National Pickleball Chains Move Into Greenville As Local Owners Bet On The Boom

Pop. Pop. Thwack. Ping. Those are the sounds spreading through Greenville, South Carolina, as new pickleball courts, academies, clubs and leagues open across the Upstate. The wave has built over the past year, and it is now pulling in outside money alongside homegrown operators.

Three names anchor the current build-out: Pickle Yard in Mauldin, Baseline GVL near Haywood Mall, and Picklr, a Utah-based chain with 500 locations worldwide. Each one is betting that Greenville has room for pay-to-play pickleball, a proposition that would have sounded strange a decade ago, when the sport mostly meant borrowed time on a public tennis court.

“From a business standpoint, it’s really opened a lot of eyes,” said Andy Gillentine, a pickleball player and a professor at the University of South Carolina’s College of Hospitality, Retail and Sport Management.

A Sport That Outgrew Public Courts

Cities in the Upstate began building public pickleball courts about a decade ago, said John Moore, a volunteer leader with Pickleball Upstate. As players showed up, the game moved into the mainstream, and private investors started paying attention.

Moore traces the sport’s rise back further than court counts. “Everything goes back to high school,” he said. “Pickleball attracted the uncool kids, and the uncool kids found community, enjoyed it. Then, as pickleball’s gained in popularity, the cool kids started to say, ‘Hey, what are these nerds doing?'”

National participation numbers back up what Moore is describing on the ground. The Sports & Fitness Industry Association counted 24.3 million pickleball players in the United States in 2025, up from 4.2 million in 2020.

That growth curve is what pulled pickleball out of parks departments and into commercial real estate. A sport that once had to fight tennis players for court time has now attracted investors willing to build entire facilities dedicated to nothing else. What started as a handful of volunteer-run courts on municipal land has turned into a real estate category, with operators scouting Upstate strip malls and vacant retail space the same way a gym chain or a grocery brand might.

Money Moving In From Outside Greenville

Greenville’s build-out mirrors a much larger shift in how pickleball gets financed nationally. In May 2026, Pickleball Inc., the parent company of Major League Pickleball and the PPA Tour, announced a $225 million investment from Apollo Global Management’s newly created sports fund and Dundon Capital Partners, a raise that valued the company at $750 million, according to CNBC. The deal folded several pickleball businesses, including equipment retailer Pickleball Central and court installer Just Courts, into a single company.

Dundon Capital Partners is owned by Tom Dundon, an owner of the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers and the NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes, who was an early investor in pickleball before this latest round. His involvement, alongside a private equity giant like Apollo, signals how far outside the sport’s recreational roots its financial backers now reach, even as the actual growth keeps showing up in small, local bets like the ones opening across Greenville.

The Sports & Fitness Industry Association’s data, cited in that same CNBC report, put pickleball as the fastest-growing sport in the country for three straight years. That is the same growth curve Gillentine points to when he talks about the market opportunity sitting in front of Greenville’s new operators: a sport large enough, and still growing fast enough, that national capital and small local businesses are placing bets on it at the same time, just at very different scales.

Selling Shoes, Balls and Court Time

Gillentine sees the appeal as much from a business angle as a player’s. Pickleball draws young players and old ones, people who play for exercise and people who play to compete, players who buy paddles secondhand and players who spend hundreds of dollars on the newest equipment.

“That’s a great market to get into, because now I’m going to be able to sell shoes, court time, rackets, balls, you name it,” Gillentine said.

That spread of players, from casual beginners to serious competitors, shapes how the new Greenville operators are building their businesses. A facility chasing only competitive league players looks different from one built to welcome someone trying pickleball for the first time, and the operators moving into the Upstate appear to be hedging across both groups rather than picking a single lane.

Locally, the demand looks real, Moore said. New facilities meet a need for court access and give players somewhere to go when outdoor weather will not cooperate.

Brandon Spearman built his own bet on that demand. He recently launched a competitive pickleball league, something he said only became possible once professional-grade indoor facilities opened in the Upstate. Without those courts, he could not reliably schedule and run tournaments.

“These businesses are really building pickleball up themselves too, so it’s kind of like a perfect storm of everything going on,” Spearman said.

Two Different Bets on the Same Sport

The new operators are not all chasing the same customer. Picklr, the Utah-based chain, runs a pickleball-focused operation: eight championship-sized courts, a pro shop, private event space, locker rooms and showers. It hosts leagues, tournaments and drop-in play, the kind of infrastructure a national brand can standardize and repeat across its 500 locations worldwide.

Pickle Yard took a different route. Alongside its courts, it offers grab-and-go food, padel courts, golf simulators and a patio, plus trivia nights, line dancing and live music. Rather than compete purely on court quality, it is positioning itself as a place people show up for reasons beyond the sport itself.

Jim Canovos, a co-owner of Pickle Yard, said the mix is deliberate. “We want to give you as many reasons as possible to be here,” he said.

Not Everyone Is Convinced

Whether all of this holds up is still an open question, Moore said. The Upstate’s mild climate keeps outdoor courts playable much of the year, which could limit demand for indoor space. Free public courts remain widely available across the region, and many players are likely to stick with them rather than pay to play.

Money is also a dividing line inside the sport itself. Pickleball has built its reputation on being social and open to players of every background and skill level. Moore worries that pay-to-play facilities could chip away at that, pushing the sport toward what he called a “country club feel,” something he sees as “antithetical” to how pickleball started.

A survey by Upstate Pickleball found that roughly 30 percent of members said they would not pay to play the sport, a figure that suggests the new facilities are competing for a majority of players rather than the entire pool. For a sport that grew up on free municipal courts, that resistance is not a small hurdle for operators counting on steady memberships to cover the cost of a lease and a building full of courts.

“It’s to be determined,” Moore said. “This is the great game of business.”

What It Means for Players

For players in Greenville, the shift means more choices than a decade of borrowed tennis courts ever offered: leagues with real infrastructure behind them, indoor options when the weather turns, and businesses competing for their time and money. Whether that competition keeps the sport as open as it has always been, or reshapes it into something closer to a private club, is a question the Upstate is only beginning to answer.