Tennis clubs are adding padel and pickleball courts to meet demand. Here's why the amenities around those courts need to scale just as fast as the courts themselves.
Padel and Pickleball Are Moving Into Tennis Clubs. Are Your Amenities Keeping Up?
Introduction
If you own or manage a tennis club, you've probably already had the conversation: members asking when you're adding padel courts, or pickleball lines painted onto an underused court, or a hybrid space that can flex between sports depending on demand.
It's the right call. Padel has grown to roughly 30 million players worldwide with more than 63,000 courts, [projected to top 70,000 by 2026](https://privateclubmarketing.com/the-racquet-renaissance-10-membership-marketing-trends-transforming-private-tennis-clubs-in-2026/), and pickleball remains the fastest-growing sport in North America. Clubs that add these sports capture members they'd otherwise lose to dedicated pickleball and padel facilities opening nearby.
Here's what most clubs don't plan for: adding courts means adding court traffic, and court traffic means your existing amenities, locker rooms, seating areas, and hygiene infrastructure, get stress-tested by volume they weren't designed for. The clubs that get this right treat amenity planning as part of the diversification strategy, not an afterthought once the new courts are already booked solid.
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Why Diversification Changes Your Member Volume Math
A tennis-only club has a predictable rhythm: members book courts in blocks, sessions run 60 to 90 minutes, and turnover between bookings gives your facility natural breathing room.
Add padel and pickleball, and that rhythm breaks. Pickleball sessions run shorter and turn over faster, meaning more total members passing through your facility on a given day even if court-hours stay flat. Padel's doubles-only format packs more players onto fewer courts per session than singles tennis. The net effect: significantly higher foot traffic through your locker rooms, common areas, and any shared amenities, without necessarily adding square footage to handle it.
Clubs that only think about court construction when diversifying miss this. The courts are the visible investment. The amenity strain is the invisible one, and it shows up in member complaints about crowded locker rooms and diminished experience quality long before anyone connects it back to the new courts.
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What a Multi-Sport Membership Actually Expects
Members who play tennis, padel, and pickleball at the same club aren't the same as members who only ever played tennis there. They're often newer to the club generally, having joined specifically because you now offer the sport mix they want, and they're comparing your facility against dedicated single-sport clubs that built their entire member experience around one thing.
That comparison matters. A player who joined primarily for pickleball is measuring your club against dedicated pickleball facilities, many of which are new builds designed from the ground up with modern amenities. If your tennis club added pickleball courts onto existing 20-year-old infrastructure without upgrading anything else, the contrast is obvious to that member on day one.
The clubs winning the diversification play are the ones treating new court additions as a full member-experience refresh, not just a construction project.
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The Amenity Gap: Hygiene Infrastructure for a Higher-Traffic Facility
Here's the specific gap most diversifying clubs miss: footwear hygiene.
Tennis, padel, and pickleball each generate meaningfully different court-shoe wear patterns, and members increasingly rotate between all three at the same facility in the same week. That means more members cycling through your locker room with sweat-soaked shoes, more often, than your facility saw as a tennis-only operation.
A footwear sanitization kiosk addresses this directly and visibly. Members using it between a padel session and a pickleball match, or before heading straight from court to the clubhouse bar, get a tangible amenity upgrade that dedicated single-sport facilities often don't offer, because most were built around one sport's usage pattern rather than three.
Positioned near the transition zone between courts and the clubhouse, it becomes part of the answer to "what does this club offer that the new pickleball-only place down the street doesn't."
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Placement Strategy for Multi-Sport Facilities
Where you put hygiene amenities matters more in a diversified facility than a single-sport one, because member traffic patterns are more complex.
At the court-to-clubhouse transition. This is the highest-traffic chokepoint in a multi-sport facility, and where every member passes regardless of which sport they just played.
Near shared locker rooms. If padel, pickleball, and tennis members all use the same locker facilities, that shared space needs to handle three sports' worth of shoe traffic instead of one.
Visible from common seating areas. Members waiting for their next court booking, increasingly common in a facility running three sports on overlapping schedules, notice and ask about amenities they can see from where they're sitting.
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Building Amenities Into the Diversification Business Case
When you pitch new courts to your board or ownership group, the ROI conversation is usually about court utilization and membership growth. Add the amenity conversation to that same pitch.
A club that diversifies sports offerings without upgrading the surrounding experience risks winning new members on the court mix and losing them on everything else. A club that pairs new courts with amenities that scale to the higher traffic they generate builds the kind of member experience that gets talked about, which drives referrals in a way that court count alone doesn't.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Do padel and pickleball players expect different amenities than tennis players? Not fundamentally different, but they expect amenities that keep pace with the facility's positioning. A club marketing itself as a modern multi-sport destination needs amenities that match that positioning, not infrastructure built for tennis alone twenty years ago.
How much does foot traffic really increase when a club adds pickleball or padel? It varies by facility, but shorter session lengths and higher court utilization per square foot generally mean more total members passing through shared spaces per day, even without adding total court-hours.
Is a footwear sanitization kiosk worth it for a club that's mostly tennis with just a few padel or pickleball courts? Yes. The amenity is used by members across all three sports, not just the newer additions, and it differentiates the club for the crossover members who are actively comparing you to single-sport facilities.
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*Freshtrax footwear sanitization kiosks are designed for exactly this type of placement. [Learn about becoming an owner](https://getfreshtrax.com/owners), [see how the technology works](https://getfreshtrax.com/how-it-works), or [download the ROI Blueprint](https://getfreshtrax.com/) to see the full financial model.*