New York Times analysis shows how pickleball has taken over thousands of tennis courts

The Kitchen Team

Covering all things pickleball

Last Edited

Sep 04 2025

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News

Last week the New York Times published a story that provided an in-depth look at how pickleball has taken over thousands of tennis courts across the country.

The numbers were truly staggering, so we wanted to share them here.

The piece, written by Ethan Singer, analyzed nearly 100,000 aerial photographs and through that identified more than 26,000 outdoor pickleball courts surfaced in the past seven years -- "a majority of them at the expense of once-exclusive tennis spaces and created since the onset of the pandemic in 2020," he writes.

"In total, we found more than 8,000 tennis courts that had been transformed for pickleball."

The analysis doesn't include all of the tennis courts (270,000) and pickleball courts (68,000) in the U.S., but Singer's reporting certainly made it clear that the pickleball takeover has been swift and vast.

"The photographs are an expansive, bird's-eye view of what has been happening on the ground in all corners of the country," he says in the story. "There's only so much ready asphalt to go around, and pickleball can't get enough of it."

In the story, Singer spoke with Jon Neeter, the owner of the Santa Monica Pickleball Center, who changed the focus of his business from tennis to pickleball a couple of years ago. That decision has paid huge dividends for Neeter, who said the business was bringing in seven times as much revenue as it did as a tennis-only facility.

It's basic geometry, Singer writes.

"Using the same square footage (on his lone tennis court), Mr. Neeter can now host four times as many people, across four times as many classes and events," Singer said in the story. "He can schedule different programs simultaneously, like a children's camp on one court and a competitive drill on another, or lessons at two different skill levels."

Even though thousands of new pickleball courts have popped up where tennis courts used to be, Singer's story points out that tensions between pickleball and tennis players have started to cool after several instances of hostility over the years -- see here, here or here.

Ted Loehrke, the United States Tennis Association's (USTA) Managing Director of Section Partnerships, said there's less conflict now because stand-alone pickleball courts have become more popular.

"Our analysis found that the number of new pickleball courts created atop tennis courts declined for the first time last year, even as the number of new stand-alone courts — and pickleball courts overall — continued to rise," Singer said in the story.

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