Coming to an empty mall space near you: pickleball.
That’s right. More than a month ago, discussions began in the pickleball world about renovating mall space into pickleball courts.
“The idea is to really identify that if you leave it up to government entities to create courts, it just doesn’t move fast enough,” said Brandon Mackie, co-creator of Pickleheads.com, a website dedicated to players which provides data and information about local pickleball courts in communities.
Mall spaces will be identified, as well as other under-utilized spaces, to build a lot of pickleball courts and supply demand for the game.
“They’re going big,” Mackie said of the brand Picklemall, created by billionaire and former hedge fund manager Steve Kuhn. He is cofounder of Major League Pickleball.
According to Mackie, Kuhn will start in Tempe, Ariz., near where Mackie lives in Phoenix, and transform a 104,000-square-foot outlet mall space into indoor pickleball courts available to the public for a fee. Mackie said the Tempe Picklemall, schedule to open in July 2023, will be one of the largest in the U.S. and plans include 50 similar Picklemalls across the country in the next four months.
Mackie said that parking garages, including one in Los Angeles and soon one in San Francisco, have been transformed into pickleball courts. Empty office spaces because employees are working from home are also being turned into pickleball courts.
Two more Picklemalls are scheduled to open this summer in Texas and Oklahoma.
Technology will be part of the pickleball game in the Picklemalls, including cameras on the courts, to improve player efficiency.
Mackie said Picklemall locations will be included on Pickleheads.com as they open across the U.S.
Pickleball originated in the U.S. in 1965 and was mostly played by senior members of communities. The game is described as a mixture of tennis, ping pong and badminton. Two players compete against two other players on a court 1/3 the size of a tennis court, but with large ping pong paddles and a plastic ball resembling a wiffle ball. Scoring is similar to badminton.
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Rebecca Barnabi
