Pickleball has done many things quickly. It has spread faster than almost any modern sport. Participation numbers are impressive. Courts are multiplying. What pickleball has not yet done is create a loyal fandom.

That distinction matters. Sports that endure do not merely get played. They get watched. They develop loyalties, rivalries and narratives that extend beyond the court. For pickleball, still young and culturally unsettled, the absence of mass fan engagement is the clearest sign that its growth remains incomplete.

The solution may lie not in professional leagues or celebrity endorsements, but in universities.

Lessons from collegiate sport

In North America, collegiate sport has long functioned as a cultural accelerant. American football and basketball did not become national obsessions solely because of professional leagues. They were forged on campuses, where student sections, marching bands and inter-campus rivalries transformed athletic contests into communal identity projects.

Even newer or historically marginal sports have followed this path. Women’s volleyball, once peripheral, now fills arenas at flagship universities. Lacrosse, long confined to regional enclaves, expanded nationally through college programmes that created both competitive legitimacy and fan ritual. In each case, universities supplied three critical ingredients: a steady pipeline of young athletes, a built-in audience, and a calendar dense enough to sustain narrative.

Pickleball now has the beginnings of this structure.

The National Collegiate Pickleball Association has done something quietly significant. It has imposed order on chaos. Conferences, regional play and national championships have replaced ad hoc campus clubs with a recognisable competitive ecosystem. Hundreds of universities now participate. Thousands of students compete under a shared framework.

From an institutional perspective, this matters more than raw participation numbers. Structure precedes spectatorship. Fans do not attach themselves to isolated matches. They follow seasons, standings and stakes.

The collegiate opportunity

At present, collegiate pickleball remains largely a participant sport. Matches are played. Results are recorded. Livestreams exist. What is missing is the surrounding culture. Few campuses yet treat pickleball events as social occasions. There are no packed student sections, no ritualised rivalries, no sense that missing a match means missing something that matters.

This is where the opportunity lies.

Pickleball’s professional ecosystem remains fragmented. Unlike tennis or basketball, it lacks a universally recognised pinnacle. Collegiate sport offers something different: legitimacy through repetition and affiliation.

Universities are exceptionally good at manufacturing fans. They do so by embedding sport into daily student life. Attendance is social rather than transactional. Loyalty is inherited rather than earned. Alumni carry attachments long after graduation. The emotional return far outlasts the athletic one.

Pickleball is well suited to this environment. Its fast pace and short matches fit naturally into campus schedules. Doubles formats lend themselves to team identity. Mixed-gender competition aligns with contemporary campus values. Most importantly, the barrier to understanding the sport is low. New fans do not require years of education to appreciate what they are watching.

In this sense, pickleball resembles where basketball stood a century ago: widely played, lightly watched and culturally undefined.

A global angle

What makes this moment unusual is that collegiate pickleball need not remain an American phenomenon. Interest in the sport is rising rapidly in India, Mexico and parts of Europe, particularly among younger and urban populations. Universities abroad are beginning to experiment with pickleball clubs, but without a global collegiate framework these efforts remain isolated.

A coordinated international collegiate model would change that. It would allow institutions to compete across borders, create international championships and expose students to global sport pathways long before professionalisation becomes relevant. For fans, it would introduce national representation and international rivalry, two of sport’s most reliable accelerants.

Crucially, this expansion need not be capital-intensive. Pickleball’s infrastructure costs are modest. Its governance requirements are light. The constraint is not capital, but coordination.

Making it work

Collegiate pickleball will not generate fans automatically. Universities will need to programme events deliberately, tell stories consistently and treat matches as social gatherings rather than administrative obligations. Media attention will have to shift from novelty to rivalry. Players will need to be framed not merely as participants, but as representatives of institutions, regions and traditions.

A sport is not defined by the number of people who play it, but by the number who care enough to watch. Pickleball has built committed players. Now it must build a fandom.