Racquet Sports Isn't a Court Story Anymore

August 6, 2026

Mike Knowles The only racquet sports advisor who's been a player, a brand builder, and a CMO. August 5, 2026

Real growth pressure. Clear thinking. No fluff. For leaders navigating the racquet sports industry right now.

One of four structural pressures reshaping racquet sports facilities today: labor and leadership.

For the last few years, the story in racquet sports has been simple: tennis is making a comeback, pickleball is exploding, padel is accelerating, and building more courts is the strategy. That story isn't wrong. It's incomplete.

The question worth asking isn't "how many courts can we build?" It's "what operating model can actually support them?"

Here's why the old story is running out of room.

Court supply is growing in more markets than ever. Capital is flowing into padel and premium pickleball at a pace nobody was predicting eighteen months ago.

And the clubs building today aren't simple, single-sport operations anymore. They're running tennis, pickleball, padel, food and beverage, events, and lessons, often under one roof, often with the systems and staffing of a much smaller business.

Growth didn't add courts alone. It added complexity most operators weren't built to carry.

I went looking for what's actually breaking underneath the court-construction story. Four pressures showed up. None of them are new on their own. What's missing is anyone connecting the four into one story.

FOUR PRESSURES, ONE PATTERN NOBODY'S CONNECTING

1. Real estate and capital.

There's a minimum viable scale in this business, and a lot of operators are building under it.

Standalone padel facilities generally need five to six courts to make the fixed-cost math work. Pickleball generally needs eight to twelve.

Below those thresholds, fixed costs eat too much of your revenue no matter how good the programming is: reception, management, insurance, booking systems, locker rooms. Those costs stay roughly the same whether you're running three courts or ten.

The Racquet Sports Institute's analysis of operator data across the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East found that larger facilities achieve 25 to 40 percent better unit economics than undersized ones through fixed-cost absorption alone.

Build under the threshold, and you're not undersized. You're structurally exposed before you open.

2. Systems fragmentation.

Most multi-sport facilities are running separate booking platforms, separate rate structures, and separate communication channels for each sport, stitched together instead of built as one operation.

A recent operations analysis of multi-sport facility software put it plainly: facilities running single-sport tools in multi-sport environments develop workarounds. Separate calendars. Manual rate lookups. Spreadsheet tracking for cross-sport memberships.

Staff WhatsApp groups for certification coordination.

The same analysis found a real financial signal behind the mess: facilities reaching $1 million in annual revenue average $381 in monthly customer spend. Smaller, more fragmented operations average $263.

That's not a technology problem. It's an operating design problem, and it shows up first in onboarding, then in service, then in the number that keeps the lights on.

3. Labor and leadership.

A director of racquet sports used to run one sport. At a growing number of clubs, the same person is now running three, often with the staffing and org chart they had when the job was smaller.

The industry's own trade press isn't hiding from this. Len Simard USTA COACHING PROFESSIONAL - PTR, PPR,PPTR, RSPA Master Professional of KOPPLIN KUEBLER & WALLACE, which places and advises country club leadership nationally, put a number on it last year: up to 30 percent of today's racquet sports professionals are expected to leave the industry within five years, citing burnout, lack of advancement, and unsustainable schedules.

The clubs responding well are the ones creating real, separately staffed roles: a head pickleball professional, a head platform tennis professional, instead of asking one person to absorb every new sport a facility adds.

The court count grew. The org chart didn't.

4. Revenue mix.

Not every sport on your property is worth the same. At Cliff Drysdale Tennis managed clubs, of every hundred dollars in revenue, roughly ninety still comes from tennis. Pickleball fills the building and barely bills for it yet. Padel, on a handful of courts, can out-earn half a club's entire operation.

Most operators are still pricing, staffing, and programming as if all three sports carry equal weight. They don't, and the operators who work out the actual mix first will make sharper decisions than the ones still treating court time as court time.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR RACQUET SPORTS OPERATORS

None of these four pressures shows up on a participation report. They don't show up in a press release or newsletter about a new court opening.

They show up in the P&L. They show up in the onboarding schedule for a new hire who has to learn three booking systems in her first week. They show up on a Wednesday afternoon when three sports need the same three staff members at the same time.

The clubs that get ahead of this aren't the ones building the most courts. They're the ones building the operating structure to run what they've already built.

WHERE I'VE SEEN THIS BEFORE

I watched a version of this play out from a different seat.

At the Racquet Sports Professionals Association, I led the organization through its first rebrand in nearly a hundred years, at the exact moment the coaching landscape was fragmenting across three sports at once and USTA Coaching, an organization with a hundred times our resources, moved directly into our territory.

The instinct in the room was to add more, more workshops, more certifications, more programming, to outrun the pressure. That's the same instinct I see in a lot of operators right now: build more courts, add more sports, and hope the structure catches up on its own.

It doesn't. We didn't win that fight by adding more. We won it by getting clear on what we stood for and building the discipline to execute it under real competitive fire.

Membership renewals grew 25 percent year over year during the hardest stretch of that pressure.

The problem was never demand. It was structure catching up to momentum. That's the same problem sitting underneath the court-construction story in racquet sports right now.

WHAT THIS LOOKS LIKE MONDAY MORNING

If you run a club or multi-sport facility, here's the actual work.

Put your lease and your court mix on one page. What does this building need to earn per square foot, per hour, to stay open? Then check whether your current programming can realistically hit that number, or whether you built for demand and never built for the business.

Map the customer's path, not your org chart. Walk through how a member actually moves through your systems: booking, billing, communication, coaching sign-up. Count how many separate platforms they touch and how many times your staff re-enters the same information. Every repeat is margin and attention you're burning on nothing.

Name who actually owns your hardest decisions. Lease terms, sport mix, pricing, staffing. If those decisions live in one person's head instead of in how the business runs, that's not a bench strength issue. It's an exposure issue the moment that person is unavailable.

Decide what the building is for. A court-rental box, a family ladder, a coaching hub, a third space people pay to belong to. Pick one on purpose. Program, price, and staff around that answer instead of drifting into whichever one your lease and your competitors decided for you.

WHY THIS WORK NOW RUNS THROUGH FACILITY ALLY

Six months into building Inside The Lines Advisory, that's exactly the problem that pulled me into a second role.

Inside the Lines is where I work through the strategy. Facility Ally is where I help operators put it to work.

I've joined Facility Ally as Head of Growth, in addition to running Inside the Lines.

Facility Ally was built by Luke Wade, The Community Creator, an operator who hit this same wall running his own sports league in Kansas City. He built the operating system to answer it: real estate strategy, systems, staffing, and revenue design, for facilities managing more sport than their structure was built to carry.

Court count was never the whole story. The operators who separate themselves from here forward are the ones who treat what happens after the ribbon-cutting as the real work.

HOW TO WORK ON THIS WITH FACILITY ALLY

This is the part I'd normally split into three ITL offers. Not this issue.

Facility Ally asks one question up front: where is your facility leaking revenue? That's not a tagline.

It's the same question this whole issue has been circling: real estate, systems, labor, revenue mix, asked in six words instead of two thousand.

Facility Ally is a turnkey operational partner, not another software app to bolt onto the four to eight you're probably already running.

Strip away the service categories and here's what it buys you: money you don't lose before you open, money you don't lose to friction, and money you actually earn from what you've already built.

Money you don't lose before you open. Answers Pressure #1: Real estate and capital.

The real estate and capital pressure gets solved in the first conversation: budgets, break-even math, and vendor management for your buildout, before you sign a lease instead of after.

This is where operators either build for the business their lease demands, or find out too late that they didn't.

Money you don't lose to friction. Answers Pressure #2 (systems fragmentation) and Pressure #3 (labor and leadership) together.

Every hour your staff spends re-entering data or covering a role nobody was hired for is money that never shows up on the P&L.

This is org structure and hiring funnels built for a multi-sport staff, one system for reservations, memberships, and daily workflow, and a smoother guest journey from check-in to court time. All three together are how the friction stops showing up in the member experience too.

Money you actually earn from what you've already built. Answers Pressure #4: Revenue mix.

Most operators are sitting on revenue their building already has the capacity for and isn't collecting, membership tiers priced for what each sport actually earns, sponsorships nobody's pitched yet, leagues and tournaments that turn open court time into booked revenue.

That's the earning side. The other half is getting noticed and staying memorable: the brand, website, ads, email, and community work that brings people back.

The process is three steps. A deep-dive assessment of your actual bottlenecks. A custom strategy built around your specific facility, not a template. Then execution, side by side with your team, not a login and a goodbye.

Start with the free Operator Scorecard. A few minutes, no cost, and it gives you a straight read on where your facility is leaking revenue before you spend money fixing the wrong thing.

Take the Operator Scorecard: https://facilityally.com/operator-scorecard/?utm_source=mike&utm_medium=newsletter

Want to talk it through first? I'm the person to reach. mike@facilityally.com | 205.789.4006

Real growth pressure. Clear thinking. No fluff.

SOURCES

Racquet Sports Institute: minimum viable court thresholds and unit economics for padel and pickleball facilities. https://www.racquetsports.institute/post/economies-of-scale-in-racquet-sports-facilities

Baseline: multi-sport facility software fragmentation, workaround patterns, and customer spend by facility revenue tier. https://www.baselinepro.com/blog/multi-sport-facility-management-software-technical-requirements-for-complex-operations

Kopplin Kuebler & Wallace (Len Simard, Boardroom Magazine, July/August 2025): racquet sports staffing shortage, projected five-year attrition, and evolving club staffing models. https://kkandw.com/beyond-the-court-reimagining-racquets-leadership-through-talent-and-compensation/

RacquetX Club Business Report, June 2026: Cliff Drysdale Management revenue mix across tennis, pickleball, and padel. (Previously cited in Issue 07.)

Facility Ally: service structure, process, and positioning. https://facilityally.com/ and https://facilityally.com/how-we-help/