Pickleball in India: Big leagues beckon

Natekar Sports and Gaming will invest $10 million over the next three to five years to promote pickleball in India and Asia-Pacific countries. “The money will be spent on a variety of things—leagues, tournaments, grassroots development, player/talent management—that are crucial to ensure that the game develops in the right sense,” says Natekar, who is founder and CEO of the World Pickleball League that will be played in India, at the CCI, in January 2025. “The vision is to get to India some of the best players. We have a lot of plans, but I want to keep them under wraps for now… I’ll reveal them at the right time.”

Sportstech platform KheloMore observed a similar pattern over the last year. Its co-founder and COO Ujwal Deole reveals that when they launched the app for making sports venues accessible, the most-popular sports then were box cricket, football and badminton. Then came tennis and squash. “Since the last year or so, two new racket sports started emerging: Paddle and pickleball. Paddle is still a Tier I market game. But pickleball has picked up and gotten into Tier II and III markets. It remains to be seen how paddle picks up, but pickleball has a natural scalability factor,” he explains. 

Also read: Corporates and HNIs have given a push to pickleball: Gaurav Natekar

KheloMore and AIPA in June announced an investment of Rs5 crore to build 100 pickleball courts across the country in two years. “It’s been a fruitful partnership with AIPA. We’ve had a great equation with them from the get-go,” says Deole. “We saw the good work done by the association and decided to partner with them to help promote pickleball. Growing a sport has multiple layers to it… you need more venues, more marketing, more tournaments, more glamour. We added the tech angle in terms of our software for booking courts and registration platforms.”

For instance, he claims, all AIPA tournaments now happen with the KheloMore app, and 200 to 250 courts all over India can be booked on the platform. Deole attributes this to the fancy the general public has taken to pickleball. For instance, six months ago, there was not a single pickleball court in Thane, and 15 courts have come up there now, he says. 

Support from such sport enthusiasts is always welcome for a new-age sport. Prabhoo says the needle has certainly moved, albeit a bit slowly. “Financial challenges are always there for a big-budget tournament like the World Pickleball Championship. But we are happy that though in small amounts, sponsorship has started coming in. And it’s not only in kind, but also in cash,” he tells Forbes India, adding that tournaments like the Championship and the World Pickleball League will catapult it into a mainstream sport. “People will understand it’s recreation, but also a competitive sport.”  

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DCB Bank, Skechers and a car dealer, which will showcase their model at the event, have infused cash, while ITC Foods’ snacking brand Bingo! has announced a five-year deal to promote pickleball in India, starting with the Championship. “There were hardly 50 courts in Mumbai last July; now there are at least 500. And hundreds of courts are being built in places like Surat, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. There’s been a huge boom, an explosion in pickleball. Earlier people would ask, ‘What is pickleball?’. Now they say, ‘Oh, you play pickleball’. A complete shift has happened,” says Prabhoo, adding that the fact that the Championship will be telecast on Doordarshan will help take the game to the farthest corners of the country. “This tournament will help us develop the game at the grassroots level… in Tier III and IV cities, rural India. Because it is such an aspirational game, we will find talent there who can play at the global stage. We will hopefully have a few Indian idols who will play at the highest level.”

Vrushali Thakare, who won a bronze in the 19-plus women’s doubles at the Asia Pickleball Games and will play in the Championship, knows what it is to rise through the ranks. The 26-year-old hails from Jalgaon, Maharashtra, and began playing pickleball in her first year while pursuing a BSc in electronics. She used to play badminton, but when introduced to pickleball by her coach, she did well in the first tournament that she participated in—winning a gold in the women’s doubles and a silver in the mixed doubles. “I didn’t even have a paddle to begin with. But this sport has given me a lot… we get to meet new people, new players and learn from them,” she says. “It’s a proud moment that India is hosting this tournament and we’ll get an opportunity to play with some serious talent,” adds Thakare, who has been practising on court for three hours four days a week besides spending a couple of hours in the gym and meditating.

Also read: The ultimate aim is to take pickleball to the Olympics: Arvind Prabhoo

A first-year student of sports management from Mumbai, Vanshik Kapadia, is also thrilled to take part in the World Pickleball Championship. “This is one of the biggest tournaments that I’ll be playing in. I am super excited and cannot wait to win laurels for my team. Playing in a competition like this is fun and thrilling… the exposure you get by competing against some of the world’s best talent is something else,” says Kapadia, a gold medallist in the 19-plus men’s doubles and mixed doubles at the Asia Pickleball Games.

The 19-year-old played tennis from the age of six to 16 before his father got him to play pickleball. “I fell in love with the game. There has been no looking back,” he says. 

Deole of KheloMore—the registration and marketing partner for the World Pickleball Championship—says they are willing to pump in more money to make the sport easily accessible and are partnering with corporates too. “The long-term vision is to make sure pickleball is available in 100 cities and towns in the country. Right now, it’s there in 15 to 18 cities of which only four or five have enough supply. We’ll keep committing to the game as the market grows,” he says. “We are talking to people in Madhya Pradesh and Kolkata, and have partnered with someone in Sikkim too. The sport is growing exponentially in the bigger states like Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat and Delhi.”

Amid all the euphoria, Natekar says it’s important that the right people come into the sport and with the right vision. “Indian sport has galloped far, but it’s also been held back because a lot of people in the ecosystem don’t understand sport, they don’t have the best interest of the sport in mind. It’s for a short-term gain. And that has been the biggest tragedy of Indian sport,” he says, adding a word of caution. “While there’s a lot of interest in pickleball, we’ll have to see how it translates for everybody, and especially for the game.”

Prabhoo, though, remains an optimist and has the final say. “It is only going to go upward from here for pickleball.”