On a recent, muggy day in August, I donned my best approximation of racket-sport-chic attire and made my way over to McCrimmon Parkway Neighborhood Park in northwest Cary, where on Monday evenings, the six pickleball courts are reserved for open play. I was there to test my thesis that Cary is nuts for pickleball, and thus, the ideal location for a national pickleball tournament.
When I arrived, every court was full and there were a handful of people waiting in line for their turn. One set of mixed doubles players seemed pretty serious, moving quickly to the kitchen line after each serve to trade carefully-placed dinks. The match on the adjacent court was just ending, and I watched the players congenially tap paddles in lieu of shaking hands. Sharp whacking sounds and victorious shouts punctuated the drone of birds and insects from the surrounding woods.
Starting next Monday, two thousand players and several thousand spectators will converge on Cary for a week-long professional pickleball tournament kicking off at Cary Tennis Park. The Veolia Pickleball National Championships is the equivalent of a Grand Slam in the tennis world: a major tournament featuring most of the top-ranked players in the sport.
Tournament winners will claim a combined $1.6 million in prize money. The ticketing website heralds it as “the biggest pickleball festival in the world!” promising pro-led clinics, food, and live music alongside the matches. This is a big deal for Cary, which has been steadily raising its profile as a sporting destination over the past few years.
“Hosting world-class events is what Cary is built for,” the town’s Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Resources Director John Collins said in a press release this spring. “We’re building on that foundation to deliver an experience that reflects both the growth of pickleball and Cary’s ability to host at the highest level.”
Durham’s got the most famous baseball team in the minor league. Raleigh has the Stanley Cup-winning Hurricanes. Morrisville hosts international cricket matches at Church Street Park and is becoming a national hub for the sport. Compared to its neighbors, professional sports isn’t such a big part of Cary’s identity as a town—yet.
Granted, Cary is home to the Carolina Courage, the two-time National Women’s Soccer League champions. But the team’s future there isn’t certain—facilities at WakeMed Soccer Park are somewhat dated, and owner Steve Malik has expressed a desire to move the team’s stadium to Raleigh. Cary hosted The Soccer Tournament in May and an international rugby match in July. A pickleball tournament arguably jives with Cary’s identity the best of any of these offerings; both the sport and the town enjoy a reputation for being fun, friendly, and popular with the over-55 set.
If you’ve been living under a rock for the past six years, here’s what you need to know about pickleball: It’s a fusion of badminton, ping-pong, and tennis, played with paddles and a wiffle ball on a court roughly a third of the size of a tennis court bisected by a low net. Invented in 1965, the sport’s popularity surged to a full-blown craze during the pandemic. An estimated 24.3 million people picked up a paddle in 2025, per the Sports & Fitness Industry Association.
Players love pickleball because it’s relatively easy to learn and less physically demanding than tennis. The ball moves slower than a tennis ball and effective hits require minimal force, making it approachable for beginners. Decent gear is pretty cheap, and courts are proliferating at local parks. Plus, pickleball has a friendly ethos: the official rulebook instructs players to “[give] the opponent the benefit of any doubt” so as to preserve “the game’s underlying principles of fun and competition.”
(Pickleball does have some haters. A 2023 article in The New York Times diagnosed “a nationwide scourge of frayed nerves and unneighborly clashes” provoked by the loud, irregular popping sounds of paddles connecting with balls. People living within earshot of pickleball courts compared the experience to living beside a gun range, or in hell. Also, some recreational tennis players are salty about their neighborhood courts being converted for pickleball.)
Cary has hosted PPA (Professional Pickleball Association) Tour events before, but never the national championship. Past events generated a combined $6 million in economic impact for the surrounding area.
At McCrimmon Parkway Neighborhood Park, to my slight surprise, most of the players appeared to be in their 20s and 30s. Perhaps the gray-haired crowd—pickleball’s early adopters—had been deterred by the stifling heat and humidity.
Most of the players looked to be in the beginner to medium skill range, and nearly all of them were dressed less fussily than I was in shorts and T-shirts. A group of teenagers arrived, hung up their backpacks on the chain-link fence, and commenced an exuberant game of soaring lobs and fierce smashes.
There’s amateur pickleball, played casually in parks and rec centers, and then there’s pickleball the professional sport, which is still niche but growing in popularity. The very best elite players are beginning to score big sponsorships and a degree of name recognition.
The top-ranked men’s and women’s picklers, Ben Johns and Anna Leigh Waters, will both be in Cary for the national championships to face off against a slew of other highly-rated professionals. (Most of the players in the tournament are Americans, like Waters and Johns, but some are international.) Waters turned pro at age 12 and, seven years later, has racked up 196 gold medals and 39 triple crowns (signifying a win in the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles divisions of the same tournament), the most of any pickleball pro. Johns is also a phenom with a slew of medals to his name. Alongside the professional bracket, amateurs can sign up to play in a separate bracket for their own title.
“The first-ever PPA Slam tournament in North Carolina will be a milestone for the sport with the Greater Raleigh area becoming the center of the pro pickleball universe as the 2026-2027 pro pickleball season commences,” reads the registration page for the tournament.
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