n 2022, the Santa Monica Tennis Center in Southern California had a lone tennis court. Today, that court is gone.

In its place are four pickleball courts, attached to what is now called the Santa Monica Pickleball Center.

In 2019, Cincinnati’s Sawyer Point Park had eight worn-down tennis courts.

Today, the park has 24 pickleball courts, six of which are drawn atop the three tennis courts that remain.

The lost tennis courts at the Santa Monica Pickleball Center and Sawyer Point Park are hardly alone.

They are among the thousands of tennis courts identified by The New York Times that have given way to — or now share space with — pickleball.

By analyzing nearly 100,000 aerial photographs, we were able to identify more than 26,000 outdoor pickleball courts made in the last seven years — a majority of them at the expense of once-exclusive tennis spaces and created since the onset of the pandemic in 2020. In total, we found more than 8,000 tennis courts that had been transformed for pickleball.

By 2024, 14 pickleball courts were being built or drawn each day, on average, across the country.

Our analysis is not comprehensive: By trade group estimates, there are more than 270,000 tennis courts — and now 68,000 pickleball courts — in the United States, including indoor courts that we were not able to track. But the photographs are an expansive, bird’s-eye view of what has been happening on the ground in all corners of the country: There’s only so much ready asphalt to go around, and pickleball can’t get enough of it.

‘As Many Courts as Possible’

Jon Neeter, the owner of the Santa Monica Pickleball Center, said his former tennis business had been doing very well for a single court with a pro shop. A lifelong tennis player and coach, he wanted his shop to be a home away from home for regular clients. “That was one of the things that made it really tough to take that plunge to go all in” on pickleball, he said.

By 2024, just a year after the pickleball conversion, Neeter said the business was bringing in seven times as much revenue as it ever did as a tennis-only shop.

One explanation is basic geometry. Using the same square footage, Neeter can now host four times as many people, across four times as many classes and events. He can schedule different programs simultaneously, like a children’s camp on one court and a competitive drill on another, or lessons at two different skill levels.

“When I had a single court, if I had one person in a class that didn’t fit, I couldn’t bump them over to another court where maybe everybody would feel more comfortable,” he said. He’s also now hosting corporate events for big companies and has seen a big boost in retail sales.

The conversions have been successful at many public spaces, too. At Sawyer Point Park, more than 150 people a day play pickleball during group sessions. And the swarm of visitors has prompted more upgrades across the park, including at a neighboring ice rink and amphitheater.

Alex Mouton, the facility coordinator and head instructor at the Cayce Pickleball Complex in South Carolina, said “the amount of traffic coming in and out” had changed the area for the better since the conversion of four tennis courts into 16 bright blue pickleball courts. The complex has hosted five amateur and professional tournaments since the opening of the new courts in March, bringing in revenue for local hotels and businesses, she said.

Not every new pickleball court rises from the ashes of a tennis court, however. Many, like six of the 24 at Sawyer Point, are hybrid courts, where the smaller pickleball outlines overlap with larger tennis borders.

The most common approach, our analysis showed, is to overlay a single pickleball court in the middle of the tennis court, where they share a net. (Officially, the pickleball net is supposed to be slightly shorter than the tennis net.)

But there are far more variations available. A pickleball court is 20 feet wide and 44 feet long — just under a third of the size of a tennis court, even less if you count the out-of-bounds running space afforded to tennis courts. That means there are multiple ways to draw pickleball courts on a tennis court. (Four is the most we saw crammed into one tennis court.)

One thing common to all these arrangements: At no point can tennis and pickleball players play at the same time.

The Fight to Save Tennis Courts

The U.S. Tennis Association, unsurprisingly, wants to avoid losing court space to pickleball.

Ted Loehrke, managing director of section partnerships, said the USTA relies on relationships across its 17 regions to boost the sport locally. It monitors things like town hall agendas for mentions of tennis and pickleball, then makes sure “somebody is there to speak up on behalf of tennis.”

An email from a USTA regional officer in 2022 provided guidance for a coming city council meeting by saying, “The point must be made that one court given to pickleball temporarily is just the beginning of pickleball’s attempt to take over as many courts as possible.”

Tensions between tennis and pickleball have eased in the last year or so, Loehrke said, as stand-alone pickleball courts have become more popular. Indeed, our analysis found that the number of new pickleball courts created atop tennis courts declined for the first time last year, even as the number of new stand-alone courts — and pickleball courts overall — continued to rise.

These new courts are frequently built on land near tennis facilities, like open fields of grass or dirt, or parking lots.

New Courts Can Cost $1 Million

Building new courts isn’t cheap. Rich Gallagher, chief executive of the YMCA of the Sunbelt, which has two branches in southwestern Georgia, said his organization spent about $150,000 on resurfacing to convert four tennis courts to 12 pickleball courts. He said brand-new courts would have cost roughly $1 million.

But they may be increasingly preferable even to hybrid courts. “A pickleballer wants just their lines,” Gallagher said. “A tennis player just wants their lines.”

At Jaquith Park in Newberg, Oregon, the parks and recreation district is building several new stand-alone pickleball courts after an experiment with hybrids. Nick Konen, a director for the parks district, said that “for the longevity of pickleball and tennis, there does need to be some separation.”

Two of the park’s hybrid courts are even returning to tennis only.

Konen, who was previously on the town’s pickleball advisory committee, said he’s feeling pressure from his pickleball-loving constituents to get the new courts done. (They helped propel him to his board seat.) “The pickleball community, now that I’ve been elected, they are wanting to see results,” he said, “which I totally understand, but they’re really hounding me.”

‘There’s an Addiction to It’

When asked if there’s a risk he might regret switching his business from tennis to pickleball, Neeter said there was a “zero percent chance” that it’s a temporary fad. It’s weaving into “the fabric of people’s lives,” he said. “It’s their social circles. It’s like everything. There’s an addiction to it.”

Gary Lessis, a Cincinnati resident and volunteer who had pushed for the city to replace Sawyer Point Park’s tennis courts, said, “When we first started back in 2020, it was primarily 70-year-olds” playing pickleball. Today, he said, the fastest-growing segment is players 20 to 35.

Census numbers back that up to an extent. In the areas where our analysis shows new pickleball courts over time, there’s a clear trend: The neighborhoods with new courts are getting younger, less suburban, less wealthy.

Kim Mills, an associate director of the Bainbridge Family YMCA in southwestern Georgia, said her small town used to have a bowling alley and a movie theater, both of which are now closed.

After the YMCA’s pickleball court conversions, she said, “people immediately started coming and playing — especially the young people.” She said the sport is more social than tennis. “You can hear them laughing and talking.”

The old tennis courts, she said, had fallen into disrepair. Lessis said the same of Sawyer Point Park. In many of the aerial photographs, you can see cracks marring the tennis courts.

None of this means that tennis is a dying sport. According to research by the USTA, tennis participation has seen a boost since the pandemic, though not as propulsive as pickleball’s. But even tennis die-hards acknowledge that there’s more the sport can do to be welcoming.

“If tennis players aren’t using the courts, then they have no one to blame but themselves,” said Tanner DeVarennes, director of operations at the Hartford Tennis Club in Connecticut. The club has no intention of converting any of its 12 green clay tennis courts to pickleball.

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Methodology

To track pickleball and tennis courts across the country, we started with a set of more than 12,000 locations with pickleball courts based on aggregated data from Pickleheads, the official court listing partner of USA Pickleball, and Open Street Map. We then obtained historical aerial images of each of these locations from the imagery and mapping company Vexcel.

We used computer vision tools to identify the precise locations of courts in each image, and whether they were pickleball or tennis courts (or hybrids). We primarily relied on “oriented bounding box detection,” a machine-learning technique, and manually annotated a training set of courts. We then used template matching to verify the outputs of the mod(EDel.

Finally, court locations were compared with each location’s historical imagery to identify new and changing courts over time.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Ethan Singer/Nora Williams/DeSean McClinton-Holland

c.2025 The New York Times Company