The owners at Pala Pickleball, located just outside of Houston, are offering consultations to pickleball club owners from around the country as a means to help other clubs succeed and ultimately spread the sport of pickleball. Guillermo Ordorica, Lindsey Myers, and their wives Gaby and Kaitlyn are the owners of Pala Pickleball. While starting their club in 2022, multiple interested club owners came up to the folks at Pala Pickleball and asked for help with starting their own club. The owners at Pala saw the demand for pickleball club advice and decided to meet that need by offering consultations for a reasonable fee. Since then, they have helped several clubs around the country in places like Michigan, Oklahoma, and Texas.
Pala Pickleball is all about quality gameplay. Guillermo Ordorica says, “What we offer is good games all the time.” The facility is climate-controlled and furnished with 11 state-of-the-art courts with plenty of room for spectating and moving about the facility. They also have 8 outdoor courts for nice days. Pala has both a wide membership base and a sizeable number of drop-in players; Guillermo estimates that their membership-to-drop-in ratio is about 65-35. Currently, they are regarded as the largest pickleball club in the Houston area. All these hallmarks of success have made Pala Pickleball an excellent club to emulate and seek after for consultation.
Pickleball consultants field questions about designing facilities, hosting events, and attracting and retaining new members. They also help with marketing ideas and legal and financial issues. Lindsey Myers, one of the owners at Pala, has helped other clubs with issues like court layout, management, and staffing. He says, “We’ll give you direction on everything, top to bottom if you want it.” He also finds that customer retention is a common concern for many pickleball clubs. All club owners want to keep their customers engaged. For Myers, the answer is simple: “You have to have activities that people are interested in participating in.” Pala’s round-robin Father’s Day tournament is an excellent example of an interesting event; it is casual, yearly, and allows people to spend quality time with their fathers. Dads even get a free beer with their registration. Consulting is a bridge between the experience that older clubs have and the guidance that newer clubs need.
The owners at Pala can do consultations over the phone or internet, but they encourage aspiring club owners to come to Pala Pickleball for a couple of days to experience the flow of the club for themselves.
According to Myers, individuals who anticipate starting a pickleball club must prioritize court design as well as player and spectator experience. An ideal court design has a large number of quality courts, a high ceiling, and plenty of room for people to spectate. One of Lindsey’s favorite aspects of the facility is its space for viewing: “For tournaments, we have a really nice gallery with 50 or 100 people there who are all there to support their family and friends, and they wanna watch them play.”
Some clubs spend a lot of resources providing a high-quality food service or a decked-out pro shop and have success doing so. But Pala’s intense focus on the gameplay itself led them away from that path. Myers says, “We tried to do food at the beginning of the club, and what we found is that players just want to come and play and go.” For Pala, pickleball is central, and all other services are peripheral. Guillermo says, “People come here to play pickleball.”
Pickleball clubs may be communal, but they are also businesses with needs to meet and money to bring in. To some, consulting is seen as a strange business tactic because it is essentially “aiding the competition”. Myers remarks that many clubs get stuck in the “crush the competition” type of mindset. Pala Pickleball, however, prefers to share information back and forth with other clubs in “open relationships.” They believe they can afford to help and befriend their competitors due to the rapid growth that pickleball is still experiencing.
They also like to see others succeed. Myers says, “The most enjoyable part is to watch somebody go from zero, from just having an idea, to being successful. Watching them implement that and seeing that success happen for them is the greatest thing ever. I’m a big proponent of ‘you have to give it away to keep it.’”
What advice do the owners at Pala Pickleball have for new pickleball club owners? Myers encourages new club owners to branch out into the wider pickleball community and ask for advice from those farther along: “Don’t be shy. Ask other people what they’re doing. If you see successful clubs, go there, visit them, meet with them, talk to them.”
Pickleball businesses may be in competition with each other, but Pala Pickleball’s openness and willingness to help other clubs shows that even the business side of pickleball can be friendly, social, and fun.
