By Ian Lintott, Founder of Total Sport Solutions

I’ll be straight with you. I heard about pickleball nearly 20 years ago and didn’t give it much thought. A plastic ball, a funny name, courts about the size of a large dining room, it seemed destined to stay a niche curiosity, certainly nothing we’d ever see take root around here.

Then, about four years ago, it hit Ontario like a tidal wave.

Suddenly, everyone was talking about it, and before long, organizations were coming to us asking us to build courts. Community centres. Private clubs. Municipalities. School boards. What looked like a minor sport from a distance had quietly become a serious infrastructure conversation, and now it’s taken the entire country by storm.

For anyone who hasn’t played, pickleball is a paddle sport that borrows elements from tennis, badminton, and ping pong. It’s played on a court roughly a quarter the size of a tennis court, with a lightweight paddle and a perforated plastic ball. Games are fast, social, and easy to pick up. Most people are rallying within their first twenty minutes on court. That accessibility is the whole story.

A few weeks ago, Canada Sports Betting published something I’ve been forwarding to anyone who will read it. They ranked the top 100 most-populated Canadian cities by pickleball engagement, court count, courts per resident, Google search interest, and called the composite a “Pickle Score.” It’s a fun piece of research. And the headline number stopped me cold.

Nine of the top 20 pickleball cities in Canada are in Ontario.

Not two. Not four. Nine. Toronto sits first overall with a score of 72.0, well ahead of anyone else on the list. Ottawa is fourth. Chatham, a city of 44,000 people, is ninth. Mississauga is tenth. Then Markham, Kingston, London, Burlington, and Orillia. I read that list and felt something I wasn’t expecting. We’ve built courts in a lot of those cities. Burlington is three minutes down the road from our shop in Oakville. We’ve had crews in Mississauga and Markham more times than we can count. These are our job sites. Which means TSS is in that Pickle Score.

I started Total Sport Solutions in Oakville more than a decade ago with a simple idea: help organizations turn underused space into something worth showing up for. As the projects grew, the mission never changed. Take a space nobody is using and turn it into somewhere people actually want to be. It started with basketball half-courts, expanded into multi-sport surfaces, and then pickleball found us — and what began in backyards quickly grew into facilities serving entire communities.

Today, we build courts for clubs, rec centres, schools, municipalities, and homes across Ontario. We’re the Official Court Supplier of Pickleball Ontario. This is what we do.

So I have a pretty good sense of why Ontario is winning.

It’s not just population. Chatham has 8.27 courts per 10,000 residents, ninth in the country, ahead of cities four times its size. Communities here didn’t wait for pickleball to come to them. Curling clubs converted their off-season ice. Community centres rethought their gym space. Facilities that used to sit half-empty in the summer started running leagues year-round. Ontario invested early, built the infrastructure, and the players showed up.

Ontario got here first. And if you live in London, Oakville, Mississauga, or Ottawa, there’s a decent chance we helped get you there.

One thing that’s accelerated that growth in ways I didn’t fully anticipate is how quickly pickleball has been adopted in corporate and recreational settings. Companies across Ontario are now running internal leagues and booking court time for team events. It makes sense when you think about it — a game almost anyone can play, no experience required, on a court small enough that everyone stays in the action the whole time. It has become one of the more genuinely fun team outings going, and the demand from that side of the market has added real fuel to the infrastructure push we’re seeing province-wide.

The facilities that moved early don’t regret it. Not one. What I hear consistently is that they wish they’d added more courts sooner. The demand showed up faster than they planned for, leagues filled up before the paint was dry, and now they’re calling us back to figure out how to expand. The facilities that waited are now playing catch-up in a market where players already know where to go.

A big part of why is who pickleball actually works for. I’ve watched a 70-year-old and a 14-year-old on the same court, same game, genuinely competitive with each other. It doesn’t ask much to get started. No years of training, no expensive equipment, no prior experience. You show up, someone hands you a paddle, and within twenty minutes you’re rallying. Facilities that add pickleball don’t just attract existing athletes. They attract people who haven’t played anything in years. That’s a different kind of member growth, and it’s hard to replicate with almost any other sport.

So if you’re a facility operator still sitting on the fence, I’ll ask the same thing I ask everyone who calls us: what are you waiting for? The communities showing up in that top 20 aren’t there by accident. They built something, and the players came. There’s still room to be part of that. But the window for being early is closing faster than most people think.