TopCourt Adds Pickleball Instruction to its Platform
| July 11, 2023
- Pickleball World Champions Ben Johns and Jessie Irvine join TopCourt as pickleball coaches
- Pickleball has become the fastest growing sport in North America with a two-year participation growth rate of 40%
- Currently TopCourt’s tennis coaching team features Venus Williams, Simona Halep, Alexander Zverev, Chris Evert, Iga Swiatek, and Nick Kyrgios
NEW YORK (August 25, 2022) – Today, TopCourt took the next step in the company’s growth by adding pickleball to its portfolio. Pickleball has more than 5 million active players in the United States, has enjoyed a 40% growth since 2020, boasts a celebrity following, and has been called by the Economist as “the fastest growing sport in America.”
Launched in 2020, TopCourt has become the go-to destination for professional tennis instruction, with a coaching team featuring the world’s best tennis players of the present, past and future, as well as the sport’s most legendary coaches.
Adding pickleball instructional platform to TopCourt enhances the consumer experience and expands its demographic reach. Pickleball is enjoying a youth movement in the United States as more and more schools add the sport to their physical education curriculum. Pickleball’s popularity has landed the sport TV deals with ESPN, CBS, and Tennis Channel.
As part of the new platform, TopCourt will partner with Professional Pickleball Association and its athletes, such as Ben Johns, who is the sport’s World No. 1 player in both singles and doubles, and Jessie Irvine, a World Top-5 player. Irvine’s instructional videos will be unveiled this week and feature pickleball and fitness lessons from beginner to professional level of play, and Johns’ lessons will follow shortly. Johns is considered to be the greatest pickleball player of all time.
“Pickleball has changed my life, and I am excited to have a platform such as TopCourt to become one of its official coaches. It’s been exciting to see pickleball grow exponentially over the last few years, and I look forward to helping make pickleball the most popular recreational sport around the world.”
— Ben Johns
In addition to record growth in the US, Montreal Gazette has called pickleball the fastest growing sport in Canada. The International Federation of Pickleball currently boasts 70 member countries, and a swelling global presence has inspired enthusiasts to lobby the International Olympic Committee for inclusion, perhaps in the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics. To mount a successful Olympic bid, pickleball needs competitive players in at least 75 countries.
Over the last few years, numerous professional sports have added e-learning capabilities to their fan experience. TopCourt became the official e-learning platform of the ATP and WTA in 2021, bridging professional tennis and its star players and coaches with the everyday tennis fan. Numerous studies on the e-learning market project it to be worth $325B by 2025, with a survey of 2,500 organizations finding that those with comprehensive e-learning programs have 218% higher revenue per team member and 24% higher profit margins.*
*Source: KPMG
