Pickleball has become absolutely huge in Vietnam

I can't speak for the rest of the world because I only live in this one country but for me, pickleball was something that I had barely heard of two years ago and now, at least in Vietnam, it is everywhere you look.

I have a scooter and sometimes will just go and explore other neighborhoods just to see what they are like. One thing that these places always have, is some sort of pickleball courts and sometimes they have multiple pickleball arenas of sorts.

I was down at a resort recently for this annual Christmas "walking street" that they do every year and noticed that they had converted most of their tennis courts (which nobody really uses) into a bunch of pickleball courts instead and they are running this not just for resort guests, but also as its own separate business for people in the community. This is not an isolated thing either as almost any plot of land is being converted for exactly this sort of purpose.

It likely started out as just a few places here and there but now, the damn things are all over the place. No matter where you live you are close to pickleball courts and they are extremely inexpensive to rent. It costs about $4 and hour to rent a court at most places.

Lemon Pickleball is the court that I go and meet up with my friends at on Monday mornings and the only reason why we go there is because it is close to where we all live. There really isn't much difference between one pickleball court and the next one. This one is likely always going to be more popular than the resort one in the first picture because the courts are covered and Asians tend to not enjoy being in the sun and well, nobody wants to play the sport in the rain and it is rainy season right now.

According to an article that I read recently, the sport barely existed in Vietnam at the start of 2024 and it was estimated that the industry in total was "worth" 15 billion VND but has since then gone up to more than 350 billion.

While not so much of an issue here in Da Nang, it is said that in places like Hanoi and Saigon, that there is scarcity of availability for places to build courts and this has driven up the price to 5 times what we pay per hour here in Da Nang, where there is plenty of open space. Virtually all tennis courts have been converted to pickleball courts because you can fit at least 2 pickleball courts into the same amount of space. Pickleball is also a lot more accessible for the average person that tennis and as someone who has played both sports, I definitely agree with this. Tennis is friggin hard but you can walk in on your first day and have a reasonable game of pickleball.

Recently, the MB Pickleball Cup in Da Nang, set the Guinness World Record for the most amount of spectators attending a pickleball event for the entire world. Sure it was just under 8,000 people, but that is a lot of folks turning up for a sport that just over a year and a half ago, didn't really exist in this country.

It seems like almost everyone I know plays this sport to some degree and it is easy to understand why. It isn't terribly physically demanding but if you want to play in a super-intense sort of way, that is also available. My group is a group of guys who aren't really in the best shape and two of them are smokers, so our game isn't exactly the highest level of physical activity. We have a good time and it ends up costing us $2 each for 2 hours of exercise.

I don't think we are in any danger of the price of this rising anytime soon in Da Nang because I think there are already far more courts than we already need. If there is one thing that Da Nang is excellent at, it is flooding a market with an abundance of whatever product or service happens to be popular at the time

This is just a relatively tiny portion of the city where I and most of the expat population lives. These are only the courts that have bothered to do whatever it is that you have to do in order to get your place listed on Google Maps as well. Trust me, there are considerably many more locations that just these red dots.

I don't think this trend can continue in the upward way that it is heading now but I'm the kind of person that appreciates when any physical activity can become a trend. At least it isn't a damn app!