Kaitlyn Kerr Names Five Traits Of The Best Pickleball Clubs

• Kaitlyn Kerr, who has visited more than 75 pickleball facilities across 19 states and seven countries and territories, says the clubs where players are happiest get the same five things right.
• Her list: courts built for play, control of sound, reasons to stay off the court, replay and scoring on every court, and a community built by people.
• Her last test is the bathroom: “Show me your bathroom, and I’ll tell you how premium your club is.”

What Separates The Clubs Players Love From The Ones They Leave

Kaitlyn Kerr has walked into more pickleball facilities than most players will see in a lifetime. For her series The Joy of Pickleball, she has toured nine clubs in nine cities, including a former Macy’s in Richmond, a 1930s theater in Times Square where Frank Sinatra got his start, a mid-century modern club in Beverly Hills, Michigan, and a 50,000-square-foot “urban country club” in St. Pete that sold out 800 memberships before it opened.

Add tournaments, events, and travel, and Kerr’s running count reaches more than 75 facilities across 19 states and seven countries and territories, a total she says could top anyone else’s in the game. Writing for The Dink, she says every one of them looked different. The clubs where players were happiest, though, got the same five things right.

Whether you are building a facility or choosing where to spend your court time, here is her list, with the details she saw at each stop.

1. Courts Built For The Player First

Kerr starts with space, and she does not bend on it. “Players will forgive a lot, but not a cramped court.” Players need run-off behind the baseline, room between courts for an ATP, and a ceiling high enough that a good lob stays in play. She calls those requirements non-negotiable and says you cannot fix them after the lease is signed.

The clubs that get this right make a choice that looks bad on a spreadsheet. Sam Sood, owner of Pickleball Kingdom in Hamilton, New Jersey, put just 14 courts in more than 40,000 square feet. He could have squeezed in more. Kerr says Sood decided the people who love the game deserved the room.

Ceilings count just as much. Erica Desai and Mary Cannon, the founders of CityPickle, told Kerr that when they walk into a space with high ceilings and no columns, they know right away it is perfect for pickleball.

Kerr says lighting is where most facilities fall short. JDC, the design firm run by Ben and Collin Johns, calls it the number one player complaint. The usual culprit is gym-style fixtures pointing straight down at the court. JDC recommends mounting lights beyond the court and angling them inward, lighting every court evenly so there are no “good” and “bad” courts, and avoiding fixtures bright enough to make players squint.

Pickleball Kingdom followed that approach. Sood brought in engineers with light meters to light every court evenly, with fixtures along the sidelines. Zero Zero Two in Fort Collins kept its lights off the courts and hung reflectors to cut glare. Down the Line in Annandale, Virginia, painted the walls behind the courts dark so the ball is easy to see. Kerr says none of this shows up in a brochure, but all of it shows up in your game.

2. A Room Where You Can Hear Yourself Think

Sound is Kerr’s pet peeve. If she cannot hear her partner call “yours” or hold a conversation at the bar, she is not staying.

Pickleball is loud by nature, she writes, with hard paddles, a hollow ball, and a dozen courts running at once. A big box with concrete floors and a metal roof turns that into a roar, and nobody wants to hang out somewhere they have to shout to be heard.

The clubs that solved the problem treated sound as a design task from the first day. Paddle + Par in Beverly Hills, Michigan, lined its walls with acoustic panels and hung “ceiling clouds” overhead, so 11 courts of full dinking still feel calm. Kerr says it is comfortable enough that people come in just for lunch or dinner, to sit and soak up the energy of the courts.

Zero Zero Two put soundproofing above its courts and wrapped the walls in a thick vinyl that breaks up sound waves instead of bouncing them back. In the conference rooms, the courts all but disappear. St. Pete Athletic built a soundproof call booth so a member can take a call from the boss without the boss knowing they are at the courts. It is popular enough that the club is adding a second one.

Kerr’s verdict: “Sound is the most underrated line item in a facility budget.” Players often cannot name the problem, she says, but they feel it, and they leave.

3. A Reason To Stay Off The Court

Not every club needs to be a restaurant, Kerr writes, and some owners just want to build a great pickleball club, which she calls a valid choice. The PickleBOS team in Boston put it simply: pickleball players just want to play pickleball, and everything else is secondary.

Even so, PickleBOS built a bar and an open lounge that flows onto the courts, and it hands out free balls so nobody pays to borrow equipment. Kerr says even the play-first clubs she loves give people somewhere to be when they are not on the court.

At other clubs, food is the draw. At Performance Pickleball in Richmond, Kerr met a group of women whose routine is two hours of play, then drinks at the bar, and the second half counts as much as the first. SPF in Chicago sources its coffee, pastries, and sourdough from neighborhood businesses. Paddle + Par bakes its own bread. St. Pete Athletic makes its own ketchup.

Kerr calls the strategy smart business. One club she visited hosted three events of more than 500 people in its first week. Nearly every club she toured books birthdays and corporate outings, and SPF members are planning everything up to a rehearsal dinner there. “A court rents for an hour, but a place people want to stay books the whole evening.”

The clubs that miss do neither. A front desk, a row of courts, and nowhere to sit feels like renting a gym, she says, and people leave the minute their game ends.

4. Replay And Scoring On Every Court

A few years ago, video replay was a luxury saved for the championship court. Every facility Kerr visited for The Joy of Pickleball now has replay and digital scoring on every court, and players notice when it is missing. As one owner told her, there is no reason only a couple of courts should get it.

The obvious use is bragging rights. Kerr says the bigger one is improvement. Coaches told her again and again that players hear instructions but do not absorb them until they see themselves, and a replay closes that gap in seconds. A coach at Performance Pickleball in Richmond said it made her lessons easier: instead of describing what a student did, she shows them.

Kerr tested the idea on herself. She ran one of her own matches through PB Vision and learned that only half her serves landed in the deep third of the court. She wants 75 to 80 percent. “I’d never have known without the data.”

Good technology also fades into the background. At PickleBOS in Boston, the tournament director told Kerr the system handles standings and court assignments so completely that “I get to be a viewer at my own tournament.” Replays travel too. One club told her its members’ highlights have generated more than 875,000 impressions for its partners.

5. People Build The Community, Not The Building

“You can copy a floor plan, but you can’t copy a culture.” Kerr says the clubs she would return to tomorrow all had owners and staff on the floor every day, building that culture on purpose.

PickleBOS runs what it calls a “one member at a time” policy. Every member gets welcomed and heard, and the owners would rather be in open play than behind a desk. At Zero Zero Two, the front desk greeted members by name. The owners survey members and act on the results, and they cap membership so there is always a court open. One member described the place to Kerr as “like going to a family picnic, but no weird uncles.”

At Down the Line, founder Jenni Bae told Kerr that one big reason she kept playing is that her dad got hooked, and the sport is now how they spend time together. Kerr’s conclusion: courts, sound, space, and technology get people in the door, but people are why they come back.

The Bathroom Test And The Bottom Line

Kerr says the bar has moved. “A warehouse with nets isn’t really a pickleball facility anymore.” She calls it a placeholder until a better one opens nearby. Players now expect courts built for the game, a room they can hear in, a reason to stay off the court, technology that improves every match, and people who know their name.

She runs one last test everywhere she goes: “Show me your bathroom, and I’ll tell you how premium your club is.” CityPickle Times Square passed with flying colors, with art deco bathrooms that nod to the building’s history as a theater. St. Pete Athletic has her favorite member locker rooms anywhere, iconic sink faucets included. The clubs that pass the bathroom test almost always pass the other five, she says.

Her list lands as the club business sorts itself out. The Dink has reported on bad leases, oversized facilities, and flawed business models behind a growing wave of club closures, and on The Picklr’s Chapter 11 filing. For players choosing where to join, Kerr’s five traits work as a checklist for a first visit. Check the run-off and lighting, listen for the roar, see what keeps people around, look for replay and scoring on every court, and notice whether the staff know names.

Kerr is the creator of Pickleball Chick, an MLP team owner, and Head of Content and Partnerships at PodPlay, which produces The Joy of Pickleball. She is asking readers to send her their favorite club on Instagram at @pickleball.chick.