It’s raining in Sarasota. And not a light sprinkle but a proper, Florida drenching, so the outdoor courts at the Pickleball Club’s Lakewood Ranch location are deserted. Inside is a different story. Most of the 12 courts are in play. With four people to a court, all pouncing and swatting at the ball, set to the pop-pop-popping soundtrack of the game, it makes for a snappy scene on a Tuesday afternoon.

Pickleball, if you haven’t heard, is the fastest growing sport in the United States, with 48 million people—an astounding 19 percent of the population—getting in on the game last year. Given that momentum, as well as the uncanny levels of enthusiasm for the game, it’s no surprise that billions of dollars are being poured into the industry in the shape of pro teams and tournaments, franchises, broadcasting rights, and celebrity endorsements, as investors try to make something of the moment. Here at the Pickleball Club, founder and CEO Brian McCarthy (MBA 1972) is making a big bet that his model—a private club, with high-end amenities and a community organized around the sport—will have what it takes to stay in the game for the long haul.

McCarthy tours the facility like a proud father, pointing out the features that are designed to convert the casual player, who might otherwise be joining the crowds at the neighborhood rec center, into a club member. Getting out of the rain and not having to wait for court time just scratch the surface of it. Over by the entrance, a digital display announces the day’s run of show. Beginners get designated time in the morning so that they can play in the forgiving company of other newbies; intermediate and advanced players get their own dedicated time slots, too. One of the club’s eight pros is coaching a session on serve and return strategies later on, all part of the club’s skills-development program that keeps players progressing through the sport.

Those who want to level up their game can take it a step further: McCarthy points to the facility’s back court, where cameras are embedded in the wall and positioned to record a video feed of each session. Whether that’s a doubles match among friends or a private lesson with one of the club’s pros, members scan a QR code to access the recording. At home, they can study the game tape to sort out what’s gone wrong with their swing—or find a strategy to win the next one. This PlaySight SmartCourt technology is more commonly used by NBA teams and NCAA programs, and represents one part of the club’s $1 million tech investment, says McCarthy, who was an avid racquetball player and developed half a billion dollars in commercial real estate before he found pickleball.

Meanwhile, business is bouncing along in the pro shop and Pickles café, where staff are dispensing espresso from a chrome appliance that looks sufficiently engineered to drive away under its own steam. Taken as a whole, the club’s amenities amount to cruise ship–level hospitality and an overall vibe that says: Come for the pickleball but stay for everything else.

It takes a staff of 30 to provide this level of service, and they’re just six months into operations by this point in November. Like every startup, the team has been busily evaluating what works, addressing what doesn’t, and fine-tuning all the processes. That data is especially valuable in this case because the Lakewood Ranch location is the company’s beta test. Just down the street, a 15-person corporate team is building the next club in Port St. Lucie. And the one after that in The Villages. All told, the company’s $180 million development plan will amount to a small pickleball empire, with 15 locations across Florida, all built from the ground up. Once the Florida beachhead is established, they’ll expand geographically from there.

Matt Gordon remembers the phone call from his friend Brian McCarthy, sometime in late 2019, when McCarthy floated the idea of getting in on the game together. “I said, ‘Well, that sounds wonderful, Brian, but what the hell is pickleball?’ ” Gordon was an M&A lawyer on Wall Street (and tennis player) by training; the two had worked together a decade earlier in commercial real estate. Over the phone, McCarthy told Gordon that he had his eye on an old roller rink in Sarasota that he thought could be repurposed for pickleball, which had about 2 million players at the time. Gordon offered to run the numbers.

“I penciled it out, and the revenues looked good, but 80 percent of my motivation was that I wanted to work with Brian again. So I said all right,” Gordon recalls. They put together a quick seed-capital round and put down a deposit on the roller rink. Then came COVID, at which point the project was no longer financeable. Nothing was. They walked away and spent the next six months waiting and watching.

Pickleball turned out to be the answer many people needed to the pandemic: Players stand 6 or 7 feet away from their partner, and 15 to 20 feet away from their opponents on a mini tennis court. The game is easy to pick up for a newbie but also difficult to master, lending the sport a handy balance of attractiveness for new entrants and stickiness for the long-timers. Seniors, in particular, couldn’t get enough of it.

McCarthy and Gordon observed the mob scenes at public courts everywhere and decided to jump. They launched the Pickleball Club in 2020, with Brian’s wife, Valerie, a lifelong athlete who brings decades of experience in the fitness industry to the role of COO; Gordon is CFO and general counsel. People would naturally assume that a private, indoor club simply meant bringing the play out of the elements and away from the neighborhood noise complaints that were growing more contentious in communities across the country. And that was part of it, McCarthy acknowledges. “But that’s not what I saw,” he adds.

McCarthy noticed that pickleball plays were falling into a few, fixed categories. Take, for starters, the food and beverage model: Like any bowling alley, Top Golf, or the Kansas City–based Chicken N Pickle (with NFL investors Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce), these establishments lure people in with an activity but ultimately make their money on your dinner tab. Others were making the most out of the downturn in commercial real estate by snapping up vacant Bed Bath & Beyonds or other space in struggling shopping malls and quickly filling them with courts. People pay to play but there’s absolutely no reason to stick around. “All valid,” McCarthy says. But he saw another route that no one else was taking: “I really thought that a private-club model could work.”

McCarthy was well versed in how private clubs operate—both how they deliver real value and where they can fall short. A member of Sarasota’s Bird Key Yacht Club, he served on its board of governors from 2014 to 2016, when the club’s 50-year-old marina was crumbling into disrepair. It’s a common side effect of member-managed clubs, he notes. “It’s tough to get things done, because no one wants to be in charge when someone says the word assessment. It’s why condos have a lot of deferred maintenance.”

But seeing the need to shore up the club, McCarthy offered to help the Bird Key’s commodore navigate the tangle of permitting and agency signoffs. “You must go through federal, state, county, and city agencies, and you worry about the seagrass and the manatees and the mangroves. It’s probably one of the most complex development deals you can do,” he observes. The permitting and engineering took about two years; the $3 million project was demolished and rebuilt in six months.

Navigating that kind of bureaucracy is routine for a military careerist. McCarthy had enrolled in the United States Navy Reserves shortly after his undergraduate degree in engineering. He went straight to officer training school and the Navy Supply Corps School and, by the age of 24, was the supply officer serving on the USS Buck (DD-761), running the destroyer’s supply department, which consisted of disbursement, supply management, retail operations, a post office, and a food service operation that served 900 meals a day underway. He also saw combat as a boat officer for a squadron of six PBRs in the Mekong Delta. Over the next 30 years, while he attended HBS and established a career in commercial real estate, McCarthy remained in the reserves. Holding five commands, including as a principal logistics planner for Desert Storm, he ultimately achieved the rank of rear admiral. (It’s a proud achievement for anyone but notably rare for a reservist.)

“What I loved about being in the Navy was being able to look at things differently than my military counterparts because I was a real estate developer and entrepreneur full-time; then I’d go out on active duty and be assigned to solve some problem,” McCarthy explains. It exercised the engineering and systems-thinking part of his brain.

Take, for example, the time the Army had 6,000 tanks that were ready to retire. Retirement is an expensive proposition as weapons must go through an extensive demilitarizing process, and even the scrap metal wouldn’t yield enough value to offset the high cost to demil, as it’s called. McCarthy thought back to WWII history and the sinking of the Japanese fleet in Truk Lagoon, which became one of the world’s largest ship graveyards. Much later it became a scuba destination because the steel turned out to be a useful foundation for coral reefs and marine life. McCarthy wondered if the military could do something similar off the coast of Florida, with 6,000 Army combat tanks.

But two major problems stood in the way. “One was that we weren’t going to save any money because we still had to demil all the parts on every tank. And the other was how to move the tanks from wherever they were, to get them into the water,” he recalls.

Digging further, McCarthy found that the corrosive effects of salt water on steel meant that salt-water immersion would satisfy the Army’s demilitarizing standard. Check. As to the second part, McCarthy says he enlisted the Army’s help in transporting the tanks with that branch’s extensive network of trucks and rail access. “Then I got the Navy to bring in their barges, and we literally rolled the tanks into the water,” he says—perhaps simplifying the process a bit. “The GAO came out later and said that sinking every one of those tanks provided the equivalent of $100,000 in benefit a year, when you include the benefit to industries like fishing and sporting.”

McCarthy has scaffolded his career on this kind of entrepreneurial thinking: a melding of his engineering training and his military and commercial experience, as well as an entrepreneurial attitude that started with a childhood paper route. “What I’ve learned is that you don’t have all the answers. You take the info you have within the time frame given, and you make the best decision you can, even if it isn’t always right,” he says.

All of which brings us back full circle to pickleball, a nascent market in which no one has the answers and the playbook has not been written. But reading the numbers, McCarthy sees an opening. The sport has a natural stickiness to it. Add to that the virtuous cycle of getting people off the couch and onto the court, where they can enjoy themselves immediately but also aspire to advance. By offering an optimal club experience, McCarthy aims to establish a long-term membership base that functions as an annuity stream. That, in turn, affords him the ability to bring in more pros, develop youth programs, and foster a lifetime love of the sport.

Would it be cheaper to fling open the doors and invite anyone in to play tomorrow? Yes. Is it easier to repurpose a vacant department store than build something from the ground up and fill it with top-flight amenities? “Trust me, it’s cheaper,” McCarthy says. “There are people out there saying they’ll have 500 pickleball franchise locations around the country, and you can get caught up in all that. They won’t have to worry about the financial risk and the human resources, but I say let them capitalize on this tremendous trend. We’re willing to sacrifice some of the short-term benefits because in the long run I think we’ll win.”

One hedge that gives them extra confidence as they chase down this ambitious plan, by the way, is real estate: The Pickleball Club will be both owner and operator of all 15 facilities. The land that they’re purchasing in each location is zoned for light industrial use that, according to Florida zoning code, could be used for an attractive range of alternative purposes, from storage or warehousing to retail or sports operations. If every pickleball player drops their paddle and walks off the court tomorrow, the real estate itself is a great counterbalance and risk mitigator. “That, to a finance guy, was the pixie dust,” Gordon says.

Not that the numbers are headed in that direction yet. In fact, pickleball players are only getting younger, at least in averages. The Association of Pickleball Professionals reports that the average age is a surprising 34.8. That trend warms the heart of COO Valerie McCarthy. A D1 college swimmer with a master’s in exercise physiology, McCarthy has been a lifelong fitness advocate both personally and professionally: She managed large YMCA clubs in her pre-pickleball career. She’s deeply concerned about the way online activity has become a substitute for physical activity, particularly for children. Pickleball can have a hand here, she says.

She loves to see what happens when a child puts down their device and picks up a paddle. Especially for those who don’t consider themselves a natural athlete—and this applies to players young and old—pickleball delivers something that people really need right now, she says. Engagement. Movement. Social contact and connection. Yes, there is meaning in pickleball.

There are also investors, and even a pickleball business is about financial returns at the end of the day, Gordon cautions. But it feels good to be serving communities in a very positive way, he adds. “An auto repair shop is a perfectly legitimate business that’s serving a need in a community, but no one is happy when they end up in a collision shop. It’s fun to be in the happy business.”

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