On Pickleball
by Paulo Gonzalez
2022-06-01 | pickleball economics racket-sports
I gathered some data on pickleball tournaments. I wanted to understand the scene and dynamics around it. One of the steps to do this was to gather some tournament data, which I did. Here is the link to the project [0] (code I wrote to do the gathering) and here is a link to a google sheet [1] with all of the data I scraped/organized.
There is some borderline "professional" money to be made in pickleball when playing tournaments. There are a lot of tournaments, 3 leagues, invitationals, it's a wild west per se. Pickleball prioritizes bodies on court, so much that the prize money for the US Open (one of the biggest tournaments but not the highest paying) was $2.5k for Men's singles while $10k for Men's doubles a couple years ago. They see that four registrations are better than two :)
Doubles pickleball is an interesting game with very low barrier of entry. People that don't have good racket skills can have fun and even compete right off the bat. Singles pickleball (what I'm interested in) is a tough game, lots of moving around and grinding, there is no hiding there. You do need skills to play doubles at a higher level but I'm not interested in it at the moment. Tournaments for singles are usually decided in one day and there are usually five matches to win the tournament and backdraws for folks that lose a match or two. It's very physically demanding to win a tournament, which is interesting to get in shape in a safe setting (difficult to get injured if you know how to move).
Tournaments have have many different catefories: levels, age, mixed gender. You can play a 2.5 over 50 mixed doubles category in a tournament for example. Folks don't care that the draw will have 3 people, they give out a couple medals and people are happy. I haven't played a tournament yet, so I don't have first hand experiences yet.
A friend of mine did and here were the stats for it:
- - Link to the tournament [2], 120k in prize money for pro divisions (this was a 250 rating, the lowest in their tournament payout specs [3])
- - 801 players playing
- - $70 registration, per player
- - $35 per non-pro event (non prize money)
- - $135 per pro event (prize money), max draw of 32 for each event -> men, women, mixed and senior events.
- - max of 3 events: 1 singles, 1 doubles, 1 mixed
- - they sell insurance for your registration in case you want to cancel it and get a refund (🤯❤️)
You can do the math and project what the potential revenue for an event like that is.
It's a thing, here to stay. It is big ping pong. Instead of having ping pong tables in offices, folks will have pickleball courts.
Links/Resources:
Thanks for reading!