Welcome to The Signal, Box Score's Wednesday newsletter. This week, we’re looking at the business of pickleball. The spectacular growth of the sport is undeniable, but is it sustainable?
As part of the preamble to its much-anticipated IPO, Anthropic revealed in a Form S-1 filing last month that the AI company behind Claude, founded just five years ago, generated $33.24 billion in revenue in the first nine months of 2026, an incredible 1,200% increase over the same period in 2025.
Sports has its own version of Anthropic, a new sport whose growth has skyrocketed, disrupted the status quo and quickly become part of the cultural landscape in ways eerily similar to the growth of AI. That sport is pickleball.
Pickleball, which combines elements of tennis and pingpong, has a low barrier to entry. Easy to learn and easy to play, the sport has been on a growth trajectory that any tech executive would envy as millions of new players have started talking about “the kitchen” (the no-volley zone near the net) and a “dink” (a soft, well-placed shot that lands in the kitchen).
Since 2020, the number of pickleball players in the US has increased from 4.2 million to 24.3 million in 2025, an increase of 479%, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association.
And the cultural impact of pickleball is even more pronounced. In town meetings in the US, pickleball is a more talked-about subject than short-term rentals, bike lanes and even data centers. Take that, Anthropic!
Like AI and data centers, the discourse around pickleball is not all rainbows and unicorns. Some people think the plastic ball is too noisy for public parks. One Tampa, FL, resident compared the sound of a pickleball game to "a pneumatic nail gun on a roof." There's also a tennis-pickleball divide that is creating turf wars over limited court space, and a stark uptick in ER visits to treat pickleball injuries. According to insurance site ValuePenguin, pickleball-related ER visits rose from an estimated 8,304 in 2018 to 31,463 in 2025.
(In fairness to the sport, the vast majority of public comments about pickleball at town meetings in the US were positive, while comments about data centers were mostly negative.)
Another similarity between pickleball and AI is that many observers think that each is headed for a market correction. Despite investor enthusiasm over Anthropic’s impending IPO, the company’s quarterly revenue growth slowed to 47% in the third quarter of 2026 from 144% revenue growth in the second quarter, according to Reuters.
Anthropic is also committed to spending $895.4 billion on AI computing and data centers by the end of 2030, with $70 billion due to be spent in the next year. Investors are increasingly concerned whether the high costs of the AI infrastructure build-out will ultimately pay off, and Alphabet, Oracle, Meta and Amazon have all seen their valuations revised downward in recent weeks.
Pickleball has some storm clouds on the horizon as well.
