For operators who have spent years, or even decades, running successful tennis clubs, the rapid emergence of padel and pickleball presents an unusually attractive opportunity. The customers already understand racket sports, much of the infrastructure looks familiar, coaching is part of the ecosystem and, superficially at least, the commercial model appears reassuringly recognisable.

Build courts. Recruit members. Employ coaches. Run programmes. Sell equipment. Organise competitions. Repeat.

The problem is that padel and pickleball are not simply smaller-court versions of tennis, and clubs that approach them as such risk missing some of the most important commercial characteristics that have made both sports grow so quickly.

The numbers alone should make operators pay attention.

In Britain, padel has moved from just 15,000 players in 2019 to one million in 2026, according to the LTA, with 1,825 courts operating across 551 venues by May 2026.

In the United States, the Sports & Fitness Industry Association estimates that 24.3 million Americans played pickleball during 2025, compared with approximately 4.2 million in 2020 — growth of 479% in five years.

Tennis itself is hardly standing still. The USTA reported a record 27.3 million US tennis players in 2025, including 14.5 million "core" players who played at least ten times during the year, while Britain recorded a record 5.8 million annual adult tennis participants.

The opportunity, therefore, is not about deciding which sport wins.

It is about understanding that three rapidly growing racket sports can require three different customer strategies.

For clubs moving into padel and pickleball, four areas deserve particular attention: acquisition, coaching, retention and incremental revenue.

1. NEW PLAYER ACQUISITION: STOP SELLING MEMBERSHIP BEFORE YOU HAVE SOLD THE EXPERIENCE

Traditional tennis clubs have historically been built around membership. Join the club, gain access to courts, enter the coaching programme, meet other members and gradually become part of the community.

That sequence does not necessarily translate to emerging racket sports.

Padel in particular is developing within a much more transactional leisure economy, where customers increasingly discover a venue digitally, book a court, invite friends and experience the product before developing any meaningful relationship with the club.

That changes the acquisition funnel.

The first objective may not be:

Prospect → member.

It may be:

Curious consumer → first booking → second booking → regular player → community participant → high-value customer.

Membership can appear somewhere within that journey, but it doesn't necessarily need to sit at the beginning.

The scale of padel's potential introductory market demonstrates why this distinction matters. LTA research published in 2025 found awareness of padel among British adults had risen to 43%, equivalent to around 23 million people, while more than eight million Britons expressed an interest in trying the sport.

For an operator, eight million people interested in trying padel is not fundamentally a membership opportunity.

It is a trial-conversion opportunity.

That should influence marketing expenditure.

Instead of focusing primarily on annual membership offers, padel clubs should be testing introductory events, beginner fours, corporate tasters, social evenings, women's introductory sessions, family sessions, university partnerships and referral incentives that allow existing players to bring new participants into the facility.

Pickleball presents a similar opportunity.

Its extraordinary US growth has been accompanied by significant demographic diversification. SFIA says women represented 42.9% of American pickleball players in 2025, while teenagers and young adults aged 13-24 recorded the highest participation rates of any age segment.

The old assumption that pickleball is primarily an older person's recreational activity is therefore increasingly dangerous from a marketing perspective.

What should clubs measure?

Not simply membership enquiries.

Operators should know:

• cost per first-time player;

• first-to-second-visit conversion;

• percentage of beginners returning within 14 and 30 days;

• acquisition source;

• referral rate;

• time from first visit to becoming a regular player;

• revenue generated during the first 90 days of a customer's relationship with the club.

That gives management a much better understanding of whether marketing is creating players rather than merely generating leads.

2. COACHING: THE TENNIS LESSON MODEL ISN'T AUTOMATICALLY THE RIGHT ANSWER

Coaching is another area where tennis thinking can easily be transferred too literally.

Tennis has developed sophisticated coaching pathways over many decades, with individual lessons, junior programmes, squads, adult courses and performance programmes all established as important components of the club business.

Padel and pickleball require coaching too, but their accessibility creates a different challenge.

People can start playing remarkably quickly.

That is one of their greatest commercial advantages.

The mistake is interpreting that accessibility as meaning coaching is less important.

It may actually mean coaching has to be packaged differently.

A new tennis player may accept that several lessons are required before they can confidently arrange their own match. A new padel or pickleball customer may expect to be playing socially almost immediately.

The coach therefore becomes more than a technical instructor.

They become a customer activation specialist.

An excellent beginner programme should teach enough technique to make somebody competent, but it should simultaneously introduce partners, explain scoring and etiquette, connect players of similar standards and ultimately make the coach unnecessary for the customer's next visit.

That last point might sound counter-intuitive for a coaching business.

Commercially, it makes considerable sense.

A player taking one coaching session every week is valuable.

A player who takes coaching and plays three additional times every week is considerably more valuable to the wider facility.

Build coaching around activation

Instead of simply reproducing the traditional private-lesson model, clubs should consider products such as:

Learn → Meet → Play

A short beginner course that ends with participants being introduced to suitable playing partners.

Coach & Play

A short instructional element followed by organised match play.

Level-Up Clinics

Sessions organised around specific skills and player ratings rather than generic intermediate coaching.

New Player Leagues

Coaching cohorts automatically graduate into a social league.

Matchmaking Sessions

Coaches act as connectors, introducing players of compatible standards.

This is particularly important because the ultimate commercial product is not coaching itself.

It is playing frequency.

3. RETENTION: YOUR BIGGEST COMPETITOR MAY BE AN EMPTY WHATSAPP GROUP

Tennis clubs have traditionally used membership itself as part of the retention mechanism. A customer pays an annual subscription and therefore has both a financial and psychological incentive to continue playing.

Pay-and-play padel and pickleball environments can be very different.

There is considerably less friction involved in stopping.

This means retention needs to be actively engineered.

Interestingly, tennis provides a useful benchmark for what a mature racket sport can achieve. The USTA's latest participation research shows that US tennis retained 80.4% of its previous-year players in 2025, with 20.7 million retained participants.

Padel and pickleball operators should be equally obsessed with their own retention numbers.

Yet one of the biggest causes of churn may have very little to do with the quality of the courts.

It is the inability to find somebody to play with.

Racket sports operators often think they sell courts.

Customers frequently experience something different: access to other people.

A beautifully constructed padel court has virtually no value to an individual customer at 7pm on Tuesday if they cannot find three suitable players.

That makes matchmaking infrastructure potentially as important as physical infrastructure.

Clubs should therefore consider organised open matches, level-based WhatsApp communities, in-app matchmaking, ladders, leagues, Americano events, social mixers and coach-led introductions as fundamental parts of their retention strategy rather than optional extras.

The objective is to create what technology companies might describe as a network effect.

Every additional compatible player makes the club more useful to every other player.

Once somebody has ten people at the club they regularly play with, their relationship is no longer simply with the facility.

It is with the community.

And communities are much harder to leave.

4. INCREMENTAL REVENUE: DON'T ONLY ASK HOW MUCH A COURT EARNS

Court utilisation will inevitably dominate the economics of padel and pickleball facilities, particularly where substantial capital has been invested in construction.

But focusing exclusively on revenue per court hour risks underestimating the value of the customer.

Consider padel.

LTA research has previously put the average British off-peak booking at approximately £27 per court per hour, or £7 per player in doubles.

The more interesting question for an operator is what happens around that £7.

Does the player arrive two minutes before the booking and leave immediately afterwards?

Or do they arrive 30 minutes earlier, buy coffee, rent or demo a racket, play for 90 minutes, stay for food, book another match, enter Saturday's tournament and bring two new players next week?

Those are fundamentally different businesses.

This is where operators should borrow ideas not only from tennis but from golf, boutique fitness, hospitality and entertainment.

The objective should be to increase revenue per customer visit without making the experience feel relentlessly monetised.

Potential revenue layers include coaching, racket rental, demo programmes, retail, restringing where appropriate, food and beverage, leagues, tournaments, corporate events, children's parties, sponsorship, branded competitions, premium matchmaking, fitness services and club merchandise.

Corporate events may be particularly interesting because both padel and pickleball have relatively low barriers to participation.

A company can bring 20 employees to a padel facility and have most of them actively participating relatively quickly. Achieving the same experience with complete tennis beginners can require considerably more coaching intervention.

That accessibility gives operators an opportunity to sell something beyond sport:

social entertainment with a racket attached.

5. THINK IN REVENUE PER PLAYER, NOT SIMPLY REVENUE PER MEMBER

There is a broader financial lesson here.

Traditional clubs frequently organise their management information around membership numbers.

Emerging racket-sports operators should consider going further.

What is the annual value of a player?

A hypothetical customer might spend:

Court bookings: £700

Coaching: £350

Food and beverage: £250

Events and competitions: £150

Retail and racket rental: £100

That player is worth £1,550 annually before considering the value of friends or colleagues they introduce.

The precise figures will obviously vary enormously by facility and market, but the principle is important.

A club with 2,000 registered players is not necessarily a healthier business than one with 1,500.

The important questions are how frequently they play, how long they remain customers and how much they spend across the entire operation.

Management dashboards therefore need to move beyond memberships and court occupancy towards metrics including revenue per active player, visits per active player, 30/90/365-day retention, ancillary spend per visit and customer lifetime value.

6. THE SOCIAL PRODUCT MAY BE MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE SPORTING PRODUCT

Perhaps the most important distinction for operators is cultural rather than financial.

Padel and pickleball have grown partly because they fit extremely well into contemporary leisure behaviour.

They are relatively easy to try, highly social and capable of delivering enjoyable competition without requiring years of technical development.

The growth figures reinforce the point.

British padel participation increased from approximately 400,000 players at the end of 2024 to 860,000 by the end of 2025 before passing one million in 2026.

US pickleball participation, meanwhile, rose from around 4.2 million in 2020 to 24.3 million in 2025, while the number of highly engaged "core" players increased from 1.4 million to 7.5 million over the same period.

Those numbers indicate something more significant than people discovering another racket sport.

They suggest consumers are responding to a particular format of participation.

That distinction matters.

A club can have excellent courts and still create a poor product if customers struggle to find matches, don't know anybody, cannot understand their playing level or have no reason to stay after their booking.

Conversely, a facility with an exceptional playing community can generate remarkable loyalty.

That means the clubhouse, café, viewing areas, tournaments, music, events, communication channels and staff introductions should not automatically be treated as secondary to the courts.

They are part of the product.

The RacketBusiness.com View: Don't Copy Tennis — Learn From It

None of this suggests tennis clubs have been getting their business models wrong.

Quite the opposite.

Tennis has accumulated decades of knowledge around coaching, competition, junior development, membership and community building, and its current participation figures show how powerful that ecosystem remains. In the United States alone, 4.9 million people played tennis for the first time during 2025 and more than 20 million players were retained from the previous year.

The lesson for clubs adding padel and pickleball is therefore not to abandon everything tennis has taught the industry.

It is to separate the principles from the products.

The principle of great coaching transfers.

The coaching product may need to change.

The principle of community transfers.

The membership model may not.

The principle of customer retention transfers.

The mechanism for achieving it may be completely different.

And the principle of maximising facility revenue certainly transfers, but the biggest opportunity may no longer be extracting more money from a membership subscription. It may be creating a customer who visits the venue four times a week for multiple reasons.

The operators most likely to succeed in the emerging multi-racket market will therefore be those who stop asking:

"How do we run padel or pickleball at our tennis club?"

A much more useful question is:

"If we were building this business around the behaviour of today's padel or pickleball player, what would we do differently?"

That small change in thinking could produce a very different club — and a considerably better business.