Why the Pickleball Franchise Model May Not Work for Everyone

Pickleball is having a moment — and that moment has lasted years now. With over 25 million players across the United States and youth participation climbing fast, the sport shows no signs of slowing down. But headlines lately have cast a shadow over the business side of the game. Clubs closing. Facilities going up for sale. Operators bleeding money despite packed courts. So what’s actually going on, and what separates the clubs that are thriving from the ones that are barely hanging on?

The answer, when you dig into it, has a lot to do with location, community, business model — and whether slapping a national brand on the front of a building actually means anything to the person walking through the door.

The Sport Is Healthy. Not Every Business Is.

Let’s be clear about one thing first: pickleball itself is not struggling. The sport is growing across every demographic — older adults who love the low-impact gameplay, younger players who are drawn to the competitive scene, and kids who are now joining varsity teams at the high school level. Pickleball club closures aren’t a sign that the sport is dying — they’re a sign that not every business model built around the sport was sound to begin with.

That’s an important distinction. When a restaurant closes, we don’t declare that people have stopped eating. We assume the food wasn’t good, the rent was too high, or the location was wrong. The same logic applies here. Some pickleball businesses were built on shaky financial foundations — oversized facilities, bad lease terms, and an assumption that demand alone would carry them through. It doesn’t work that way in any industry, and pickleball is no exception.

Mary Cannon, co-founder of CityPickle, put it plainly: economic basics like supply and demand and barriers to entry can’t be ignored in pickleball. That’s not pessimism — it’s just business reality.

The Supply Problem Nobody Talked About

Part of what makes pickleball so beloved is its accessibility. You don’t need much to play. For around $100 on Amazon, you can grab paddles, balls, and court tape and set up a game in a parking lot or cul-de-sac. Municipal parks are converting tennis courts to pickleball courts at a rapid pace. Country clubs have added courts. Warehouses across the suburbs are being converted into indoor facilities.

That accessibility is a feature for players. For club operators, it creates a real competitive problem. When supply is easy to replicate, your business is vulnerable the moment someone opens a shinier, cheaper facility a few miles away. What protects your investment then?

This is where the concept of a competitive moat becomes essential. In investing, Warren Buffett has long championed businesses with wide, sustainable moats — structural advantages that make it hard for competitors to take your customers. In the pickleball world, most suburban clubs don’t have one. The ones that do have built it through something deeper than a coat of paint and a fresh logo.

What a Real Competitive Moat Looks Like in Pickleball

CityPickle’s approach to this problem is worth studying, because it’s deliberate in a way that most club operators haven’t been. When Cannon and her co-founder Erica Desai started building their business plan back in 2021, they made a conscious decision to pursue only urban locations — places where real estate is genuinely scarce and the demand from busy, active residents with disposable income far outstrips the available supply.

Their locations include Central Park, Hudson Yards, Philadelphia City Hall, Brooklyn Bridge Park in DUMBO, and a seven-court facility on the 8th floor of a Class A office tower in the heart of Times Square. These aren’t just impressive addresses for the sake of it. They’re strategic. Millions of pedestrians walk past these courts every day, generating enormous brand visibility. Competitors can’t just copy them — winning those locations required navigating competitive RFP processes and public-private partnerships with city governments. That’s not something a newcomer can replicate overnight.

The Times Square location alone required multiple sound engineers and was, by Cannon’s own admission, not for the faint of heart. But that difficulty is the point. The harder something is to build, the harder it is for someone else to undercut you.

Beyond the real estate, those urban locations are ideal for private events — particularly corporate events, which Cannon identifies as a key revenue driver. New York City alone has over 200,000 businesses with employees who need team-building activities and entertaining spaces. That’s a revenue stream that most suburban clubs simply can’t access at the same scale.

For Beginners: What Does Any of This Actually Mean?

If you’re newer to pickleball — or just to thinking about the business side of the sport — here’s the simple version of what’s happening.

Pickleball is booming. Millions of Americans play it, more are joining every year, and the sport is now showing up in high schools and colleges across the country. Because it’s popular, a lot of entrepreneurs decided to open pickleball clubs as businesses. Some of those businesses are doing great. Others are struggling or have already closed.

Why? Because being in a popular industry doesn’t automatically make your business successful. Imagine if everyone in your town decided to open a coffee shop at the same time because coffee is popular. A lot of those coffee shops would fail — not because people stopped drinking coffee, but because there’s too much competition and not every shop has something that makes it worth choosing over the others.

That “something special” is what business people call a competitive moat. It’s the reason customers choose you instead of the cheaper place that just opened nearby. For pickleball clubs, that moat might be a one-of-a-kind location, a uniquely strong community feel, or programming so good that members wouldn’t dream of going somewhere else.

One specific question being asked right now is whether a franchise model makes sense for pickleball clubs. A franchise is when a business sells the right to use its name and system to independent owners — think McDonald’s or Anytime Fitness. The idea is that the brand recognition helps attract customers. But does that actually work for pickleball?

The Franchise Question: Does a National Brand Actually Help?

This is the crux of the debate, and it’s worth thinking through carefully. In a traditional franchise model, the franchisor brings a few things to the table: brand recognition, a proven system, and often, purchasing power that helps franchisees get supplies at lower costs. Think about how a McDonald’s franchise benefits from national advertising and bulk food purchasing deals that an independent burger joint could never access.

Now apply that to a pickleball club. The biggest operating costs for any club are real estate and labor — both of which are determined entirely by the local market. A franchisor can’t negotiate your lease or reduce your payroll costs. There’s no equivalent of a McDonald’s ground beef deal in pickleball; the ongoing supply needs of a pickleball club just aren’t significant enough for centralized purchasing to matter.

That leaves brand recognition as the main value a franchise would offer. And here’s the honest question: does a suburban player, choosing between two clubs within a 30-minute drive of their home, actually care whether one has a nationally recognized name on the sign? Or do they care which one has better programming, friendlier staff, and a more welcoming community?

The answer is almost certainly the latter. A pickleball club that loses money despite being busy is usually a club that got the fundamentals wrong — not one that lacked a recognizable logo. The best-run clubs succeed because of local management quality, not national brand equity.

What Actually Drives a Successful Pickleball Club

Talk to any operator running a thriving pickleball club and you’ll hear the same themes come up. It starts with programming. A court sheet that’s thoughtfully curated — with the right mix of open play, clinics, leagues, and events for the specific community the club serves — drives utilization and gives members a reason to keep coming back. Great pickleball programming isn’t accidental. It’s designed.

Then there’s the community element. This is harder to quantify but easier to feel. Clubs that build a genuine sense of belonging — where regulars know each other, where staff know members by name, where people feel like they’re part of something — create loyalty that price alone can’t disrupt. If a player feels genuinely at home at their local club, they’re not going to drive 10 minutes further to save $10 an hour at a newer facility. That loyalty is worth more than any franchise agreement.

Ancillary revenue matters too. Food and beverage, pro shops, private lessons, corporate events, birthday parties — the clubs that layer multiple revenue streams on top of court fees are far more resilient than the ones treating court rental as their only income source.

None of this requires a national brand. All of it requires strong, attentive, locally invested management.

The Youth Boom Is Real and It Changes the Calculus

One of the most overlooked aspects of pickleball’s growth right now is what’s happening at the youth level. CityPickle’s kids’ summer camps and after-school academy programs are reportedly outpacing even their most optimistic projections. There are approximately 300 colleges with pickleball clubs, and high school varsity programs are now getting off the ground in major cities.

This matters for club operators because it points to where sustained long-term growth is going to come from. Players who grow up in the sport become lifelong participants. Building programming that serves kids and teenagers isn’t just a nice community gesture — it’s an investment in your future customer base.

The clubs that recognize this early and build relationships with local schools, offer youth development programming, and position themselves as the hub for pickleball in their community will have a significant advantage over those that are purely focused on adult recreational play.

What the Struggling Clubs Have in Common

The pickleball facilities that are struggling tend to share a few characteristics. They often opened in markets where supply quickly caught up with demand, leaving them competing on price with newer, sometimes better-capitalized competitors. Many signed aggressive leases during the peak of pickleball enthusiasm, locking themselves into high fixed costs that are difficult to sustain if utilization dips. Some built facilities that were simply too large for their local market to support.

The franchise question is relevant here too. Some operators may have assumed that buying into a recognizable brand would provide a buffer against competition. In most cases, it appears that assumption hasn’t held up. Local execution is what determines whether a pickleball club thrives, and no franchise fee buys you that.

The Road Forward for Pickleball Businesses

None of this should be read as a warning away from the pickleball business. The fundamentals of the sport are genuinely strong. Demand is real, the player base is diverse and growing, and the sport’s accessibility means it will continue to attract new participants for years to come. This is an industry with a real future.

But that future belongs to operators who are thoughtful about their competitive position, honest about their costs, and deeply committed to the communities they serve. It belongs to clubs in urban locations with structural scarcity advantages, and to suburban clubs with operators who put in the work to make their facility feel irreplaceable. It does not automatically belong to anyone just because they have a recognizable logo on the door.

As George Bernard Shaw put it — and it applies perfectly here — “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” The sport will keep growing. The question is which businesses are built well enough to grow with it.

If you’re a pickleball fan, a player, or someone considering getting into the business side of the sport, the lesson is straightforward: strong demand is a starting point, not a guarantee. The clubs worth watching — and worth playing at — are the ones that have figured out what makes them genuinely hard to replace.