The cheapest growth channel a pickleball club has is already walking through the front door with a phone. Most clubs don't treat it like one.
That matters more this fall than it did a year ago. David Johnson's recent piece in The Dink tracked nine facilities that cut their asking prices by an average of 39% in ten weeks. His line is blunt: "Your facility is not worth what you spent building it." It's the reset we described in After the Gold Rush. When courts stop being scarce, the basis of competition moves to community and experience. The clubs that win are the ones people want to belong to.
Your community is built on the court, but it's discovered on the feed. If your community doesn't show up where the next member is scrolling, it might as well not exist to them. And the people who make it show up aren't just your marketing team. They're creators.
This post is the creator playbook for clubs: why creators matter, what one Utah club did, and the specific moves operators can make to create a creator friendly environment.
Deloitte's 2026 Digital Media Trends found that 52% of consumers say social media is their primary way of discovering new content — 73% among Gen Z. In sports specifically, WSC Sports' fan study found 62% of fans discovered a new team, player or league through short-form video.
On those platforms, the brand isn't the trusted voice. Edelman found 60% of consumers trust what a creator says about a brand more than what the brand says about itself. And the creator doesn't need to be famous. Edelman's 2026 analysis puts it as "proximity matters more than popularity" — a creator with a small, aligned following can drive more action than one with millions.
For a club, that's the whole opportunity. The most trusted voice for "is this a good place to play?" is a local player who plays there, posts about it, and has a few thousand followers in your metro. You probably already have some!
Premier Pickleball in Herriman, Utah has become home base for a tight group of local creators. On any given night you'll find Randy Nguyen (@randypickleball), Braden McCoy (@drillmorepickleball), Sione Moli (@holymolipb), Chase Ferrel (@gottabethelefty.pb) and Josh Maxwell (@josh.max) playing and creating content at the same club.
Owner and co-founder Molly Hansen is candid that it started organically:
"We didn't set out to do this. It happened organically, and it really started with one person: Randy. He was already a coach and ambassador for Premier, and at some point he started creating content on his own. I remember seeing what he was putting out and immediately understanding how much impact that could have for the club, players finding us who never would have otherwise, people getting a real feel for what Premier is like before they ever walk through the door. From there it became intentional."
Here's what intentional looks like.
1. Make "yes" the default. Premier's creators get free memberships and can shoot any time without asking first. When the club runs bigger events, creators are invited to grab b-roll, or the club shares its own footage with them. Swag and unlimited replays are included, and the club will even cut custom replay edits for them. Every one of those removes a reason not to post. Braden put it best: "Just don't make it feel like a favor. The moment a creator has to ask permission to film, you lose some of the magic. Treat us like we're part of the club, because honestly, we are."
2. Put every court on camera. This is the piece that makes the first one sustainable. Molly said:
"Having a camera on every court is really what makes a lot of this possible day to day. We're not having to prioritize which court a creator can shoot on or work around a schedule, every court is already covered. That's cut down a lot on the back and forth for our staff. It's the infrastructure that lets us say yes to creators easily instead of it becoming a scheduling headache."
Josh Maxwell, a pediatrician who makes tips for everyday players, says the cameras mean "personal filming is rarely needed" at Premier: "This makes creating short-clip content effortless, plus it's tons of fun to spam the replay button." If a creator has to book a special court, set up a tripod, or ask the front desk, you've built friction into your marketing.
3. Kill the editing tax. The hard part of pickleball content isn't filming. It's finding eight seconds of gold in two hours of footage. Chase described his workflow before Premier: record everything on a GoPro, upload to a laptop, sort through roughly two hours of video to find a couple of clips, then edit and post. Now:
"When there's a rally I want to post, I head to one of the 'Replay' buttons around the court to have it emailed to me after our session is done. From there I can easily download and complete the entire editing, and eventual posting, on my smartphone. This has been 10x more productive than my previous workflow."
Randy's version is shorter: "The replay system saves me the hassle of bringing my own equipment, exporting, and clipping hours of video. Now I just have the clips I need." Sione says the difference is that he "can be focused on playing and let the footage take care of itself."
The fewer steps between the point and the post, the more posts you get.
4. Ask for one thing: the collab tag. Premier's only ask is light. When a post is relevant to the club, the creator makes it an Instagram or Facebook collab with Premier's account, so it's cross-promoted instead of living only on the creator's page. That one step is the growth mechanic. A collab post runs on both accounts, reaches audiences with little overlap, and picks up an algorithmic tailwind when both sides engage (Fast Company called it "growing together"). The creator grows, the club grows, and nobody paid for an ad.
5. Let them be themselves. Every creator we talked to said some version of the same thing. Randy: "If clubs want good creators I think the biggest thing is letting them be themselves and making sure that they feel appreciated." Sione's advice to owners was simply "really get to know them" — Premier's owners played with the creators, organized things for them, and "didn't try to force a community. They built relationships, and the community followed." None of Premier's creator content has a "join now" call to action in it. It doesn't need one.
6. Recruit for it. Premier now weighs content when it hires. Molly: "As we've continued hiring coaches and ambassadors, we now actually factor in the content they create, the quality of it, how consistently they post." Sione is proof it works in both directions. He started posting in May with zero followers, and within a few months was coaching and running clinics at Premier.
The less obvious benefit of a creator-friendly club is that creators attract creators. Sione started because of Randy: "He was the first creator I followed who I felt was genuinely awesome at making pickleball easy to understand." Chase says making Premier his home club "was the biggest catalyst for my commitment to content creation," and that playing alongside new and established creators let him see what was working.
Nobody at Premier describes it as a competition. Randy: "It's never a competition, I see it more as ambitious people growing together because we all inspire each other." Sione describes them as "building a place in Utah where everyone can turn to one of us for something" — tips, paddle reviews, gameplay breakdowns, "or just someone being fun and wild."
Braden, the creator Randy says inspires him most, describes the same thing: "Nobody in this group is trying to outdo anybody. We're just trying to lift each other up. We appreciate every kind of player, the guy picking up a paddle for the first time all the way to the tournament grinders, because we all remember being that beginner ourselves."
There's a quality signal in that, too. Josh has played at many of the clubs in the area and says Premier's facilities, players and culture are the best around. His read: "Content creators want to be where good pickleball is happening."
That's a content engine with five different lanes, and the club at the center of every one of them.
Randy Nguyen — RandyPickleball
Randy is where Premier's creator scene started. He was coaching and serving as an ambassador for the club before he ever posted. Molly trusted him to run soft-launch events before the doors opened and to start Premier's first leagues. He began making content because he thought pro-tour commentary "could be more entertaining but still informative," and he has since moved into honest paddle reviews and gameplay for players at every level. His goal isn't just a bigger audience: "my overall goal is to build a community of people that care about each other and growing the sport together." Randy joined the PodPlay Creator Collective in September.
Braden McCoy — DrillMorePickleball
Braden is a husband, dad and three-year player who documents rec pickleball as it actually is: the good, the bad and the ugly. He cross-posts to Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and YouTube, and Premier is where he films. He joined the PodPlay Creator Collective in May. Since then his Instagram following has roughly doubled, and two of his collab reels with PodPlay have passed 100,000 views. In his words: "I'm not out here trying to be the best player at Premier. I just want the guy who lost 11-2 in rec play to watch my video and feel like his match mattered. That's really the whole point of what I do."
We built PodPlay so this doesn't depend on getting lucky with one creator. Three pieces do the work:
Across 290+ clubs and 1.9 million players, that's the difference between recording pickleball and getting it seen.
Molly is clear-eyed about attribution: "Honestly, it's hard to point to a hard number and say this many members came directly from creator content." She treats it as "an ongoing awareness campaign" rather than a lead-generation channel — with Premier's name and logo on every court, the club is in almost every shot.
That's the right frame, and it's measurable. Track collab-post reach on your club account, how many clips your players submit, and add "saw us on social / a creator" to your new-member intake. The numbers won't be perfect. They'll still tell you whether the engine is running.
In a market where courts are no longer scarce, the club people want to belong to wins. Creators are how people find out which club that is. Make yes the default, put every court on camera, strip out the editing, ask for the collab tag, and let people be themselves.
Want to see how clip capture, Go Viral and the Creator Collective would work at your club? Book a demo.
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