out in real time?

Those are not questions you answer with a conference panel or a trade publication. They require someone who has been inside the pressure - at the operator level, at the professional coaching organization level, at the national association level - and who has a point of view built around your specific situation.

I served as CMO of the Racquet Sports Professionals Association - the nearly 100-year-old professional coaching association formerly known as the USPTA - through exactly this kind of pressure in 2024 and 2025. The USTA was moving into our territory. The coaching landscape was fragmenting across three sports simultaneously. We had to decide what the organization stood for and whom it served, under competitive fire, with 97 years of history on the line. The result: 25 percent year-over-year growth in membership renewals during the hardest stretch of that fight.

That experience is the foundation of Inside the Lines Advisory. I built this practice to help racquet sports operators do what we did at the RSPA: get clear on where the pressure is coming from, decide what to prioritize first, and execute with discipline when everything around you is still in flux.

THE OFFER

Here is something I have not done before in this newsletter.

If you take the Growth Pressure Diagnostic before July 15, I will personally review your responses and send you back a written strategic opinion - not a score, not an automated report - on where the pressure is building in your operation and what I would address first. That is what the diagnostic always delivers. But for submissions before July 15, I will also include a specific recommendation for the second half of 2026 based on which of the three stories in this report is most relevant to your situation.

Every submission gets read personally. Most turn into a conversation worth having.

Take the Growth Pressure Diagnostic: Click here. Takes about five minutes. Every submission is reviewed personally.

If you would rather start with a conversation: Book 30 minutes: Click Here

[email protected] | 205.789.4006 | mikehknowles.com

Real growth pressure. Clear thinking. No fluff.

SOURCES — ALL VERIFIED AS OF JUNE 23, 2026

TENNIS

USTA 2026 Tennis Participation Report, February 2026 https://www.usta.com/en/home/stay-current/national/tennis-participation-continues-to-surge-with-six-consecutive-yea.html

Racket Business: "Bogus Surveys, Made-Up Numbers, the USTA Deception Machine is Humming," March 2026 https://racketbusiness.com/p/bogus-surveys-made-up-numbers-the-usta-deception-machine-is-humming

PICKLEBALL

SFIA 2026 Topline Participation Report, June 2026 https://sfia.org/research/u-s-pickleball-participation/

CourtSource 2026 State of the Courts Report, March 2026 https://www.courtsource.us/2026-state-of-the-courts-report.html

The Dink: "The Pickleball Facility Boom Is Here, But a Shakeout Looms," March 2026 https://www.thedinkpickleball.com/the-3-billion-pickleball-facility-boom-is-here-but-a-shakeout-may-be-next/

Pickleball.com: "Tennis vs. Pickleball: Is the War Finally Over?" January 2026 https://pickleball.com/culture/tennis-vs-pickleball-is-the-war-finally-over

PADEL

Playtomic / PwC Strategy& Global Padel Report 2026 https://playtomic.com/global-padel-report

THE CONVERGENCE STORY

RacquetX Club Business Report, June 2026 Read full report

Seattle Parks: Draft Outdoor Racquet Sports Strategy, April 2026 https://westseattleblog.com/2026/04/where-to-play-tennis-where-to-play-pickleball-seattle-parks-asks-for-feedback-on-draft-racquet-sports-strategy/

CourtSource 2026 State of the Courts Report https://www.courtsource.us/2026-state-of-the-courts-report.html

He also serves as the U.S. Development Partner for the International Padel Cluster, the Barcelona-based global padel industry organization. He is based in the Orlando area and can be reached at [email protected] or mikehknowles.com.