The community gets built on the court. More and more, it gets found on the feed.
Earlier this month, David Johnson wrote in these pages that pickleball facility prices are resetting fast — nine listings cut by an average of 39% in ten weeks. His conclusion was that the clubs that come through the reset "will be the ones run like real businesses."
This summer I argued here that the land-grab era was over, and that once courts stop being scarce, the basis of competition shifts to community and experience.
You can pour concrete in ninety days; you cannot pour belonging.
The community gets built on the court. More and more, it gets found on the feed. And the people doing the finding-for-you aren't just club marketing departments. They're local players with phones, a point of view, and a few thousand followers.
One club in Utah shows what that looks like when it works.
A scene in Herriman
On a weeknight at Premier Pickleball in Herriman, Utah, you can find several pickleball creators on adjacent courts.
- Randy Nguyen (@randypickleball) does gear reviews and competitive gameplay
- Braden McCoy (@drillmorepickleball) makes content for the rec player who just lost 11-2
- Josh Maxwell (@josh.max), a pediatrician by day, makes tips for players with full-time jobs and families
- Sione Moli (@holymolipb) makes beginner instruction.
- Chase Ferrel (@gottabethelefty.pb) posts daily.
None of them is a household name. That's part of the point.
Randy calls the place "clip city." When something funny or impressive happens during a social event, he says, "people are always encouraged to hit the replay button."
Premier didn't plan any of this. Co-founder Molly Hansen traces it to one person:
We didn't set out to do this. It happened organically, and it really started with one person: Randy. He was already a coach and ambassador for Premier, and at some point he started creating content on his own.
The impact was almost immediate. Hansen goes on:
I remember seeing what he was putting out and immediately understanding how much impact that could have for the club, players finding us who never would have otherwise, people getting a real feel for what Premier is like before they ever walk through the door.
From there, she says, it became intentional.
Creators get free memberships, can shoot without clearing it in advance, get invited to grab b-roll at events, and get swag and unlimited replays. The one ask is that posts relevant to the club go up as Instagram or Facebook collaborations with Premier's account. The club now factors content quality and consistency into how it hires coaches and ambassadors.
Ben Borton
Why it's happening now
Premier is an unusually clear example, but the forces behind it are broad.
Discovery moved to social. Deloitte's 2026 Digital Media Trends survey found 52% of US consumers say social media is their primary way of discovering new content, rising to 73% among Gen Z. In sports, WSC Sports found 62% of fans had discovered a new team, player or league through short-form video. The pro game's growth has run on the same rails. The PPA Tour and MLP reported social impressions up 407% for MLP in 2025.
Trust sits with people, not brands. Edelman found 60% of consumers trust what a creator says about a brand more than what the brand says about itself. Its 2026 analysis adds that "proximity matters more than popularity." A local creator with an aligned audience can move more people than a famous one.
People want real, local, in-person. Eventbrite's 2026 Social Study of 18-to-35-year-olds found 69% prefer discovering experiences through personal networks and 89% want events that connect them to their local community.
Experiential venues are built to be shared. Competitive-socializing concepts have grown 386% since 2021, per Cushman & Wakefield data cited by Thesis Driven, which also notes that high-frequency, community-tied venues outperform one-time novelty destinations. A pickleball club is the high-frequency kind. Members come back weekly, and every visit is a potential clip.
Put those together and a local creator playing at their home club is close to the ideal messenger: trusted, nearby, and showing the actual experience rather than describing it.
The workflow changed
The piece that has shifted most in the past two years is the mechanics. Pickleball content used to mean hauling a camera, filming whole sessions, and scrubbing through hours of footage for a few seconds worth posting.
Chase describes that old routine — GoPro, upload to laptop, "sort through roughly two hours of video to find just a couple clips" — against what he does now at a club with cameras on every court: tap a replay button during the session, get the clip emailed, edit and post from his phone.
He calls it "10x more productive." Sione logs his start and end times and court number, then pulls a custom clip from the club's app after he plays. "The difference now," he says, "is that I can be focused on playing and let the footage take care of itself."
For the club, the same infrastructure removes a staffing problem. Molly says that with every court covered, "we're not having to prioritize which court a creator can shoot on or work around a schedule." It's what lets the club "say yes to creators easily instead of it becoming a scheduling headache."
Court-level video is spreading across the industry through several vendors, including PodPlay, the company I co-founded, which runs Premier's courts. That spread is what turns a one-off creator into something a club can repeat.
Creators cluster
The more interesting dynamic at Premier is that creators pull in other creators.
- Sione started posting in May after following Randy, who he says was "the first creator I followed who I felt was genuinely awesome at making pickleball easy to understand." Within a few months he was coaching and running clinics at the club.
- Chase says making Premier his home club "was the biggest catalyst for my commitment to content creation," largely because he could see what was working for the creators around him.
They describe it as collaborative rather than competitive.
"It's never a competition," Randy says. "I see it more as ambitious people growing together because we all inspire each other." Sione frames the group as "building a place in Utah where everyone can turn to one of us for something."
Braden says the same: "Nobody in this group is trying to outdo anybody. We're just trying to lift each other up."
Josh Maxwell adds a less obvious point: the clustering follows quality. "Sure, you can take over a warehouse, put down courts and nets, fill reservations, run tournaments, and have a financially successful club," he says.
"All players notice when the playing experience is an afterthought, and the best players will play elsewhere, and eventually everyone else follows."
His conclusion: "Content creators want to be where good pickleball is happening."
When Sione was asked what club owners should do, he talked about Premier's owners — Jamie, Molly and Ronnie — getting to know players personally. "They didn't try to force a community. They built relationships, and the community followed."
David Johnson
The open questions
None of this is settled, and Premier's own owner is the first to say the returns are hard to pin down. "It's hard to point to a hard number and say this many members came directly from creator content," Molly says. She treats it as an awareness campaign rather than lead generation. No Premier creator post carries a "come join now" message.
That's the honest state of the evidence. Nobody has yet published a rigorous number connecting creator content to club memberships, the way restaurant studies have connected TikTok to foot traffic. Clubs leaning in are making a bet on awareness and culture.
There are other questions operators are working through:
- Curation. Molly says Premier is "particular about who we work with," because "the creators we partner with are really an extension of that culture." A creator whose tone doesn't match the club can cost more than they bring.
- Commercial conflicts. Many creators carry paddle and apparel sponsorships. Clubs with their own brand partners will run into overlap.
- Formalization. The more structured this gets, the more it risks losing what made it work. Every creator we spoke with said some version of "let them be themselves." Braden's version: "The moment a creator has to ask permission to film, you lose some of the magic."
Other sectors are already testing formal versions. Chicago's FFC gyms run a Creator Partnership Program that trades memberships for content. In pickleball, PodPlay runs a Creator Collective that matches creators with clubs on its network and shares revenue from creator-driven channels; Randy and Braden are both members. Some Premier players' clips also reach this site through The Dink's ClipTHAT series. Expect more clubs, brands and platforms to try their own versions.
After the reset
David Johnson is right that the next phase rewards clubs run like real businesses. Part of running a real business in 2026 is being findable where your next customer spends their time. For a sport whose players carry a camera in their pocket and scroll short-form video every night, that place is the feed.
Premier's lesson isn't that every club needs a content strategy. It's that the club's community is already producing content, whether the club participates or not. The clubs that make that easy, and make creators feel at home, end up with their culture on screen for thousands of people who haven't walked in yet.
Courts are a commodity now. Belonging isn't. Increasingly, belonging is also something people see before they feel it.
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