It seems Bill Gates and Taylor Swift have something in common other than the fact that they are both billionaires. They play pickleball.
I didn’t know Gates is a pickleball enthusiast until I saw something posted on Threads, the palatable alternative to X, Elon Musk’s $44 billion social media garbage dump. Apparently, Gates was introduced to pickleball over fifty years ago, several years before he founded Microsoft. According to Gates, “My dad was friends with the game’s inventors…. He learned about their creation and by the late 1960s, he got inspired to build a pickleball court at our house. I’ve been playing ever since.”
Pop sensation, Taylor Swift plays pickleball too, although at thirty-four, she hasn’t played nearly as long as Gates. The only photograph I found of her, holding a paddle while modeling a lavender pickle skirt, suggests she hasn’t played for very long or very often. I don’t know how good her game is, but if it’s not, she can’t be criticized. After all, she has a pretty full schedule. What with Chiefs games at Arrowhead Stadium and hootenannies in Australia, Japan and Rio, she doesn’t have much time to practice dinks.
Ms. Swift has a pickleball fashion line. She is, as might be expected, using her fame to capitalize on the country’s fastest growing sport. When the millions of “Swifties” learn that Taylor Swift is in the pickleball fashion business, buy her clothes and actually play the sport, we might well see a huge wave of young fans crash the courts. That’s the good news.
The bad news is, as pickleball continues its meteoric rise in popularity, it is difficult to build courts fast enough to satisfy demand. According to Pickleheads, an online service that provides users with lists of pickleball courts that are available for booking, the sport continues to be the fastest growing sport in America. There are currently over thirty-seven million picklers vying for court time in the U.S. alone. Pickleheads predicts a compound annual growth rate of 8% through 2028, although based on recent growth, that figure seems overly conservative.
There are currently 11,000 locations with approximately 50,000 courts on which to play pickleball in the United States. By the end of 2023, 120 new courts were being added each month. Experience at The Landings Club seems to mirror the national trend. As stated in a previous article, it is becoming increasingly difficult to book courts at peak hours. On any given Saturday morning over sixty picklers line up to play on twelve courts reserved for New Neighbors. New Neighbors participation is an accurate indication of future court usage. Additionally, the court sports professionals have resurrected a youth program, which is certain to increase the number of younger players.
Six new courts are scheduled to be built at Franklin Creek this year. While they will go a long way to ease the current congestion, if pickleball continues its meteoric assent, how soon will we need even more?