• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, April 4, 2023

It’s not just in your neighborhood. Pickleball mania is everywhere and headed soon to a Walmart near you. Walmart is teaming up with Break The Love to introduce more people to the sport. This digital platform helps spread the pickleball passion, giving users access to court reservations, instructional resources and purchasing gear.

The collaboration aims to give away 125,000 reservations for Walmart customers and associates, says Casey Schlaybaugh, Walmart’s vice president of brand marketing and strategy. By tapping into the growing sport, “Walmart is demonstrating our commitment to engaging customers in the places and spaces where they thrive, adding value to their lives,” she says.

In addition to the comped reservations, Break the Love will run 25 community events in cities nationwide, with pickleball programming and giveaways. It will also sell pickleball merchandise on its site, which will click through to check out on Walmart’s website, says Trisha Goyal, founder of Break the Love.

“We’ve got short-form video content featuring demos, tips and tricks and inspiration,” she tells Marketing Daily, “and  meet-and-greats with pro pickleball athletes.”

Yes, pro athletes. The sport has become so popular that celebrity investors, including athletes like Tom Brady, LeBron James, Patrick Mahomes and Kevin Durant, are getting behind professional teams. So are national brands, including Carvana, Baird, Hertz, Chase and Hyundai.

Goyal started Break the Love in 2019 as a combination of a booking platform and social network, so people could find tennis players at their level and connect with a larger racquet community. Along came pickleball, “which continues to take the country by storm,” Goyal says.

All that buzz means plenty of people are looking for a way in, Schlaybaugh tells Marketing Daily. “We serve America, and we want to help people just getting started, as well as weekend warriors. We want to provide what they need to try it or perfect their game. And this is about being digital first to connect them to the physical game.”

The effort comes as America is desperately ramping up the pickleball infrastructure, with communities often converting tennis and basketball courts and parking lots.

Schlaybaugh says Walmart will market the campaign by engaging current customers using paid, earned and owned channels. And Goyal says Break the Love will put the word out on the fast-expanding grassroots of pickle ballers.

CNBC reports that about 36.5 million people played pickleball from August 2021 to August 2022. And a YouGov study found that about 14% of Americans played at least one game of pickleball in that same year-long period, and 8.5 million people played at least eight times.

That puts the participation rate of the game, invented in the 1960s as a combo of tennis, badminton and ping pong, in the same realm as golf, basketball and tennis.