Paddle up!

Turning former retail space into a dedicated destination for North America’s fastest-growing sport, Smash Pickleball serves up a state-of-the-art indoor facility

Photo: Ed Sater and Cam Taylor of Smash Pickleball

IT’S PROBABLY OBVIOUS why someone might start a pickleball business. Pickleball is booming in a way few sports ever have. Judging from the way its players talk about it, it is only marginally less addictive than heroin or cigarettes, and that might even be a conservative assessment.

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“Pickleball addiction is a real thing,” Ed Sater, owner of Smash Pickleball, says in an email, before we’d even spoken. “It can take over your life. One game and you will be hooked. It will all start innocently enough and then you will eat, sleep and breathe pickleball. You will even start dreaming about it.”

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This is the kind of talk that business majors, entrepreneurs and cartels salivate over. Addictions like this can be big business; and all the better if it’s legal and good for you, too.

So, when Sater caught the ­pickleball bug last fall, his business acumen spun into gear (Sater is also president of home renovation firm BlueKey Design+Build Inc.). He saw a need for an indoor facility — not just a ­warehouse with a bunch of pickleball courts crammed in, but a purpose-built facility for what is, by some estimations, the fastest-growing sport in North America.

He had started training with long-time pickleball player Cam Taylor (a pickleball industry vet who runs the Taylor Pickleball Academy, and who is now the director of operations for Smash), and the two started to warm to the idea of partnering up.

“I was already starting to plan how this would look,” Sater says. “I had this beautiful conceptual package together for what this would look like. I approached Cam, and said, ‘Cam, I’d like to talk to you about something…’”

So, what is that package? While there are places to play pickleball indoors, Sater wanted something that is both suited to the specifics of pickleball and the social aspects of the game. He settled on a space at 1040 Wharncliffe Road (a former Bad Boy Furniture ­outlet), designed a space to ­accommodate nine courts, re-­configured the mechanical and HVAC systems (so as not to have airflow that would disrupt play) and included a 1,200-foot retail space, kitchen, social hub and licensed area.

Part of Smash Pickleball’s business model includes retail sales — a place where you can come and test out the latest in pickleball paddles and gear. “Everything we did was purposeful,” Sater says. “We could have easily put in 12 courts and been a pickleball warehouse, but that’s not what we chose.”

This, says Taylor, cuts against the grain of how indoor pickleball courts are being developed in Canada. “It’s not just about how many courts you get in, it’s about how you are best utilizing the space for the members,” he says.

Both he and Sater agree that the first rush of capital into the pickleball space had produced middling facilities, which they believe is telling of owners looking for a quick return, not a real investment in the sport. “We feel like we’re leading that change,” Taylor says.

Smash Pickleball, which opened in mid-October, operates on a membership-based model, selling a couple of different options — a Smash level at $59 per month plus $6 per hour court fees, or a Full Smash level at $159 per month with no court fees and additional benefits (there’s a student membership as well, and the club will also offer leagues, social programs and clinics). An advanced sales campaign, says Sater, was instantly successful. “We knew it was going to be busy, but it just goes to show there’s a big market for what we are doing — people were putting their credit cards down four months before we opened.”

Sater has plans for Smash Pickleball extending well beyond the Forest City. The first franchised location, in Collingwood, is already in development, and Sater says he receives a couple of emails a day from people interested in getting on board. “Our branding and our business model are very attractive to people,” he says. “They see the value in what we’re offering.”

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And so too will the players, say Sater and Taylor. “There’s not many other sports where you would accept playing in something that was not built for you,” Taylor notes. Yet pickleball players do, all the time, taking over public tennis courts or taping out makeshift courts wherever they can. “Our tagline is, ‘You deserve better.’”

“These are not just pickleball courts,” Taylor adds. “These are ­awesome ­pickleball courts.” Kieran Delamont