Second commercial indoor pickleball court facility planning to open in Naperville
Naperville pickleballers prepare your paddles: more opportunities to play are coming.
The Picklr, a Utah-based pickleball chain, will soon have a location at Fox River Commons shopping center at 808 S. Route 59, bringing as many as nine new indoor pickleball courts to town. That’s on top of the 11-court, Sure Shot facility that opened on the city’s far north side last month.
With the addition of Picklr, all-weather pickleball in Naperville will be more accessible than ever.
“We’ve been working on getting a facility open and ready in Naperville for a while,” Picklr co-founder Austin Wood said. “We were hearing about a lot of people playing pickleball there but that there weren’t enough courts for the area. Plus, Chicago’s the windy city. It’s cold. All those weather components get in the way of playing outdoors.”
Already under construction, Picklr’s Naperville location is on track to open sometime early next year, according to Wood. The facility will have eight or nine courts, which will not only host drop-in play, but also tournaments, leagues and clinics.
In all, the pickleball venue will fill out just over 27,300 square feet of open space at Fox River Commons.
“We’re really excited,” Wood said.
Naperville is one of three Picklr franchises headed to the greater Chicago area over the next few months. Other locations are bound for Villa Park and Mundelein. Naperville’s, however, will likely be the first to open its doors, Wood said.
Picklr’s push into the Chicago area is one step of a larger franchising effort the company announced in early September. Including locations coming to Illinois, Picklr is preparing to rollout 80 new facilities across 12 different states. And that’s just the beginning, Wood said. For Chicago alone, he said, “There will be more, for sure.”
It’s all part of tapping into the market that’s America’s fastest-growing sport.
In the last three years, pickleball participation in the United States grew 158.6%, up to 8.9 million players in 2022, according to a report from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. Within that same stretch of time, Wood and Jorge Barragan launched Picklr.
The pair, friends from high school, started the operation in Uintah, Utah, in early 2021. Wood said the business idea was born out of need — he and Barragan, both regular pickleballers, just couldn’t find a place to play sometimes, especially when temperatures dropped. So they made their own space, but as a “scalable system” that could find success beyond Uintah one day, he said.
Naperville fits right into that Picklr formula, he said.
“The reason we’re so excited about Naperville is because before we select a site, we look at its demographics — its average household income, the age group of the people there, that sort of thing,” Wood said. “Naperville’s demographics really fit our brand.”
Readily available real estate helped too.
Located at the intersection of Ogden Avenue and Route 59, Fox River Commons has been on the lookout for new tenants for more than a year, according to David Donato, chief operating officer of Fox River’s owner, Continental Realty Corp.
Last August, the Baltimore-based real estate company purchased Fox River and four other suburban Chicago shopping centers in a $93.6 million acquisition totaling more than 900,000 square feet.
Donato said Fox River specifically was acquired as a “turnaround project.”
Before carving out a space for Picklr, about a third of the 241,000-square-foot center was vacant, Donato said, including three anchor spaces, two junior anchors, one small shop space and two roadside spots. Fox River tapped Picklr for an anchor tenancy.
“We love their concept, and pickleball is clearly popular,” Donato said. “So much of what we as a landlord do, especially on a project like this that’s inherited as a turnaround, is to think outside the box. We’ve done a lot of deals with nonretailers in our retail portfolio.”
Still, not stopping at pickleball, Donato said he and his Continental Realty team are in talks with “several other people‘’ to fill out the rest of Fox River. He declined to say who the interested parties are or how many, noting that “we can’t reveal anything more until we get to a lease with anybody.”
Until then, focus is on Picklr.
“We’re so impressed with them,” Donato said. “They’ve got all sorts of academies and leagues and things that will bring repeat visits by the same people. That’s really important to us. … I think the more life you get in there, the more cross-shopping that’s coming into the center. The more vibrant it all becomes.”
