No, Pickleball Hasn't Peaked. Ottawa's Court Supply Has.
Every so often someone tells me pickleball is a fad that's already crested — a pandemic hobby that will fade back into the retirement-community margins it supposedly came from. The data says the opposite. Nationally the sport is still climbing fast, and its player base is getting younger every year, not older. In Ottawa, and right here in Ward 13, the story isn't fading interest — it's a supply problem the city has been slow to solve.
The national numbers keep climbing
Participation estimates vary by tracking body, but they all point the same direction. Multiple 2026 industry reports put U.S. players in the low-to-mid twenty millions, up from under five million just four years earlier. Growth rates for 2025-2026 are still running in the mid-to-high teens percent annually, and analysts tracking the sport describe it as still accelerating rather than levelling off.
- Median player age has dropped from roughly 41 to about 35
- Players under 35 now make up close to 40% of the base
- The gender split has moved from a wide gap toward roughly even
- The 65+ cohort is still growing in absolute numbers — it's just no longer the majority
In other words, the "seniors' sport" framing that shaped a lot of early municipal planning assumptions is out of date. The people showing up for court time now span every age bracket, which means the demand isn't a temporary demographic bulge that will age out. It's a permanent shift in how the city's residents want to use recreational space.
Ottawa's own numbers back this up
The city doesn't need outside consultants to tell it this is happening — its own facilities are already showing the strain. The Rideau Sports Centre, one of the most active pickleball venues in the city, caps indoor registration at 700 spots and still carries a waitlist running into the hundreds. That's one club. The City has responded by launching an Outdoor Tennis and Pickleball Strategy, explicitly citing steadily increasing demand for court space as pickleball remains the fastest-growing sport in North America.
Right now the city's Recreation, Cultural and Facility Services department oversees 315 outdoor tennis courts and 172 outdoor pickleball courts across all of Ottawa. A strategy process is underway to figure out how that inventory should grow and who should manage it. That's a reasonable step. But a strategy document is not a court, and it's worth asking how long the gap between demand and delivery is going to run before anyone is accountable for closing it.
The boom has a cost side too
Growth this fast isn't free, and it's worth being honest about that in the same piece that's arguing for more courts. Orthopaedic clinics are seeing a sharp rise in pickleball-related Achilles tendon injuries — one multi-year clinic review found foot and ankle injury cases increased more than sixfold between 2019 and 2023, with Achilles tendon rupture as the single most common diagnosis in that group. It's the sport's most serious injury: a sudden push-off or change of direction can tear the tendon outright, usually requiring surgery and months of rehab.
What's notable is who's getting hurt. This used to be an injury rarely seen outside high-level sprinters and jumpers. Clinicians are now reporting it regularly in players in their 60s and 70s — a demographic, and often specifically women in that age range, who historically had little exposure to this kind of traumatic tendon injury before pickleball brought them onto a court running lateral sprints for the first time in decades. Nationally, the injury bill for the sport was already estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars as of 2023, before the more recent surge in players.
That's not an argument against building more courts — it's an argument for building them thoughtfully. If the city is going to keep expanding access, pairing new court capacity with basic injury-prevention programming (warm-up clinics, beginner orientation for players returning to sport after years away) is a cheap addition next to the cost of the courts themselves, and it's the kind of detail that gets skipped when a strategy document focuses on court counts alone.
What I'd actually track
If I'm elected, this is exactly the kind of file where I'd want outcome measures attached before council approves anything — not just a strategy with good intentions, but a public delivery timeline: how many net new courts, by when, funded from what line, and a public dashboard tracking it the same way I've pushed for on infrastructure and liability reporting elsewhere. Growing demand paired with a vague roadmap is exactly the outputs-versus-outcomes gap I keep writing about on this blog.
Come see it for yourself
I'm working on confirming a date for a friendly pickleball/tennis charity match against Councillor King at the Rideau Sports Centre, benefiting Roots and Culture Canada. It's a fun event, but it's also a decent stand-in for the argument above: one of the busiest courts in the city, with a waitlist to prove it. Watch this space for the date. I'm still... waiting
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