This page exists because every other pickleball directory is a black box. Ours isn't — here is exactly how each listing on The Court Scout earns its place, what we confirm, what we don't, and how we handle conflicting information.
1. Two states, no middle ground
Every record carries a verification_status of either verified or needs-verification. There is no "probably accurate" tier. New entries always start as needs-verification — they are sourced leads, not confirmed facts — and graduate only when a human checks them against a primary source.
- Verified (298): every field below confirmed against the venue's own website, Google Business Profile, or a direct phone call. Stamped with a
last_checkeddate. - Needs-verification (2202): a sourced lead, not yet first-party confirmed. Clearly labeled on the listing so you can decide for yourself.
2. What "verified" requires
A listing earns the verified mark only when all six of these are first-party confirmed:
- Exists and is open — confirmed via the venue's own site, Google Business Profile, or a call.
- Address — matches the venue's official listing.
- Court count — confirmed by the venue, not a third-party directory. This is where scrapers most often go wrong.
- Phone — dialed or matched to the official site. (Major directories list placeholder numbers like
(512) 555-0123for real venues; we don't.) - Access & cost — current pricing model (free / pay-to-play / membership) confirmed.
- Hours — confirmed for the current season.
Surface and net type are nice-to-have; they don't block verified status but get filled in when we can confirm them.
3. What we never do
- We never guess court counts. If a venue doesn't publish a number, the listing says so — we leave the field empty rather than invent a figure.
- We never publish scraped data as fact. Public directories were used only as leads to find facilities; each record is rebuilt from a primary source before it ships.
- We never quietly pick a winner between conflicting sources. We record the disagreement openly in the listing's notes.
- We never republish Google ratings as our own. Google ratings come from the official Places API, are shown with attribution, and are hidden after 90 days so the site never displays stale data.
- We never hide closed venues to inflate counts. Permanently-closed venues are removed from the live site (and kept in the underlying data with a status flag, for the record).
4. Resolving source disagreements
When two sources conflict — common with court counts — we don't silently pick one. The verifier records both figures in the listing's notes (e.g. "City Parks lists 5 courts; club lists 4"), treats the venue's own source or the relevant governing body as authoritative, and if the contradiction can't be resolved on paper, leaves the listing as needs-verification and flags it for a site visit or phone call. Honest uncertainty is more useful than a scraper's false confidence.
5. Re-verification cadence
Listings aren't verified once and forgotten. Each verified record is re-checked roughly every six months, and sooner for venues that recently opened, recently changed hands, or were flagged by a user submission. The last_checked date on each listing tells you when it was most recently confirmed.
6. How Google ratings are handled
Ratings shown on the site come from the official Google Places API — never scraped from Google Maps. We store only the place_id long-term; the rating itself is a cache. The build hides any rating older than 90 days, so a listing either shows fresh Google data or no rating at all. Ratings appear with a visible "via Google" credit. We deliberately do not republish them as our own aggregateRating schema markup, because they aren't ours.
"Best clubs in {city}" pages rank by a Bayesian-weighted score — (v/(v+m))·R + (m/(v+m))·C — so a club with a handful of perfect reviews is pulled toward the metro average until enough players weigh in. It cannot leapfrog a heavily-reviewed, consistently high-rated club.
7. Corrections
If you see something wrong, suggest an edit — your submission goes into the verification queue and typically publishes within 48 hours after we confirm against a primary source. If you operate a venue and want to dispute something, see For Venues.
8. The full workflow, in one line
Lead → Draft → First-party confirm → Stamp last_checked → Publish. A human, not a model, signs the last two steps.