A new indoor pickleball club is coming to the Tri-Cities called The Flying Pickle. This photo is from the club’s Idaho facility.
Paul Starita fell in love with pickleball pretty quickly.
He’s so high on the sport that he and his business partners intend to build an indoor pickleball facility in the Badger Canyon area, next to the recently opened Quake entertainment center.
“We anticipate it to be a 50,000-square-foot facility, with 18 to 20 pickleball courts,” Starita said. Starita and his partners already opened their first pickleball facility, The Flying Pickle, in Nampa, Idaho.
“It’s the fastest growing sport in America,” said the Boise man. “It’s just such a fun sport, and it’s so accessible to everyone. It’s easy to learn, yet it takes skills to learn.”
For the Kennewick facility, the timeline “depends on the paperwork approval from both the city and the county,” Starita said. “Our goal is to start as soon as possible to start moving dirt. It depends on the approvals. But we expect it to be open in early 2026.”
Starita calls it a ground-up project – as opposed to some clubs around the country renovating vacant commercial space. The Press Pickleball Club recently opened six indoor courts in the former Spokesman-Review production facility in Spokane.
The Flying Pickle uses a membership model in which players pay a monthly fee for guaranteed court space.
“We have a member-to-court ratio we use. We want our members to use our courts,” Starita said. “A lot of clubs around the country, some people can only play once a week. But we will have our membership capped. In Boise, we hit (our membership cap) at 10 months.”
However, even if you’re not a member, people can come into the building to pay and play as a guest.
Starita said the Kennewick facility will be similar to Idaho’s, offering, among other amenities, court reservations, a lounge, pro shop, restaurant, locker rooms, youth programs, optimal lighting and acoustically designed courts.
A new indoor pickleball club is coming to the Tri-Cities called The Flying Pickle. This photo is from club’s Idaho facility, which features a restaurant called The Kitchen, offering snacks, appetizers, smoothies, breakfast items, tacos, quesadillas, bowls and desserts, as well as energy drinks, beer, wine and cocktails.
“We call it a pickleball players paradise,” said Starita, whose family owns several Paul Mitchell Schools for beauty training, including the one in Richland.
“I’ve done a lot of business in the Tri-Cities, and I come to the Tri-Cities a lot,” Starita said. “So the area there I know is nice.”
He said he has an entrepreneurial mindset and pickleball is “something I’ve been passionate about.”
Starita said he was fortunate to meet professional pickleball players (yes, there are professionals) – Susannah Barr and Nick Petterson – both of whom have Boise-area connections.
The three of them became business partners.
“They helped me shape the idea. It took several years to develop the design, find the property,” Starita said. “We’re planning on franchising the company later this month.”
Starita said his roots in his family’s business resulted in not rushing into anything. They’ve done their research.
“Between me, Nick and Susanna, we’ve been to every club in the country,” he said. That’s close to 200 pickleball clubs. “What we build – you won’t find ours in a cheap (vacant) Bed, Bath and Beyond. Our lighting and acoustics are excellent. There is a lot that went into the design.”
The process took just under two years. The trio started work on design in January 2022 and opened the Boise facility in November 2023.
According to USA Pickleball, the sport of pickleball was created in 1965 on Bainbridge Island, when three fathers – Joel Pritchard, Bill Bell and Barney McCallum – developed a summer activity for their bored kids.
This Washington connection is how it became the state’s official sport.
A pickleball court is 20-by-44 for both singles and doubles. Players use paddles to hit a plastic ball back and forth. Think of it as a scaled down version of tennis.
In Washington, there were 1,011 pickleball courts in 2023, with 571 of them outdoor courts.
According to the 2024 Sports and Fitness Industry Association’s Topline Participation report, an estimated 13.6 million players participated in the sport in 2023. That’s a 52% jump over the previous year.
That’s why Starita loves The Flying Pickle.
“This place allows for reliable play. It’s always light inside. You don’t know if you can get on a court outside around here in the summer,” he said. “With our program you’ll know when you’ll play, who you’ll play, and for how long. We definitely timed the market right,” he said.
Starita says that the Boise area has 40 to 50 pickleball courts within the parks and recreation system.
Steve Sullivan of Club 509 Pickleball in the Tri-Cities estimates there are 35 pickleball courts in the Tri-Cities region. That includes 15 relatively new outdoor courts at Lawrence Scott Park in Kennewick, and a number of new courts at both Richland’s Columbia Basin Racquet Club and Kennewick’s Pacific Clinic.
“The sport is addictive,” said Sullivan, who plays four days a week. “The adage is when you’re done, you want to play one more game. You just want to keep playing.”
In 2021, a professional league was established, called Major League Pickleball, with six franchises located around the country.
MLP will have 16 premier franchises in 2025. Each team has two men and two women.
The Flying Pickle co-owner Barr plays for the Atlanta Bouncers franchise. Petterson has played in three professional tournaments through January 2025.
There are another six Challenger franchises, with 24 up-and-coming players.
The teams travel and have 14 tour dates around the country, with the closest to the Tri-Cities in Salt Lake City in June.
Team ownerships involve a number of celebrities, including businessman and TV personality Mark Cuban; professional football players Tom Brady, Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes; Olympian swimmer Michael Phelps; and country music star Dierks Bentley.
A professional pickleball player can make more than $260,000 a year on average in the MLP.
“Pickleball is the highest paid sport for women athletes,” Starita said. “The top pickleball players can make more than the top WNBA players.”
But at the local level, there’s another incentive besides staying active.
A new indoor pickleball club is coming to the Tri-Cities called The Flying Pickle. This photo is from club’s Idaho facility, which features a lounge, pro shop, restaurant, locker rooms, youth programs, optimal lighting and acoustically designed courts.
“There is a social aspect of it, too,” Sullivan said.
Starita agreed. “For me, I love it because it’s the community we created,” he said. “It was so unexpected and so fun to watch. We had a marriage proposal there. We’ve had a wedding there.
“We’ve had widows and widowers, in their time of grief, find their community. For a lot of people, it’s been their home away from home. They found their second family at the club.”
Go to: theflyingpickle.com.
You must have JavaScript enabled to enjoy a limited number of articles over the next 30 days.
Daily and Monthly News
Mailing Address: 8656 W. Gage Blvd., Ste. C303 Kennewick, WA 99336 USA
All content copyright © 2024 Mid-Columbia Media Inc. All rights reserved.
No reproduction, transmission or display is permitted without the written permissions of Mid-Columbia Media Inc.
Design, CMS, Hosting & Web Development :: ePublishing
