I’m often asked a deceptively simple question: what’s the optimal number of members per court for a pickleball club? The punchline is that there isn’t a universal answer. The number changes dramatically depending on whether your members get uncapped free play, a fixed allotment, or just a discount. Before you can reason about “members per court,” you have to pick a membership model.
At PodPlay, we see more clubs every month than any single operator could possibly tour. The team at PodPlay has the added advantage of having been in the operators' shoes before (see Built by Players for Players), so membership construction and business logic is part of PodPlay's DNA. Across that dataset, one pattern is obvious: the clubs that grow fastest and run smoothest are the ones that match their membership model to their operating realities–court inventory, peak-time concentration, local price sensitivity, and their appetite for community building. Below is a framework distilled from those patterns.
Clubs gravitate toward memberships for a few consistent reasons.
For operators, the appeal is threefold:
1) Recurring revenue - calms the nerves; it smooths out volatility and allows simple napkin math. N members multiplied by the monthly fee yields quick projections for franchise planning and breakeven timelines. It’s also a legacy of the gym era–a time when operators didn’t have the software to meter usage, track open play, or price to demand. The problem is that a one-size-fits-all membership is almost never priced correctly for most customers. It becomes profitable only when the number of “overpayers” exceeds the “underpayers.” Gyms have historically depended on breakage–members who don’t show up. That’s a fragile foundation for a sports club and puts operators at odds with their customers.
2) Load balancing - you can steer customers into off-peak hours with the right structure. An off-peak tier appeals to a predictable demographic: time-flexible, price-sensitive, high-usage players.
3) Creating Community - and then there’s the human layer. People like belonging to things. A membership badge, digital or physical, creates ownership, community gravity, and a sense of fairness.
Players value memberships for parallel reasons: more value per dollar once certain thresholds are crossed, flexibility, perks, and–controversially but undeniably–scarcity and status.
These aren’t mutually exclusive. We have seen top performing clubs deploy two of them side-by-side.
1. All-You-Can-Eat (“Free Play”) Memberships
This is simultaneously the most common model in use and deeply flawed unless you add the appropriate guardrails to avoid abuse.
The model: one monthly (or annual) fee, uncapped play. It usually carries a higher price point and often bundles other perks.
Why it sells: it’s simple. Pay a fee, play for free, whenever you want. The incentives are clear, and for high-frequency players, irresistible.
Where it breaks: unlimited models inevitably run into congestion. Everyone wants to play at the same time. Peak hours clog up, availability evaporates, and a small but meaningful percentage of members hoard reservations–booking multiple daily slots far in advance and deciding later which to keep. We have regularly seen tech-savvy members write scripts to gobble up slots as soon as they become available. Members rapidly become annoyed if capacity is not available or they regularly end up on an open play waitlist 50 people deep.
Free rider dynamics appear quickly. If a member can book a free court and bring three non-members at zero cost, then one membership covers four players. The economics of this kind of membership can collapse unless you close the loophole. PodPlay clubs solve this by pairing unlimited memberships with pricing features like non-member fees and transparent charges tied to actual usage (spot pricing is more complicated but inherently more "fair").
The fix #1: guardrails. The most effective tool is a cap on how many active reservations a member can hold at once (the limit could be 1 or more). When one reservation is used, they regain the ability to book another. This single constraint eliminates most hoarding behavior without damaging the value proposition.
The fix #2: direct traffic. Allow for members to play unlimited (with or without guardrails) during off-peak hours, and enforce limits during peak hours.
A practical rule of thumb framework for an unlimited-heavy club:
≈ 1,440 playable player-hours per court per month
If you give each member 10 playable hours, that implies 144 members per court (with no room for non-members).
Give each member ~14.4 hours and the target becomes 100 members per court.
At 28.8 hours, you’re down to 50 members per court.
In practice, because demand pools heavily in peak windows, and clubs want to make space for non-members as well as members, these numbers don’t translate 1:1 to lived experience. Across PodPlay clubs, we consistently see the sweet spot for unlimited models landing between 40–80 members per court. Above that, you sacrifice too much availability and/or create traffic jams for members; below that, you are leaving recurring revenue on the table if you are a heavily membership focused club.
2. Metered Memberships (Play Pass Models)
Instead of unlimited play, the club offers a capped allotment–free reservations, or more commonly, a bank of open play passes. PodPlay expresses this through “Play Passes” in a digital wallet that auto-apply and expire monthly.
Benefits to the club: you know the maximum free usage embedded in each membership. You can price membership to your true cost structure. When passes correspond to open play sessions, you also control when play happens–an underrated advantage for smoothing utilization.
Benefits to the player: obvious value. A clean example:
Open Play Membership–$50/month
The member sees $100 in value for $50. The club knows some players won’t use their full allotment. The club also chooses when to schedule those open play blocks, often scheduling some/all during off-peak time that might otherwise sit empty.
How to reason about capacity:
If you run
You have 24 open play slots per day per court. Over 30 days, that’s 720 slots per month.
If each membership includes 10 passes and every member uses all 10, then 72 members would completely consume all open play capacity for that court. That’s your hard upper bound. Most clubs run comfortably below that so they can serve non-members, maintain flexibility, and accommodate natural variation.
The right number of metered members per court is therefore a direct function of the number of passes you grant, the number of players per court per open play session, and the amount of open play inventory you choose to provide.
3. Discounted-Play Memberships
This is the most flexible, and often the most scalable, model: no free play, just reduced pricing on reservations or open play or other programming.
It carries several advantages. First, value is easy to articulate. If a non-member court hour is $40 and a membership costs $49/month and yields a 25% discount, the break-even is five hours per month. That’s a clear, honest pitch.
Second, discounted-play tiers sidestep almost all hoarding behaviors. Even a modest per-hour charge pushes members to book what they actually intend to use.
Third, these memberships tend to attract the “casual core” –players who want to belong to the community and play with some regularity, but aren’t ready for a heavy monthly commitment. A $29-$59 membership is approachable. Clubs rarely need to cap sales of these memberships, which makes them excellent for recurring-revenue growth.
Fourth, these memberships have the least “freeloader” problems because invitees still have to pay to play (even if they are receiving a discounted member rate).
The number of membership tiers you offer is just as important as the pricing of each one.
This is a choice-architecture problem. Each new tier adds friction, and too many tiers make customers hesitate. A membership should only exist if it solves a specific problem for a specific audience–weekday grinders, juniors, new players who thrive in open play, seniors who prefer midday blocks, competitive ladders, etc. If two tiers overlap, merge them. The strongest clubs keep things clean: one to three core memberships, with simple variants like monthly vs. annual or individual vs. couple vs. family.
Keep the storefront simple and the economics legible and customers move faster.
Memberships live on a spectrum between exclusivity and inclusivity. It’s difficult to optimize for both at once.
Exclusive tiers promise scarcity and status. They generally need tight caps, limited availability windows, and concrete perks that truly differentiate them.
Inclusive tiers optimize for value and community gravity. They broaden your user base, deepen engagement, and produce downstream revenue in programming, retail, F&B, and events.
Both can work–just not in the same tier.
Court time is perishable inventory. Memberships are simply mechanisms for converting that inventory into recurring revenue while shaping when and how people play. The right model is the one that aligns your economics with your demand curve. Once you get that right, the question of “how many members per court?” becomes a math problem instead of a guessing game–and the business becomes far easier to manage.
PodPlay gives venue operators all the tools they need to digitally manage a physical space - integrating video replays, digital scoreboards, and autonomous functionality with a reservation engine, event management, coach connect, membership module, and payments.
Originally built to power PingPod, the network of futuristic autonomous ping pong clubs, PodPlay is now being used to manage venues across pickleball, padel, ping pong, golf simulators, tennis, cricket, soccer and pool, with more experience verticals to come in the future.
If you’re interested in learning more, request a demo.
Every great company has a compass and a catchphrase. The compass is the mission statement—the guiding “why” that orients employees, investors, and customers over decades. The catchphrase is the slogan—the cultural spark that sticks in your head and rallies people in the moment.
Sep 25, 2025