About The Court Scout

A verified directory of pickleball and padel courts — researched against primary sources, not scraped.

Placeholder phone numbers. Court counts nobody checked. Venues that closed two years ago. Existing pickleball directories rank on thin, partly-wrong data — so we rebuilt every record from primary sources instead of scraping.

Public directories are used only as leads to find facilities. Each record is researched from the operator's own site, the parks department, or a phone call — and it only graduates to verified after first-party confirmation. Where sources disagree, we publish the disagreement in the record's notes rather than picking the tidier answer.

01

A person picks up the phone

Operator sites, parks departments, direct calls. Never a scrape. Public directories are leads, never sources.

02

Every listing shows its date

Last-checked, method and sources sit on the record. Where sources disagree, we print the conflict instead of choosing.

03

Sponsored is never ranked

Featured slots are labelled, separated, and never inside a merit order. Merit awards cannot be bought.

Known gaps — tracked, not hidden
—15,887 listings remain needs-verification — they need a first-party call to confirm court counts, hours or current status.
—9,998 court counts are left blank where no official source publishes a number — private HOA courts, multi-use gyms. Honest beats guessed.
—250 venues are confirmed closed and excluded from the site; the records are kept for history.
—Only a handful of venues have a real photo. Everything else shows a neutral placeholder rather than invented art.

By the numbers

  • 21894+ venues researched across 6941+ cities in 51 US states and 322 international regions — and growing.
  • 5816 listings first-party verified so far; the rest are sourced leads we're actively confirming against primary sources.
  • Court counts are never guessed. If we don't know, the listing says so.
  • Permanently closed venues are excluded from the live site but kept in the underlying data for history.

How a listing earns "verified"

A listing graduates to verified when its address, court count, surface, access (free/paid/membership) and current operating status are confirmed against a first-party source — usually the venue's own website, occasionally a direct phone call. We then stamp the date. Anything not yet first-party confirmed is clearly labeled — we don't paper over uncertainty.

Google reviews — how we use them

Ratings come from the official Google Places API; we never scrape Google Maps. We store only the place_id long-term and treat ratings as a cache — anything older than 90 days is automatically hidden. Ratings are shown with a visible "via Google" credit, and we do not republish them as our own aggregateRating markup.

Who runs it

The Court Scout is built and maintained by the team behind Pickleland — a working pickleball club in Pflugerville, TX. We built this because we live in the space and were tired of sending players to clubs that had closed two years ago. Pickleland appears as a Featured club in the Austin-metro pages where it serves players; that placement is clearly labeled and never displaces the merit-ranked listings below it.

Help us improve it

Spotted a venue we're missing, or a detail that's wrong? Suggest an edit or add a court — submissions go into the verification queue and typically publish within 48 hours.