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Updates from August 2026
INTENNSE - RacquetX - Doping - Transgender - Myrtle Beach - USTA PNW
Rich Neher
August 31, 2026
Re: INTENNSE
INTENNSE in August 2026
Photo: INTENNSE
Re: RacquetX
The Briefing - Issue No. 7
CourtCall Is Live. The Agenda Is Yours to Write.
CourtCall is the submission and voting process for the RacquetX 2027 agenda. Anyone can pitch a session, a panel, or a format we have not tried yet.
Here is the case for putting your idea in. Racquet sports is in its unification era, and nobody has the full picture yet. The operator running padel courts in a market that had none three years ago knows something the panel circuit does not. The brand founder who just solved a distribution problem knows something the analysts do not. The stage should reflect that.
The timeline:
September 13. Submissions close.
September 21. Voting opens.
October 27. Finalists announced.
April 9 - 11, 2027. Sessions run in Fort Lauderdale.
What makes a strong submission:
A specific point of view, not a topic area
A problem you have actually solved or are actively working through
Named speakers where you have them, though we can help fill panels
Submissions take about ten minutes. If you have been kicking an idea around since March, this is where it goes.
The Briefing - Issue No. 8
The Gold Rush Is Giving Way to Discipline
The boom was real. 20.6% of Americans played a racquet sport in 2025, up from 13% in 2019. Pickleball went from 4.2 million players to 24.3 million in five years. Padel hit 58,334 courts worldwide, roughly six times what existed in 2016. More than 1,200 indoor pickleball facilities opened in two years, a market now worth over $3 billion. And capital noticed: Apollo alone put $225 million behind pickleball.
Now the market is asking harder questions. A planned $5 million complex in Myrtle Beach died in diligence. Racquetball peaked at 12 million players and sits at 3.5 million today, and squash carries the sharpest warning in the report: the sport was never the asset. The box was.
The number changing the conversation is a 5x gap between average and top-tier club economics in the same market. Same demand, same city, wildly different outcomes. The difference is operating discipline.
The gold rush question was how fast can we get in. The discipline question is what we are actually building. The full report breaks down who is still writing checks, what gets funded now, and the operating habits separating the clubs that compound from the clubs that stall.