Last week, professional pickleball arrived in Cary for a seven-day tournament, the Veolia Pickleball National Championships (presented by Fasenra). Equipped with a press pass, a skort, and a novice-level understanding of pickleball, I set out to discover whether this incarnation of the sport is more than just a moneygrab, a pile of brands stuffed in a trenchcoat.
Brian Clark, the chief tour officer for the Professional Pickleball Association (PPA), told me the week prior that he was expecting about 1,000 fans to attend Nationals in Cary, plus another 1,000 amateur players who would play their own tournament alongside the professional one. Tickets started at $25 and topped out near $400 for single-day VIP passes. Of the amateurs, Clark estimated about half would travel from out of state. He said Cary was a natural choice for the event because “there is a significant pickleball ecosystem already in place” here, with players, fans, and willing event partners at the town and state levels.
“If we didn’t feel like Cary was interested in growing pickleball and serving that community, we probably wouldn’t be interested in elevating the event and being a huge part of it,” Clark said.
Seven years ago, pickleball was a little-known sport played mostly on improvised courts by people with bad knees. The story goes that it morphed into a serious business venture when Connor Pardoe, the founder of the PPA, met Tom Dundon, the billionaire owner of the Carolina Hurricanes and the Portland Trailblazers.
Pardoe started the PPA in 2019 as a newly-married 23-year-old working for his family’s real estate development business in Utah. He had just discovered pickleball and thought it might be fun to host a series of tournaments. Dundon made his fortune in subprime lending (his company was accused of predatory practices and he paid hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements) and grew it with investments in health care, hotels, and sports. The two men crossed paths in 2021.
“Everything happened so quick,” Pardoe recounted on an episode of “Pickleballers,” an insider-y podcast for pickleball fans. “We’re talking, and Tom starts asking questions, like, ‘Who are the biggest and the best brands in pickleball?’ We talk about Pickleball Central, we talk about PickleballTournaments.com, we talk about a few other companies, and Tom’s like, ‘We have an opportunity to own a sport.’”
Dundon agreed to “infuse some capital” into the PPA, and Pardoe agreed to move it from Utah to Dallas, where Dundon lives. Together they formed Pickleball, Inc., a parent company that now encompasses the PPA, Major League Pickleball (a coed team league), Pickleball Central (an equipment retailer), Pickleball.com (the top pickleball news site), PickleballTournaments.com (for finding tournaments), Just Courts (a court installation company), Top Court (an instructional app), Pickleball TV, and the MATCHDAY app. Pardoe and Dundon are the majority shareholders in Pickleball, Inc. In no other sport does the same company own the two main leagues, as well as most of the digital and logistical assets associated with them.
Big sponsorships started rolling in: Carvana (part of Dundon’s investment portfolio), Hyundai, Margaritaville, Guaranteed Rate, Humana, DoorDash. Pickleball, Inc. hired 200 employees. Dozens of athletes made the sport their full-time job, playing on the PPA circuit from September to May, then switching over to Major League Pickleball from May through August. Ticket sales rose. Tournament prize purses swelled from $50,000 to over $1.5 million. Celebrity athletes like Tom Brady, LeBron James, and Naomi Osaka made investments in pickleball teams.
“Without Tom [Dundon], it does not become as professional or grow nearly as fast as it grew,” Pardoe said on the “Pickleballers” podcast. In May, Apollo Sports Capital, an investment platform, and Dundon’s investment firm Dundon Capital Partners announced a $225 million investment in Pickleball, Inc.
My first visit to the National Championships was on Thursday, roughly the halfway point of the tournament. I parked down the road and caught a shuttle to Cary Tennis Park, whose courts were retrofitted with pickleball surfaces and nets for the occasion. On the shuttle, I sat behind a man wearing a sweat-wicking polo shirt printed with—could it be?—tiny blue and green pickleball paddles alternating on a white background.
We clamored off the shuttle. The sky was cloudless and the heat smothered us like a woolen blanket. A dozen plastic balls slapped against a dozen plastic paddles on a dozen courts in an irregular rhythm. At the entrance to the park, a wide concourse decked out in American flag bunting was filled with white canopy tents, beneath which vendors hawked their wares: VitaPop prebiotic sodas, Joma pickleball paddles, Saltie Rose pickleball apparel, Ensure protein shakes, Mojo Energy Pouches. Contemporary country music blared through the speakers. There was a balloon arch for photos.
I noticed pickleball-shirt-guy working the Capital Vacations booth, passing out tickets to spin a wheel and win a free vacation. Upon Googling the company that evening, I would learn those “free vacations” are the kind involving an aggressive, hours-long pitch to invest in a timeshare. Related searches: “What is the lawsuit against Capital Vacations?” “How do I get out of Capital Vacations?” “Can I get my money back from Capital Vacations?” The guy gave me a big smile and pressed a ticket into my hand.
Contributing to the sheen of unreality was the prevalence of people with names that sound like they were made up by overzealous young adult fiction authors. Take Pickleball, Inc. content creator Ireland Horvat and pro player Roscoe Bellamy, who also co-hosts the aforementioned “Pickleballers” podcast. At Cary Tennis Park, I caught the tail end of Horvat interviewing Bellamy for a crowd of 20 or so overheated onlookers.
“Everyone who puts on these events, like, it’s crazy the amount of business acumen and the amount of operations acumen that these people have,” Bellamy raved. “Like, three years ago, this wasn’t a thing, and now you have 260 players who have full-time jobs because of the PPA. … There’s no Roscoe Bellamy playing pickleball without the PPA. … The way I’ve been able to build a brand and a podcast and businesses around it, and I get to compete my heart out, like, that wouldn’t exist.”
Horvat asked Bellamy his favorite thing about life on tour.
“I know it sounds weird, but outside of pickleball, we’re normal people,” Bellamy mused. “But in this bubble right here, you guys make me feel cool. You make me feel like a little bit of a star.”
Like Bellamy, many pro pickleballers have parlayed their niche celebrity into other ventures.
Anna Leigh Waters, the top female player, has a head-to-toe sponsorship deal with Nike and a paddle collab with Franklin. Jaume Martinez Vich, a highly-ranked male player, co-owns a yacht company. The women’s doubles duo Anna Bright and Rachel Rohrabacher turned their on-court alias, “The Girlies,” into a short-lived merch company of the same name.
Most of the pro players are in their 20s. On a different episode of Bellamy’s podcast, Hannah Johns, an early PPA employee and the sister of two pro players, compared the tight-knit pickleball world to high school. “It gets very dramatic and gossipy,” she said, alluding to dating drama, physical fights, and wild parties in the early days.
But “as soon as the money came, everyone got real serious real fast,” Johns said.
The actual pickleball games at Cary Tennis Park were pretty fun to watch. Anyone who says pickleball doesn’t require athleticism or strategy has not watched the pros play. Plus, I enjoyed the intimacy afforded by the small courts and courtside seating: the players were so close I could see the sweat beading on their foreheads. When they hit a ball out of bounds, they had to chase it themselves.
I returned on the last day of the tournament for Championship Sunday. The heat had broken and the vendors were slowly packing up. There was a new guy at the Capital Vacations booth. He told me he works “anywhere there’s a crowd” because “everybody goes on vacation,” and invited me to his upcoming gig at the Whiskey, Wine and Fire festival.
“It’s like a boozy winter-fall festival or whatever. There’ll be lots of hobnob-y, snobby people there. You should definitely show up,” he said.
A woman at the VitaPop stand offered me a free prebiotic soda, which I accepted gratefully. Spectators milled about the concourse between games. I met a group of four friends who had traveled up from Charlotte for the weekend, and their ringleader wanted to know if I played pickleball. When I told him I dabbled, he delightedly insisted I join their group photo under the balloon arch.
My press credentials didn’t include a seat at the main stadium court for the final-round matches, so I hovered near an entrance to get a partial view, feeling like a rule-breaker. Midway through the men’s singles faceoff between No. 2-ranked Federico Staksrud and No. 3-ranked Hunter Johnson, a volunteer took pity on me and waved me into the stadium.
Standing behind the last row of seats, slurping my soda and luxuriating in the cool sunlight, I watched Johnson claw his way back from a first-game loss to beat Staksrud in a best-of-three-games battle. As they sent each other running around the court, scoring improbable points, I reluctantly admitted to myself that I was having fun.
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