Pickleball growth in Southwest Florida spreading

The popularity of pickleball continues expanding across the country, but Southwest Florida is quickly becoming the sport’s epicenter.

Sweeping tennis and basketball courts across Southwest Florida is a sport that’s been around since the 1960s, leading tennis players to put their rackets down and pick up a paddle.

“I wanted to get back into tennis, but it took me a little longer,” said a Naples pickleball player, “so I’m sorry to say it, let me check pickleball. I kept seeing people play pickleball, and I’m thinking, what is this? So I decided, and that’s what happened. I became addicted.”

“It’s a game that you can play very quickly, unlike 10 years of humility. Pickleball is just fun to go out there, you meet a lot of people. The courts are being taken over. Tennis is kind of disappearing,” said another pickleball player.

Carlos Sanchez, the owner of Southwest Tennis, told WINK News for every one regulation tennis court, you can have four pickleball courts. With the sport on the rise, his business is booming throughout the region.

“The pickleball courts are very versatile because they’re smaller, more attached, and a lot of communities like to integrate them into their tennis courts so that they can have a multi-sport facility,” said Sanchez.

Sanchez told WINK News his company has done at least 60 pickleball courts in 2023. With the U.S. Open Pickleball Championships hosted in Collier County, the interest is only growing.

“Naples is becoming kind of one of the capitals of pickleball,” said a pickleball player from Naples. “We’ve got U.S. Open championships, and we’ve got a lot of courts being built. Every real estate development that’s coming out of the ground has to. It’s just absolutely table stakes to have, you know, at least ample number of pickleball courts.”

Only time will tell if the popularity of tennis diminishes and people shift more toward pickleball, possibly the hottest-growing sport in Southwest Florida.