What Great Pickleball Club Programming Actually Looks Like

Ask an operator whose club is growing what’s working and you’ll hear the same two words: quality programming. Ask what that means and you’ll usually get a calendar.

Filling a calendar isn’t the hard part. The hard part is finding the programming that fits the people who actually walk through your door.

West Shaw laid out why this matters in The Dink earlier this month. Across hundreds of facilities, pickleball courts average roughly $6,400 a month in revenue. Peak demand runs from about 5 to 9 p.m. A ten-court club gets 40 prime court hours a night, and there is no way to make a night longer.

His read was that player demand isn’t the problem. I agree. If demand is steady and prime time is fixed, the clubs that win are the ones whose programming gives players a reason to choose them, come back, and bring friends.

The Core Job: Finding Your Pickleball Family

Ask a regular why they play at their club and the answer is rarely the courts. It’s the people. The Tuesday night group, the partner they met in open play, the league team that goes out after.

Pickleball is unusually good at turning strangers into a crew, and the clubs that grow are the ones that help it happen.

That’s the core job of programming: helping people find their pickleball family.

Players come at it from two directions.

Some are on a fun track: they want a good social game, some laughs, and people they like seeing
Others are on a competitive track: they want to be tested, get better, and win something. Most people move between the two depending on the night

Good programming serves both tracks in three ways: it gets people a good game, it helps them get better, and it gives them something worth competing for.

A Good Game

Open play is the heart of pickleball.

It’s how most people found the sport. You show up with a paddle, put it in the rack, and within a few minutes you’re in a game with three people you may never have met. Nobody had to organize a foursome, book a court a week out, or chase a cancellation. You meet people, you play a few games, you stay for a drink, and the next week you look for the same faces. That’s the social engine of the sport, and it’s a big part of why pickleball grew the way it did.

The thing that makes open play great can also make it fragile. Anyone can show up, so the game you get depends on who else did.

When a 3.0 and a 5.0 land in the same game, nobody has much fun, and the stronger player starts skipping Tuesdays.

So the craft here is matching, and it matters on both tracks. The social player wants a game where everyone’s having fun. The competitive player wants a game worth winning. The default historically has been self-reported levels, which work right up until someone’s sense of their own game and everyone else’s sense of it diverge.

Clubs have gotten better at this in a few ways:

Level-specific sessions. Look at a busy club’s calendar now and it reads like a menu. On a recent weekend at CityPickle Times Square, the calendar included Early Bird High Intermediate, a Low Intermediate session called Sunday Scaries, a Beginner+ clinic sponsored by a local health system, and an After Hours Social. Each name tells you who it’s for and what kind of night it is.
DUPR-banded sessions. Using a rating to set the band gives players an objective read on who they’ll be playing with, instead of relying on everyone’s self-assessment. And it’s getting easier for more players to carry a rating. With PB Vision’s AI analysis now feeding DUPR, the matches players record at their own club can help them earn and maintain one, so a rating band no longer has to leave out the people who just haven’t been rated yet.
Challenge ladders. When a single event needs to welcome a real spread of skill and the club has plenty of courts, a ladder sorts the room on its own: winners move up a court, losers move down, and within a few rounds everyone is playing people at their level that night.

All three are still open play. They just add enough structure that the game you find is more likely to be a good one.

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Getting Better

Clinics, lessons, and drills are how players get better. What’s changing is how that improvement gets seen.

For most of the sport’s history, a lesson ran on the coach’s eye and the player’s memory. The coach watched a few points, made a diagnosis, taught a skill, and both of them left hoping it stuck. Good coaches are very good at this. But they’re working from a handful of observed rallies, and the player is working from how the session felt.

Video and AI analysis are adding a layer of evidence underneath that. I wrote about the player side of it in my piece here. The coaching side may matter more.

The structure that’s emerging at clubs is simple: match play at the start, instruction on one or two skills in the middle, match play at the end.

In the room, the coach teaches the way good coaches always have. The analysis comes afterward. A few days later, the player receives their own clips and a breakdown of both matches, with a before-and-after on the exact skill they worked on, and often a note from the coach on what to focus on next.

That follow-up is one of the most useful things a coach has. It arrives after the session, when the player would otherwise be forgetting it. It shows them their own progress in a way they can’t argue with. And it hands them an obvious next step, which is usually the next lesson or clinic.

The coach is still the one doing the teaching. Knowing what to fix first, how to explain it, and how to keep a player motivated is human work, and it isn’t going anywhere. The data gives the coach a better starting point and a better way to stay in touch between sessions.

Something Worth Competing For

Competitive play is its own reason people show up: tournaments, leagues, ladders, a bracket with your name on it. Every club runs some version of this.

What separates quality here is creativity. A format with a hook gives players a story to tell and a reason to sign up for the next one.

Silly Pickles is a good example. It started with a league on a few courts in Chicago and now runs in more than 110 cities with over 30,000 players, more than 30% of them new to the sport. The format is a weekly league: the same faces each week, partners rotating every game, and social events that keep the conversation going off the court. The creativity is in the nights themselves. They’ve run a Harry Potter night with every team sorted into a House. There’s still a winner, but the story is what people come back for. Silly Pickles says it was started because the world needed a better way to make friends, which is about as clear a statement of the core job as I’ve seen.

The One Point Slam is another. On October 17, CityPickle Times Square ran the Paddletek One Point Slam. Forty-four doubles teams (the format works for anywhere from 32 to 64), single elimination, and every match was one rally. Win the point, advance. Lose it, you’re done for the night. Forty-three points decided the bracket, and the last one was worth $5,000.

One entrant played in jeans and Uggs. The champions were Mia Yu and Sheridan Kim. The final rounds moved onto one court with the crowd packed around the sideline. At one point a match ended on a disputed kitchen call, a crowd of strangers gathered around the court monitor to watch the replay, and the point was reversed. You can watch every point of the night here.

A few things made it work, and they generalize to any club:

It’s legible in twenty seconds. Nobody needs a rules card. If a format takes a paragraph to explain, the crowd won’t follow it.
Every moment has stakes. A spectator can’t care about point six of a game to 11. Everyone cares about the only point.
It’s a night out, not just a draw. Eliminated players had an activation court and a bar to go to, plenty of them stayed to watch, and the final felt like a final.
The sponsor gets more than a banner. Paddletek’s name was on the event, and that is still the heart of a title sponsorship. What was different was where the name went next: Paddletek’s pre-roll played before every replay on the court monitors, and its mark rode on every clip players downloaded and shared. The team carrying more Paddletek paddles also won the coin toss, which was a fun touch.

Formats like this used to be hard to pull off. Forty-three matches in a three-hour window leaves no room for a clipboard. CityPickle ran it on PodPlay, the company I co-founded: the bracket updated on the big screen as officials entered scores, and court cameras captured a replay of every point. The tools that make a format like this easy to run are what make it repeatable.

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What This Means for Your Club

Look at next month’s calendar and label every session with the job it does. The goal isn’t to fill every box. It’s to understand what your players are looking for, on the fun track and the competitive one, and to deliver the versions of a good game, real improvement, and a story worth telling that make sense for your community.

A club that only sells court time is competing on price, and as West showed, court price alone doesn’t make the math work. A club that gets its programming right becomes somebody’s pickleball family.