The Operational Strain Behind Pickleball’s Rapid Rise

Pickleball’s explosion has become one of the most remarkable stories in modern sports. With participation up 311% in the past three years and 19.8 million Americans playing in 2024, the sport’s momentum is unmistakable, according to data provided by Pickleheads.com and the 2025 SFIA Report. Courts are booked from dawn to dusk. New clubs, academies, and facilities are opening at record speed. And tournament calendars are expanding faster than organizers can keep up — including 142 USA Pickleball events, 26 PPA tournaments, 20 APP events, and 11 MPL competitions in 2024 alone, representing more than 300% year-over-year growth.

Growth creates excitement. Growth creates opportunity. But growth also creates operational strain. And that is the part of the pickleball boom that rarely makes headlines.

Behind the packed courts and waitlisted clinics lies a quieter, more complex story: the systems, staff, schedules, and communications that must scale just as fast as participation and often don’t.

As clubs and tournament operators aim to deliver outstanding player experiences, they are running into the limits of tools and workflows never built for a sport growing at startup speed.

The Experience Gap: What Players Expect vs. What Systems Can Support

New players entering the sport come with expectations shaped by fitness studios, digital-native services, and highly automated sports environments. They expect:

• Transparent match and session schedules

• Real-time updates

• Clear communication around delays

• Smooth registration and check-in

• Minimal downtime between matches

• Professional, predictable on-site coordination

With nearly 20 million players, small operational lapses now have large downstream effects. A delayed match, a missing referee, a court assignment error, or a miscommunicated schedule can ripple across hundreds of participants.

Delivering an exceptional experience becomes harder, not easier, as the sport scales.

Tournaments: From Community Events to Multi-Day Productions

Pickleball tournaments are no longer casual, clipboard-and-whistle affairs. They have grown into sophisticated productions requiring both “inside the lines” and “outside the lines” expertise.

A single mid-sized tournament may involve:

• Hundreds of match blocks

• Dozens of divisions

• Referees, day of event staff – paid or volunteer-based

• Court monitors

• Vendor and sponsor coordination

• Real-time bracket and court updates

• Player support across multiple days

In other words, tournaments are no longer volunteer-run side projects. They are multi-day operations with real budgets, real expectations, and real consequences when things go wrong.

Manual scheduling, walkie-talkie coordination, and handwritten updates cannot keep pace with the volume. The operational margin for error is too thin.

Clubs Are Transforming Into Programming Engines

Five years ago, clubs were primarily focused on court reservations. Today, the leading facilities are offering:

• Skills and progression-based clinics

• League play

• Social play sessions

• Round robins

• Junior development pathways

• Private lessons and group training

• Seasonal tournaments and events

• All-day drop-in play

This is a dramatic shift in operating model — more akin to a fitness studio or tennis academy than a traditional court facility.

And with it comes a dramatic increase in operational workload:

• Instructor scheduling

• Court allocation

• Payment and attendance tracking

• Member communication

• Waitlists, substitutions, cancellations

• Back-to-back programming blocks

• Daily staffing coverage

Growth hasn’t just multiplied program offerings; it has multiplied the administrative, staffing, and communication load behind those offerings.

A Flexible Workforce That’s Difficult to Manage

Pickleball now relies on a dynamic and fast-moving workforce:

• Teaching pros

• Freelance referees

• Court monitors

• Front-desk and event staff

• Volunteers

• Support crews across multiple locations

Many of these individuals work at two, three, or even four facilities. Their availability changes weekly. Their communication channels are fragmented. And their roles often shift between events, lessons, and tournaments.

For operators, this creates a cascade of challenges:

• Last-minute cancellations

• Inconsistent coverage

• Gaps in high-traffic windows

• Manual stipends and payments

• Lack of visibility into real capacity

• Difficulty coordinating staff across multiple locations

Pickleball has the workforce — but lacks the infrastructure to deploy it efficiently.

The Pressure Point: Delivering Outstanding Customer Experience at Scale

As participation surges, the clubs and tournaments experiencing the greatest success share a consistent characteristic: operational sophistication.

They focus not only on delivering courts and competitions, but on delivering:

• Predictability

• Professionalism

• Transparency

• Clear communication

• Efficient workflows

• Data-backed decisions

This is what separates a club that provides “a great community event” from one that delivers “an exceptional experience from the moment the player engages with the brand.”

And meeting that standard requires infrastructure that can grow with you and gets smarter with each use, infusing your intelligent decision-making into your operational decisions.

The Next Phase: Smarter Systems, Not Just More Courts

Pickleball has matured from a grassroots pastime into a national ecosystem. With that evolution comes the same need every fast-growing sport eventually faces: operational systems that match the scale of demand.

Just as tennis clubs adopted reservation platforms, CRM systems, and program-management tools, pickleball is reaching an inflection point where:

• Automated scheduling

• Staff/volunteer coordination

• Real-time communication and reminders

• Attendance and demand analytics

• Transparent operations

• Centralized payments, W9 tracking, and 1099 management

will become foundational.

This is where modern platforms — such as Tourney Direct — can naturally support operators. Originally built for high-volume sports like lacrosse, systems of this type already manage dynamic schedules, staff assignments, payments, and participant communications at scale. Their structure maps directly onto the complexities emerging in pickleball.

They are not the story — but they are a piece of the solution.

A Sport Ready for Its Next Layer of Structure

Pickleball’s momentum isn’t slowing. Participation is rising. Programming is expanding. Staffing demands are increasing. Tournaments are multiplying. Player expectations are accelerating.

The sport is no longer in its novelty phase — it is in its operational phase.

To maintain the quality of the player experience while absorbing unprecedented growth, clubs and tournaments will need to shift from reactive coordination to predictable, data-driven operations.

Automation, efficiency, and operational intelligence are no longer “nice to have.” They are becoming the invisible infrastructure of a sport on the rise.