There's a sentence painted on a wall at Pickleball Kingdom in Watchung, New Jersey: Our Greatest Asset is Our Community.

What’s worth studying about Watchung is that they didn’t just put those words on a wall. They built around them. The community room sits directly beside the courts, separated by a 13-foot pane of glass that lets people watch the action without having to shout over it. It’s a simple idea, but it gets at something bigger: community isn’t just something you create with programming. It’s something you build into the club.

For most of the last five years, the pickleball business rewarded a single move: get open first. That era is over. Courts that were scarce in 2022 are common in 2026, and when supply catches demand, the game stops being about who builds first and starts being about who operates best. In today’s market, courts are a commodity and community is the moat. You can pour concrete in ninety days. You cannot pour belonging.

So the operator's real question isn't whether community matters. Everyone agrees it matters. The question is what you actually build to make it happen.

Todd and Chana Baron have an answer you can walk through.

Community needs a room

Pickleball is loud. Every operator who has tried to put a lounge, a birthday party, or a corporate event next to live courts knows the trade: wall it off and you kill the energy, leave it open and nobody can hear each other. Either way, the people stop gathering.

Watchung didn't take the trade. PICKLETILE built a 13-foot PICKLEGLASS™ wall between the courts and the community room, with a doorway integrated into the glass line, and ran a 4-foot glass railing along the mezzanine in the same material. The engineering was the hard part — a 4-inch slab, thinner than standard anchoring spec, forced a redrawn anchorage, and every panel came PE/SE-stamped for the architect and the building department. First contact to signed engineering solution took 14 days.

What that buys is a room with two settings at once.

"It's enclosed for all the good reasons, but not for all the bad reasons. You really feel part of it. You don't have to shout, you don't have to scream, and you can really enjoy being there and having a conversation normally. But you just turn around and you get to see everything." — Todd Baron

Read that as a community spec, not a construction one. People become regulars in the places where they can hear each other and still feel like they're in it. Watchung built the room where that happens and then painted its mission statement on the wall of it.

Community needs people to come back

The second requirement is duller and just as load-bearing: members have to keep showing up. Community is mostly a function of repeat presence — the same faces, often enough, for long enough that they turn into a crew.

Lighting is one of the quietest inputs to that, and the one most operators buy on price, because the spec sheet is unfamiliar territory. Todd went the other way and leaned on LSI, the Official Lighting Sponsor of USA Pickleball, whose fixtures are engineered and built in the U.S. for even, glare-controlled coverage.

"There's a lot of science behind lighting, and I didn't know this. LSI was able to give me all that information very quickly, very easily. Because of that experience and expertise, they were able to guide me in getting the right type of lights that would give the results that I wanted." — Todd Baron

Then the line that tells you it worked: "No one has a headache."

That's the entire standard. Nobody walks off court complimenting the fixtures. They just see the ball cleaner, play a game longer than they meant to, and come back Thursday. Enough Thursdays and you have a community.

Community needs the friction taken out

The last piece is everything between walking in the door and playing with someone.

Watchung runs on PodPlay's Pro tier — staffed club, full stack. That means a camera on every court, screens that tell the room what it's doing, and a front door that doesn't produce a line.

"The PodPlay system allows for every single court to have a video camera on it to capture your play for an instant replay, but it also tells you what event is on every single court, which is connected to the scheduling system." — Todd Baron

The in-club monitors aren't just signage. They're a live read of the schedule — a screen over court 7 reading Court 7 Available, advanced open play called out on the next one, a live scoreboard on a third — so a member walking in alone can find the game they belong in without asking anyone. That's a social function dressed up as a display.

The door works the same way, and Todd is blunt about why:

"Everybody comes in, they have their QR code, we have two readers. There's never a line. We want people out there playing. I don't want them waiting online to get into play." — Todd Baron

Two readers and a QR code is not a headline feature. It's thirty seconds a member spends playing instead of queuing, every visit, forever. And replay is the part that pushes the community past the building: the best point of somebody's week gets captured without anyone thinking about it, and then it goes to the group chat, to the friends who weren't there, to the people who'll walk in next month.

What the three have in common

It would be easy to read Watchung as three separate procurement decisions that happened to go well. It isn't. Glass, light, and the operating layer are all answers to the same question — once every town has courts, what makes people belong to yours?

None of the three was the cheapest option in its category. That's the point. A room where people can gather next to a loud game, light that lets them play longer, and a front door that never backs up are not amenities bolted onto a club. They are the club, in the sense that matters: they're the conditions under which strangers turn into members and members turn into regulars.

Courts are table stakes. Experiences win. And the experiences are worth building because of what they're in service of — the sentence Todd and Chana put on the wall before they had anything to prove it.

If you're planning a club and want to see how the operating layer fits, talk to us.