Inside the Columbus, Ohio club whose three-year rise from converted tennis facility to host of Major League Pickleball and the APP Tour offers a model for operators everywhere.

By Josh Kerns/IAPPF

In a sport where new facilities open weekly, Pickle & Chill in Columbus, Ohio could be considered one of the pioneers. In just over three years, the club has scaled from six indoor courts to 22 indoor and outdoor, established itself as the largest dedicated indoor/outdoor pickleball facility in the Midwest, hosted both of professional pickleball’s premier tours, and announced a second location in the Cleveland market. They’ve done it by developing and focusing on the fundamentals, many of which are the unsexy back-office decisions that determine whether a club thrives or stalls. For facility operators trying to translate pickleball’s explosive demand into a durable business, Pickle & Chill offers many great lessons others can emulate.

Pickle & Chill was founded in November 2022 by real estate developer David Kass, a former professional tennis player, and one of the most consequential figures in the modern pickleball ecosystem. Kass owns the Columbus Sliders MLP franchise (the 2025 MLP champions), and in January 2024 led an acquisition group with tennis legend Andre Agassi and Raine Ventures that took controlling interest in DUPR. He serves as the platform’s chairman. That’s just one of several reasons Pickle & Chill has been chosen to host MLP regular-season events (returning May 28-31, 2026) and the APP Tour. But the pro events are just the visible tip of the iceberg. The keys to success are just beneath the surface.

Staff is the Product

Pickle & Chill runs lean: four full-time employees, supported by a part-time roster that covers evenings and weekends. They all wear different hats.  But the focus is always on the customer first.  “Our part-time staff and our full-time staff really are our forward-facing line to our members and our community and our non-members,” Operating Partner Amy Bokker says. To keep the team at the top of their game, the club holds regular staff meetings and builds in incentives designed to keep morale high and staff feeling valued.

As for hiring, Bokker says the most reliable pipeline is the membership itself. “Frankly, a lot of our staff were members,” she says. “Our members will say, ‘Hey, can I be of assistance, can I help out?’” Some volunteer at events; others move into part-time roles. The result is a workforce that already understands the culture and embodies the community the club is selling to everyone else—with no recruiting cost and a near-zero cultural-fit failure rate.

Build a Member Feedback Loop—Then Act on It

Plenty of clubs say they listen to members. Pickle & Chill formalizes it. A member engagement committee meets with leadership once a month, generating a steady stream of feedback that informs programming, scheduling, and amenity decisions. “We meet with the committee once a month, and they give us great feedback,” Bokker says. “We strive to be great listeners.” A standing meeting forces the operations team to track what members are asking for, decide what to act on, and close the loop. Members who feel heard are members who renew.

Treat Corporate Events Sales As A Priority

Columbus is home to a dense cluster of corporate headquarters—Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister, Bath & Body Works—plus Ohio State University and a deep healthcare sector. All of them need offsite venues. Pickle & Chill has built an events business that ranges from small team-builders to a single 300-person company gathering, anchored by a full-service indoor bar (Ray’s), a mezzanine equipped with audio-visual capability, and an outdoor patio with cornhole, bocce, and a portable summer bar.

But the work doesn’t happen by accident. “All four of us (full-time staff) work in some capacity to get the word out and work in that event space,” Bokker says. The club uses LinkedIn to reach corporate decision-makers, tags client companies in social posts after events to seed referrals, and runs Perfect Venue as its dedicated events platform. The lesson: corporate revenue is real money, but it requires someone—ideally several people—actively prospecting. Courts alone are a thin business. The room around the courts is where the margin grows, Bokker says.

Playbypoint: The Software That Powers The Business

If staff is the product, software is the platform that lets four full-time employees run a 22-court operation. Pickle & Chill has used Playbypoint as its club management software since the doors opened in 2022, and Bokker is unequivocal about its centrality to the business. “We’ve been with them since the beginning of the club, since inception,” she says. “I think we’ve had a lot of growth together. Playbypoint is doing a great job of adjusting, keeping up, certainly listening to our needs as we go through.”

The platform handles the full operational stack: court bookings, memberships, summer passes, league registration, clinic sign-ups, payments through stored cards on file, automated reminders, and member-to-member visibility and communications. Reservations happen on the club’s branded website or app. Notably, Pickle & Chill doesn’t even have a phone; member communication runs through text and Patch, a messaging platform integrated directly with Playbypoint. “You’d be surprised how many times we’ll have someone at one in the morning booking a court or signing up for a league or a clinic,” Bokker says. “Without the software, every one of those bookings would be a phone call the staff missed, or a member who gave up.”

Beyond bookings, Bokker leans on Playbypoint’s reporting and analytics layer to make business decisions. “We were able to have the opportunity to see who’s coming in, when they’re coming in, how often they’re coming in, what programs are working, where we need to up our game a little bit,” she says. “Understanding the member habits has been really helpful from my end.”

Equally important is who owns the platform internally. The club’s director of membership and operations Susan Wiel functions as the in-house Playbypoint expert and administrator. “She’s really integrated with our staff and she does a great job with our programming—whether that’s membership, summer passes, leagues, or booking clinics.” 

Operators sometimes treat club software as a passive utility. Pickle & Chill treats it as an active discipline with a designated owner. The difference shows up in member experience.

The platform’s integrations also matter. Playbypoint ties directly into Patch on the communications side and DUPR on the ratings side, so the system can prevent a 3.0 player from registering for a 4.0-vetted open play before staff ever has to intervene. “All of that is super helpful and seamless from our end, ” Bokker says.  

Maximizing DUPR For All Level

Every operator has heard the same complaint: a 4.0 player shows up to a 3.5 open play, demolishes everyone, and three new players don’t come back. Pickle & Chill has leaned into rating-vetted play as a structural fix. The club was a beta test site for the popular DUPR Reset program, has three certified DUPR coaches on staff, runs DUPR-vetted open plays at the 3.5 level and above, and feeds all of its leagues into the system.

Bokker, drawing on 27 years as a Division I lacrosse head coach, sees rating systems as a coaching tool, not a status symbol. “DUPR is only going to be as good as the data we give it,” she says. “The first letter is D for dynamic. People get to a point where they don’t want to enter their scores anymore; they want to hold here at this level. Well, it’s not going to be accurate unless we’re providing it with information.” Rating-vetted sessions, automated through Playbypoint’s integration with DUPR, solve the matchmaking problem above quietly and at scale.

Vet Tournament Partners Before Handing Over the Courts

Like most large facilities, Pickle & Chill runs its own tournaments and rents space to outside organizers. The second category requires real diligence. “We really try to dig in up front,” Bokker says, “and work with the people who are running the tournament. What are they trying to do? Is this a fundraising event? Is this a serious-player event?”

The risk of skipping that conversation is real. “Sometimes people think, ‘Oh, we got this,’ and the next thing you know, people are sitting around for a long time.” Players associate that experience with the venue, not the organizer. Pickle & Chill’s in-house tournaments—three-day round-robins anchored by a summer solstice and a winter event—earn consistently strong feedback because head tournament pro David Sekel runs them tight. “It’s like a Swiss watch,” Bokker says. “We make sure the player experience is always top of mind. There’s not a lot of downtime, which I know is tough at a lot of amateur tournaments.”

There’s also a counterintuitive lesson on the amateur side: don’t under-package your social tournaments. The club once ran what it thought was a casual social event without medals. “We never made that mistake again,” Bokker says. A staff member built a podium, and every Pickle & Chill tournament now awards medals to the top three. Trophies are cheap. Resentful players are expensive.

What’s Next

A second Pickle & Chill location is under development in Beachwood, Ohio, and Bokker says the team is actively evaluating padel for the Columbus flagship. “We like to think our footprint is ever-evolving,” she says.

Three years in, the club has produced a model other operators can study. The courts are the easy part. Everything around them—staff, member feedback, corporate sales, club management software, programming—is where the work is, and where the differentiation lives. “We feel really good about where we are,” Bokker says, “and that we’re really adding positives to the community as a whole.”