Pickleball Goes to College
Across colleges and universities, pickleball is building clubs, filling new courts and creating a competitive college circuit of its own
By Darina Ayazbayeva
October 28, 2026 • 6 min read
At Penn State finding evidence of pickleball’s popularity does not require looking very far. Beside the McCoy Natatorium at University Park, 12 outdoor courts now occupy space that once belonged to tennis. Penn State opened the dedicated pickleball complex in September 2024 after the university reported growing demand from students.
The change was not made quietly or accidentally. According to Penn State, students had been “eagerly requesting” pickleball facilities, and funding for the project came from the university’s Student Fee Board.
For sophomore industrial engineering major Leen Alshami, the courts were difficult to miss even before she started playing.
“I saw everyone around campus always playing it, and then my friends invited me to go play once, and I said yes,” Alshami said.
What Alshami was seeing at Penn State is part of a transformation taking place far beyond University Park.
Pickleball on college campuses is beginning to look less like a recreational trend and more like an emerging level of the sport. Students who once might have encountered pickleball only as an informal activity now have access to university clubs, regional competitions, national championships and collegiate rankings.
The numbers are beginning to reflect that shift.
A Younger Game
The demographics of American pickleball are changing. The Sports & Fitness Industry Association reported that 24.3 million Americans played pickleball in 2025, compared with 4.2 million in 2020, more than a fivefold increase in five years.
But one finding is particularly significant for college pickleball: players ages 13 to 24 now have the highest participation rate of any age group.
The image of pickleball as primarily a retirement-community activity is increasingly at odds with who is actually picking up paddles. That younger player base is visible on college campuses, where pickleball can exist in several forms at once.
A student can play occasionally with roommates. Another can join a university club. A more experienced player can compete for a spot on the school’s top team and travel to tournaments against universities hundreds of miles away.
Alshami currently falls into the first group. She is not a member of a competitive pickleball club and does not describe herself as particularly athletic. Her involvement began socially, through friends, rather than through organized competition.
“I like it because it’s easier, and I’m not that much of an athletic person,” Alshami said.
She would consider joining an organized group as she improves.
For Ryaheen Alshami, the route onto the court was different. Ryaheen had played tennis before trying pickleball about a year ago. Her previous experience made the transition relatively straightforward.
“I remember my first game, and I actually thought pickleball was pretty easy because I used to play tennis,” she said. “A lot of the basics felt familiar, so it didn’t take me too long to get comfortable with it.”
Their experiences show one side of college pickleball: students discovering the game through the people and activities already surrounding them on campus. The other side is becoming considerably more competitive.
118 Schools, One Season
In early 2025, college pickleball players around the country began traveling through a competitive circuit that would eventually lead to the Collegiate National Championship. Before Nationals even began, 19 qualifying events had attracted 1,895 players representing 118 different schools, according to DUPR, the rating organization behind the Collegiate Pickleball Tour.
Some of the regional tournaments were substantial events on their own.
The Georgia Super Regional brought together 270 players from 25 universities. The Ohio Super Regional drew 150 players, with Ohio State defeating Wisconsin in the final. Virginia Tech won the New Jersey Super Regional, while Southern California took the Arizona event.
Those competitions ultimately led to Atlanta, where more than 600 players from 64 universities arrived for the 2025 Collegiate National Championship.
The final looked like something familiar from established college sports: two universities from the same state battling for a national title.
The University of Texas at Austin faced Texas Christian University. Texas won 3-1. Natalie Liu, Eli Trumeter, Zoeya Kahn and Jack Munro delivered the university its first team tournament victory in program history. Texas and TCU’s performances also earned both schools opportunities to compete at a Major League Pickleball event against professional-level competition.
A year later, the tournament was even bigger. The 2026 College Pickleball Tour National featured more than 700 players, 112 teams and 65 schools, making it the largest event in the tour’s history.
This time, Florida Atlantic University emerged as national champion.
FAU defeated Utah Tech 3-1 in the final after sweeping both Wisconsin and Utah Valley on its way through the later rounds. Utah Tech’s runner-up finish continued an unusually consistent run for a young college program: the school had won the national championship in 2024 and the DUPR College World Championship in 2025.
College pickleball was beginning to develop something every established collegiate sport eventually acquires: programs with histories, rivalries and expectations.
The Programs Setting the Pace
There is not yet one university that can claim permanent control of college pickleball. That may be one of the clearest signs of how rapidly the competitive landscape is developing.
North Carolina won the DUPR national title in 2022. Virginia followed in 2023. Utah Tech won in 2024. Texas took the championship in 2025. Florida Atlantic became the latest champion in 2026.
The current competitive picture extends beyond those five champions.
In DUPR’s May 2026 power rankings, Florida Atlantic occupied the No. 1 position, followed by Utah Tech and Utah Valley. Indiana, Arizona State, Washington, Kennesaw State, Texas, Wisconsin and North Carolina completed the top 10.
These are not varsity programs operating under the NCAA structure. College pickleball is still developing largely through clubs and external organizations.
But its competitive infrastructure increasingly resembles that of a traditional collegiate sport.
There are regional qualifiers. There are national rankings. There are All-America selections. There is prize money. And there is now a pathway that can put college players on the same stage as professionals.
Building Courts for a New Campus Sport
Lastly, pickleball can be enjoyed by a wider number of people around the globe. Just as lawn tennis was easier to set up and play than real tennis, pickleball builds on that idea.
You need less space, the ball has greater longevity, and you do not need strings that break. You can play pickleball in convention centers, underutilized hockey rinks, parking lots, basketball courts, etc. There’s even footage of pickleball being played on packed dirt in certain parts of the world.
While tennis is fairly easy to access here in the U.S., it is not so easy in many parts of the world. For much of the world’s population, tennis remains the domain of those who can afford club memberships plus the recurring equipment costs to play.
Pickleball is the literal continuing expansion of the sport. From real tennis to lawn tennis and now to pickleball. Every day opening itself to an even greater percentage of the global population who might be interested in playing a racket/paddle sport.
Beyond the United States
College competition is developing most visibly in the United States, but pickleball itself is no longer an exclusively American story.
Estimates of worldwide participation vary substantially because countries measure players differently, and reliable global participation data remain less standardized than U.S. figures. A 2026 Global Pickleball Report cited by Pickleball.com estimated that between 80 million and 120 million people worldwide have tried the sport at least once.
The report identified established or growing participation in countries including Canada, Australia, England, Spain, India and the Philippines, while pointing to Asia as a major area for future expansion.
For collegiate pickleball, that creates a question that has not yet been fully answered: whether the organized university competition emerging in the United States can eventually develop internationally as well.
For now, the American collegiate game is moving quickly enough on its own.
What Comes Next
The growth of collegiate pickleball can be measured in numbers: 118 schools participating in qualifying events in 2025. More than 700 players at Nationals in 2026. Twelve dedicated courts at Penn State. But it can also be measured by what happens before anyone reaches a national tournament.
A student notices people playing on campus. A friend asks her to join. She borrows or buys a paddle.
Maybe that remains an occasional game between classes. Maybe she eventually joins the club. Maybe another student arrives with years of tennis experience and begins competing almost immediately.
For Leen, pickleball is still primarily a way to spend time with friends. For Ryaheen, it offers both community and competition.
Elsewhere, players wearing their universities’ names are traveling across the country to compete for championships. Those experiences are different, but they now belong to the same expanding college pickleball system.
Pickleball has already found its way onto college campuses. The next question is how far the college game can go. ●
About Darina Ayazbayeva
Darina Ayazbayeva is a journalism student at Penn State University and an editorial intern with The Pickleball Weekly. Originally from Kazakhstan, she has experience in print, digital, and broadcast journalism through student media and reporting projects, and is particularly interested in sports, international stories, and multimedia journalism.
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