In the past 5 years we’ve seen thousands of pickleball facilities pop up across the country.

When the sport exploded in the early 2020s, there was a clear need for more courts in almost every community. Public parks were jam packed, which presented an opportunity for entrepreneurs and business-minded players to open their own private facilities.

So the gold rush was on – old grocery stores, abandoned movie theaters and empty warehouses suddenly became pickleball courts. For those who opened a facility in the early stages of the gold rush, success was almost guaranteed because demand far exceeded supply.

Fast forward a few years, and now the supply and demand gap is much closer. Most cities now have multiple indoor facilities, and Parks & Recreation departments have built new outdoor courts in many communities.

That means the calculus has changed for players. It used to be pretty simple: I play at this facility because it’s the only facility near where I live.

Now there’s multiple options in many cities, and that calculus has changed from “Where can I find a court?” to “Which court gives me the best experience?”

That’s where PodPlay specializes. The platform is a comprehensive management system that allows facility operators to handle court bookings, payments, leagues and events all in one place while keeping the user-experience simple for customers.

“We tend to be the provider of choice for facilities on the premium end of the market who are very focused on the player experience,” said PodPlay co-founder Ben Borton.

That means offering things like digital scoreboards and video replays at premium tier clubs that are fully integrated with the booking software platform. Players have a one-stop shop where they can find their highlights, book a court, see league standings and much more.

“Players love being able to capture their highlights or fun moments during their games without having to take themselves out of the game,” Borton said. “We make it so they just press a button, capture it, and then it’s seamless for them to be able to share those fun moments on social media or with their friends. The user experience and the community aspect of pickleball – everything we’re doing is meant to elevate those two things.”

Players are now generating more than 1.5 million replays per year across PodPlay-equipped clubs — a rate that has more than doubled in the past three months alone. Many of those replays make their way to social media and are included in The Kitchen’s monthly Top 10 Amateur Pickleball Highlights.

Built by club operators with experience

Before launching PodPlay, CEO Max Kogler co-founded PingPod — an autonomous table tennis club operator that runs more than 20 locations across New York City, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, Chicago and the UK.

PingPod’s clubs operate 24/7 without on-site staff. Members unlock the door from their phone, courts know who’s playing and the technology runs the venue. The software the team built to operate those clubs — covering reservations, memberships and billing, event and league management, and staff schedules — became the foundation for PodPlay.

It wasn’t long before they realized what they built for themselves could benefit club owners across pickleball, padel and other racket sports.

Looking to upgrade your paddle?

The Honolulu J6CR is one of the highest-performing paddles on the market right now.

Shop here — Use code “KITCHEN” at checkout for 10% off

“Previously in pickleball there were a lot of different tools to manage different parts of the business, like reservations and tournaments and leagues and video capture,” Borton said. “So you have a bunch of handoffs and softwares with different passwords, and we don’t think that’s a good experience for the players or for the clubs. So we built a club management tool that was integrated with everything.”

In Q1 of 2026, PodPlay added native tournament management to the platform, pulling what had previously required separate tournament software — with separate logins and separate billing — under one integrated roof.

Currently PodPlay services more than 250 clubs worldwide  — including operators like Pickleball Kingdom, CityPickle, DTL, Performance Pickleball, SPF and St. Pete Athletic — with more making the switch on a weekly basis.

In October 2025, PodPlay closed an $8 million Series A round of funding led by Frontier Growth, accelerating its rollout to operators looking for an integrated alternative to the patchwork of single-purpose tools the industry inherited from its early years.

In many cases Borton finds that facility owners are people who are extremely knowledgeable about pickleball and opened a facility in order to fill a need in their communities, but now find themselves needing to become more knowledgeable about how to run a profitable business.

“We’re there to help differentiate them and help them win by offering these premium experiences,” Borton said. “At the start, if they were the only game in town, a lot of their sins were covered because it was a hot market and you could get away with a lot of mistakes. But now maybe they’re competing with other clubs in their area and they need to be the best game in town, not just the only game in town.”

That means using the PodPlay software to easily identify what parts of the business model are working or find areas for improvement, such as:

▪️ Which programs are growing or shrinking.
▪️ All the ways members are using the club.
▪️ Which time slots are most profitable.
▪️ Underutilized court times.

All of that data can help clubs fine-tune their programming, staffing and pricing. 

PodPlay’s platform is also tiered — clubs can start with basic booking and then add replays/scoreboards and even scale up to fully autonomous operations, where venues run labor light with technology replacing full-time staffing. Operators using PodPlay’s autonomous capabilities have seen labor costs drop by up to 66 percent, freeing them to reinvest in programming, coaching and member experience.

Read next: The Kitchen’s top pickleball paddles on the market right now

PodPlay also has put together a master document on their website that walks people through the process of starting a pickleball business. It’s about 10,000 words at this point and is updated regularly as they learn more about what’s working in the industry, Borton said.

“We want to give people real data and real frameworks to work with so they can be successful,” he said. “We have the perspective of being club owners ourselves and now serving these 250 locations, so we have a pretty good idea of things that work and things that don’t work. So we try to lean on that and have those conversations with clubs – operator to operator.”