This 24-7 pickleball facility should serve as a model for the sport's growth

The Kitchen

Team The Kitchen

Last Edited

Feb 13 2025

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News

If you’ve ever wanted to open your own pickleball facility, all you need is $6 million & a vacant supermarket. At least, that’s what happened in Fishers, Indiana.

The Marsh supermarket was recently converted to a 24-hour pickleball facility, but this tells a much larger story. The significance here is massive.

Before we go too far into the “what could be,” let’s talk about the Marsh supermarket conversion:

Fishers Indiana is a town with a population of just shy of 100,000 people.
It’s a suburb of Indianapolis. Nothing crazy, just a normal town outside a major city.
City officials and residents have waited for 8 years to have the building transformed into something that could better serve the community.

The 60,000-square-foot facility was developed by New City Development based out of Indianapolis and has 20 dedicated courts which are available all day, everyday.

This type of development has the potential to sweep the nation.

All around the U.S., there are vacant movie theaters, malls, supermarkets, and other massive structures that are just waiting to be turned into a pickleball facility. The advantages of using them are incredible.

Let’s start with the benefit for communities: From both an economic and social perspective, vacant buildings provide zero value. They are typically an eye sore and tend to cause problems for communities. It’s an issue that at this point seems unnecessary when there is a viable business model to fill the gap.

Converting one of these types of vacant buildings into a pickleball facility is an investment into the community. It’s a way to take a problem and make it into a solution.

Pickleball facilities generate revenue both for the city & the business owner, they create an environment for connection, and they offer countless other opportunities to provide value to a community through events and programs from youth all the way to the elderly.

Next we have the benefit for pickleball: we all know the pickleball infrastructure is suffering. It’s estimated we will need just shy of $900 million (well $894 - thanks Fishers) over the next 5 years to meet the growing demand for the sport.

Taking an existing building that is serving no purpose just accelerates the growth for the infrastructure of pickleball. It allows for entrepreneurs to hit the ground running rather than waiting 6-12 months for a newly built structure to take shape.

Utilizing existing buildings is how we go from $900 million to $450, and from 5 years to 3.

Lastly, we’ve got the business side of the equation: A ground-up pickleball facility with 20 indoor courts would cost ~$12 million. Assuming the same square footage with the same number of courts, that exact facility for an existing building would be half that, maybe less.

Additionally, there is the added benefit of garnering local support and possible donations to take a vacant building and turn it into something thriving for the community.

Continuing with all things equal, the ROI on an existing structure is much greater than building something from the ground up. That essentially means you make more in a shorter period of time for the exact same thing.

Fishers, Indiana is a perfect example of what so many cities around the U.S. could be doing. Take something old and make it new.

I’m sure the Marsh supermarket meant something to someone, but pickleball is the future. There is an opportunity to catapult this sport into the next dimension and the best part is, the pieces are already in place.

It’s time to say goodbye to our old malls and our rundown movie theaters and our vacant supermarkets and say hello to the future of pickleball facilities.

Frank Hines loves the game of pickleball and sharing that passion with as many people as possible. He found the game over two years ago and hasn't let up since. Follow Frank on X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram.

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