Pickleball Kingdom takes Livermore's old Joann store: eight courts by late December

The dead fabric store is becoming a pickleball club. Pickleball Kingdom plans to open an eight-court indoor facility in Livermore, California, by the end of December, taking over 25,000 square feet at 4650 Arroyo Vista, the space the Joann Fabrics store vacated in the winter of 2023. It would be the chain's second California location, and members of the local Tri-Valley Pickleball Club get on the courts first under a trial partnership.

What is being built

Plans for the space call for lighting, climate control and sound treatment designed for indoor play, plus a community room, a gaming lounge, an exercise and stretching area, a viewing platform, a pro shop, a dink wall and a ball machine. Programming runs from open play sorted by skill level to private court reservations, clinics, free introductory classes, junior programs, leagues, tournaments and instant video replay, the kind of amenity that used to be a tour-stop luxury and is fast becoming table stakes for premium clubs. The free introductory classes are the sleeper line item: every indoor chain that has studied its funnel knows beginners who start in a structured class convert to members at several times the rate of walk-ins.

The owners are pickleball players themselves: Abhimanyu Dhariwal and Shreya Trivedi. That operator profile, players building the club they wanted locally, has been the franchise system's recruiting pitch, and the Livermore build follows it closely. The sound treatment line item deserves a mention of its own: indoor chains have learned that untreated warehouse acoustics drive neighbors and members to complain, and new builds now budget for it up front.

First crack goes to the local club

Members of the Tri-Valley Pickleball Club will get early access in December under a trial partnership, with a four-hour tour of the building, court time and an invitation to a pilot program. Dhariwal told the Livermore Vine the arrangement reflects the club's role as the largest nonprofit organizing the sport's growth in the Tri-Valley.

That sequencing is smarter than it looks. Franchise openings live or die on founding memberships, and the fastest way to fill a new club is to borrow an existing community's trust. The Tri-Valley club brings organized players, volunteers and word of mouth; Pickleball Kingdom brings courts, climate control and winter-proof capacity the nonprofit cannot build itself. If the pilot converts, the club opens with a membership base instead of a marketing budget.

A 43-location chain in a shaky market

Livermore will be Pickleball Kingdom's second California club after Roseville, and the company says it has 43 locations open or planned nationwide. That expansion lands against a cautionary backdrop: rival indoor franchisor The Picklr filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 9, a failure Sports Business Journal attributed to corporate guarantees the company could not sustain. Pickleball Kingdom officials say the company is expanding quickly but focusing on sustainable growth and support for its operators, which is exactly the distinction every franchise brand in the space now has to prove.

Club president Kirby Wong has said the new building could also host the Tri-Valley club's own social and competitive events, and players had a local outdoor option in the meantime: the club's Harvest Crush tournament ran October 17-18 at May Nissen Park and Livermore Downs Park.

The retail-to-pickleball pipeline

The Joann conversion is part of a national pattern. As big-box retail has contracted, its footprints, high ceilings, wide spans, abundant parking, have become the cheapest way to build indoor pickleball at scale. Former grocery stores, department stores and now fabric chains have all been reborn as court complexes, usually faster and cheaper than ground-up construction. For landlords, a pickleball tenant brings daily traffic; for operators, the shell cuts build-out cost per court dramatically.

Livermore's version lands in a market with proven demand: the Tri-Valley has been one of the Bay Area's pickleball growth pockets, with court time at public facilities chronically oversubscribed. An eight-court indoor option thirty minutes from the East Bay's core gives the region its first dedicated private capacity.

The design details that carry the thesis

The physical choices are worth reading as strategy. The mezzanine viewing area turns every court into a spectacle for non-players, which is how a sports building becomes a restaurant with activity attached. Rotating food trucks instead of a fixed kitchen keep the food offering fresh without restaurant overhead. And the event spaces give the building a weekday corporate calendar that courts alone never fill. Each of these is a small bet that the destination framing outperforms the gym framing, and each has been tested already in bigger markets.

The Cincinnati metro has been one of the Midwest's steadier pickleball markets, with public-court demand outpacing supply on both sides of the river. Northern Kentucky has lagged the Ohio side in dedicated indoor capacity, and a seven-court venue closes much of that gap in one opening.

The French angle

For French pickleball, the signing is a second marker in a strong month. The country's small but ambitious pro contingent has been a fixture of the Asian and American swings this season, and Khlif, its highest-ranked export, now carries a non-American equipment brand into every broadcast. French-language coverage has followed his rise closely, and a home-star fronting an expanding brand's international push is the kind of story that pulls new players into clubs back in Marseille and Paris.

What to watch

The December timeline is ambitious for a build of this scope, and late-December openings have a habit of slipping into January. The real test comes in the first quarter: whether early-access club members convert to paid memberships, and whether the programming mix, juniors, leagues, free intro classes, builds the beginner pipeline every indoor club needs once the eager early adopters are signed. If the Livermore formula works, expect the chain's California map to fill in quickly behind it.

Sources

• Pleasanton Weekly - Indoor pickleball club with eight courts aims to open in Livermore's old Joann store by late December

Sources checked 20 Oct 2026. Header image is illustrative, not a photo of the events described.