Hello dear readers, friends, and racket sports enthusiasts.

Drag queens, US Open ticket prices, artificial intelligence, music festivals, mixed doubles, CrossFit, airport padel courts and the uncomfortable possibility that the racket sports equipment industry might be selling players the wrong things.

Yes, it must be another issue of Racket Business!

September’s edition arrives at a fascinating moment for our industry. Tennis participation is booming, padel continues its extraordinary international expansion and pickleball is rapidly building the commercial infrastructure of a more mature sport. But growth inevitably creates new questions — and this month we have tried to ask plenty of them.

We look at whether tennis risks pricing out the very fans who have helped make the sport hotter than ever, why racket sports tournaments could learn from the music festival industry, whether the junior tennis pathway has become too obsessed with producing professional players and why the strategies that have traditionally worked for tennis clubs cannot simply be copied and pasted into padel and pickleball.

There is plenty to challenge conventional industry thinking too. New data from Perfect Racket raises some intriguing questions about what recreational players actually want from their equipment, Rod Heckelman considers what happens when AI starts removing trial, error, success and failure from the sporting experience, while OnCourtAI's Gareth Shaw uses real player data to tackle an increasingly important question: does video analysis actually help tennis players improve?

Our padel coverage goes particularly deep this month. We examine why retention rather than participation could become the sport's next great challenge, assess what Premier Padel's London P1 told us about padel as a spectator product, look at Padel Nuestro's move into Manchester, report on the ambitions of Clash of the Coaches and explore one of padel's smartest growth strategies — its willingness to escape traditional sports clubs and appear everywhere from airports and shopping centres to car parks, churches and even floating barges.

There are important lessons from inside clubs as well. We investigate how East Gloucester's investment in padel has actually helped grow squash, explore the future of club management with CourtReserve, consider who should really have a seat at the racket sports leadership table and ask whether mixed doubles might be one of the greatest commercial advantages our industry possesses.

Over in pickleball, we look beyond the headline of JOOLA becoming DUPR's official ball to examine what the partnership tells us about the growing relationship between ratings, competition and equipment, while our regular coverage brings together more developments from across the rapidly evolving pickleball landscape.

Retail, facilities and the wider business of racket sports aren't neglected either. Li Feng examines what retailers need to understand about the modern female player, we explore revenue per court hour, smart technology and facility management, and David Pyrzenski continues his fascinating Building in Public series with the realities of creating a two-sided racket sports community.

We also profile Emma Wells and her new book GRIT, asking what it really takes to build and lead a business in this industry, before Andy Whipp ventures into dangerous territory by questioning whether CrossFit's "Fittest on Earth" can really be considered fitter than the world's best racket sports athletes.

And that's before you reach our regular industry news, technology coverage, multimedia recommendations and updates from across tennis, padel and pickleball.

As ever, the objective isn't simply to tell you what is happening in racket sports. There are already plenty of places to find headlines.

We want Racket Business to explore why it is happening, what it means commercially and what the people running clubs, coaching programmes, brands, retailers, facilities, events and governing bodies can learn from it.

There is a lot to get through this month.

If you have insights, ideas, or industry experience to share, we invite you to contribute to RacketBusiness — because the conversations that shape our sport start with voices like yours. 👉 Write for RacketBusiness

See you courtside,

Rich & Tim (Learn more about us)

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From inside the lines…

An exclusive series of short features, only available to newsletter subscribers, from the owner’s of Racket Business. This month…

Three Sports, One Voice? There is a curious contradiction developing in racket sports.

Tennis, padel and pickleball are increasingly sharing players, clubs, coaches and investment. So why are the people running them still largely talking in separate rooms?

At club level, the boundaries between tennis, padel and pickleball are becoming increasingly blurred. A player may move between all three. A coach may teach two of them. A club may offer all three. A software supplier, court builder or equipment brand may serve all three. Yet administratively, the sports still largely behave as separate worlds. That made perfect sense when tennis dominated the landscape and padel and pickleball occupied relatively small niches. It makes less sense now.

The more interesting question is not whether the sports should merge. They should not. It is whether they would all benefit from creating a permanent cross-sport leadership group with one narrow purpose: ‘To identify the areas where tennis, padel and pickleball are stronger together than apart.’

That could prove particularly valuable as all three chase the same scarce resources: court space, planning approval, coaches, school access, public funding and consumer attention. The customer has already moved on

The biggest reason for considering greater cooperation is that the customer increasingly does not behave in the tidy way governing structures suggest.

Research cited by the USTA has indicated crossover rates of around 40% between tennis and pickleball at successful multi-racket facilities, while separate provider research has suggested 30% to 40% of pickleball players entering facilities subsequently began playing tennis. That is significant.

It suggests the assumption that every new pickleball player represents a lost tennis player may be fundamentally flawed. The same principle is now applying to padel. The modern customer may simply be a racket sports player. That creates a very different commercial challenge for clubs.

A facility offering tennis, padel and pickleball is no longer necessarily managing three independent sports. It is managing a portfolio of activities competing for the same customer's time and money.

The smartest clubs increasingly understand this. Administration may need to catch up. The argument becomes stronger when money is involved

Imagine a local authority considering investment in new sporting infrastructure. Three separate groups arrive. One asks for tennis courts. Another asks for pickleball courts. Another asks for padel courts. Each presents its own participation statistics and argues for its own share of the available budget. Now imagine they arrive together. The pitch becomes:

"Your community needs better racket sports facilities."

That is a much stronger message. It allows the discussion to focus on participation, health, utilisation, accessibility and community value rather than which particular code deserves the money. The same principle applies to planning.

Padel operators around the world are discovering that acquiring sites and achieving planning approval can be one of the biggest barriers to expansion. Pickleball continues to face battles over court access in some markets. Tennis has spent decades lobbying for the protection and refurbishment of public courts. These are different manifestations of the same problem. Why solve them three times? Britain has already gone part of the way. There is also precedent.

When the LTA formally incorporated padel into its operations, it made a very deliberate choice not to treat the sport purely as a competitive threat to tennis. Instead, the organisation has repeatedly talked about tennis and padel complementing one another. That strategy has coincided with explosive padel growth. By 2025, the LTA estimated that around 860,000 people were playing padel in Britain, with approximately 1,600 courts operating across the country.

Whether every tennis administrator has welcomed padel's rise quite so enthusiastically is another question. But strategically, the principle is interesting.

A major tennis organisation effectively concluded that helping another racket sport grow could strengthen the overall ecosystem. That idea deserves much wider examination. Rugby shows why separation still matters There are obvious reasons to be cautious.

Rugby union and rugby league are perhaps the clearest reminder that closely related sports do not necessarily need shared administration.

They have common ancestry, similar facilities and occasionally overlapping players, yet separate governance has allowed both sports to develop their own cultures, rules and commercial identities. That independence matters.

Padel should not simply become an offshoot of tennis. Pickleball should not be governed according to tennis priorities. Both sports have grown partly because they have challenged traditional assumptions about how racket sports should look, feel and operate. Put everything under one administrative umbrella and there is a real danger that the biggest and oldest sport dominates. That would be a mistake. So do not create another governing body

The answer is almost certainly not a new super-federation. The last thing sport needs is more bureaucracy. Instead, imagine a small Racket Sports Council.

• No control over rules.

• No rankings.

• No professional tours.

• No national teams.

Just a permanent forum involving representatives from tennis, padel and pickleball alongside club operators, coaches, facility developers and commercial partners. Its remit could be deliberately narrow:

• Facility development and planning

• Government and municipal lobbying

• Participation research

• Coach workforce development

• School and community access

• Safeguarding

• Technology and data

• Sustainability

• Sharing best practice between multi-racket venues

None of those areas require the sports to sacrifice their identities. They simply require people to talk to one another. Clubs should have a major seat at the table. There is another important point. If such a committee ever existed, it should not be dominated by governing bodies. Club operators should have significant representation. They are already conducting the real-world experiment. They know whether padel cannibalises tennis or feeds it. They know whether pickleball attracts new demographics. They know whether players migrate between sports. They know which coaching programmes work and which courts generate the best return. Most importantly, they understand something administrators sometimes forget.

The customer does not care about organisational charts. They care whether they can book a court, find someone to play with and have a good experience. The commercial world has already combined the sports. Perhaps the strongest argument for a shared voice is that much of the racket sports industry already operates this way.

• Court builders do not only build tennis courts.

• Booking platforms increasingly support multiple sports.

• Major equipment companies sell tennis rackets, padel rackets and pickleball paddles.

• Events such as RacquetX deliberately bring the industries together.

• Investors increasingly discuss "racket sports" as a category rather than treating each code in isolation.

The commercial world has already recognised the overlap. The administrative world is still catching up. Competition should remain. None of this means the sports should stop competing. Competition is healthy.

Pickleball has forced tennis to think harder about accessibility, social play and programming. Padel has shown how successfully sport can be combined with hospitality and entertainment. Tennis has decades of coaching expertise, infrastructure and professional sporting experience from which both newer sports can learn. Each sport should continue fighting for players.

But there is a difference between competing for customers and unnecessarily duplicating solutions. The industry does not need three separate conversations about the shortage of coaches. Or three about planning. Or three about public funding. Or three about school access. Sometimes the smartest commercial decision is recognising that your competitor is also your ally. The question needs changing

For years, administrators have understandably asked:

• How do we grow tennis?

• How do we grow padel?

• How do we grow pickleball?

Perhaps there should occasionally be a fourth question. “How do we grow racket sports?”

That does not require a merger. It does not require anyone to surrender control. It simply requires the three sports to recognise what the marketplace has already decided. They are separate sports. But increasingly, they are part of the same business.

_{Please note that all of our content is created by human professionals. While we utilize Generative AI technology to assist in correcting syntax and grammar, our articles are written entirely by our team of experts. We value the expertise and creativity of our human writers in delivering high-quality content to our readers.}