Every padel club owner in America knows the feeling. Prime-time is packed. And 1 p.m. on a Tuesday? Crickets.

Daren Hornig thinks he can help with that, and he’s not shy about the reason. “‘Build it and they will come’ is a myth,” the CourtsApp founder and CEO says. “Clubs need to market themselves, and that’s exactly what we do.”

CourtsApp, which calls itself the “Expedia of racquet sports,” just went national. By the company’s count it now has more than 67,000 facilities and 280,000 courts on one platform covering tennis, pickleball, padel and more. Hornig came to all this as a facility owner himself, and his read on padel is a lot more honest than you’d expect from someone selling into it.

Let’s start with the number. Padel is “still a small slice of our inventory today, about 293 facilities,” Hornig says. That’s under 1% of the platform. Then he adds the part that matters: it’s “one of our fastest-growing categories and second most searched.”

Only pickleball gets searched more. Why? “Because people genuinely don’t know where to play.”

That’s the gap in one sentence. Tons of people want to play padel, not many courts exist yet, and finding the ones that do exist is a pain.

Whether a club is just listed, connected to the booking system it already uses, or on Instant Booking, Hornig says the job doesn’t change: “we market the club where the players already are.” That means Google, TeamReach and, for padel specifically, WPR. Instant Booking gets top priority because it’s the least friction. “They want to play!”

The other lever is dynamic pricing for the dead hours. “Most club owners are happy to get 80 cents on the dollar for a 1 p.m. court if it brings in new players who get to experience their facility,” he says.

He’s also betting on daytime play growing. Remote work means flexible schedules, and “Golfers, skiers and surfers all find time to play during the day, and I think padel players will too.”

Your boss is going to love this.

A lot of new players don’t belong to a club, and Hornig says that’s who the platform is built for: “no membership fees and full discovery.” CourtsApp recently added Open Play, matches and tournaments, which in his words makes it “a one-stop shop for everything a padel player needs.”

“Ultimately, our mission is to help clubs grow by sending them more players.”

This is where it gets a little sci-fi. “AI is the future of discovery,” Hornig says. “I believe search as we know it will fade, and likely apps too. Instead, agents will direct us to the courts.”

CourtsApp is already live in Claude and ChatGPT with more in the works, so a player can just ask and the courts show up. Most facility owners don’t have the money or people to build those integrations themselves. “So we do it for them. We’re focused on where the ball is going (pun intended), not where it was last year.”

Then there’s Courtney, CourtsApp’s in-house AI agent. She lives in CourtsApp and will also be available on other clubs’ platforms.

They didn’t exactly plan the timing. “We started in the New York area, and frankly, demand pulled us national faster than I expected,” he says. Florida and California took off fast, and the team used AI to pull a fragmented industry into one place.

His pitch is the OpenTable one: “Players want one place to go, the way they use Expedia, OpenTable or DoorDash. We built it, and now they’re coming.”

Padel also happens to be great for word of mouth. “Padel is played with four people, so when one person books a court, three more hear about CourtsApp immediately.” That’s a growth engine that runs itself.

This is the part padel people should read twice. Hornig thinks the sport keeps growing, and he isn’t selling it as the next pickleball.

The biggest hurdle is size and cost. “Pickleball is geometrically friendly to tennis,” he says. You can fit three or four pickleball courts on one tennis court, or just tape the lines. “Padel is closer to one-for-one, and ideally needs 25- to 30-foot ceilings.”

Padel is also faster and more athletic, so the barrier to entry is higher. “It’s going to be a very popular sport, but I think it will take more time to reach the mainstream.”

And then the line that’ll start arguments: “I also don’t see padel becoming a parks-and-rec sport, given the expense. It will largely be a pay-to-play sport, whereas tennis and pickleball are free in most of the country, and that will slow its growth.”

Discuss amongst yourselves.

First, homework. “Make sure there’s sufficient demand where you open, and that you’re not opening right next to a competitor. That hurts both of you, and in the early years of a sport, [player] dilution is not your friend.”

Second, and no surprise here: get on CourtsApp. “We have the players, and they’re coming to us to ask where they should play, the same way a diner asks Open Table where to eat.”

Lessons are first up. “There’s a big opportunity to showcase lessons and teach new players how to play Padel.”

He also pitches CourtsApp as cross-marketing (“pun intended, again”): “Of the 66 million racquet sport players in the U.S., 43% play two or more sports.”

CourtsApp has about 293 padel facilities and a lot of players asking where to play. That’s a problem for the sport today and an opportunity for every club that’s about to open. Hornig’s view is simple: “The more people play these games, the better off we all are.”

Just don’t count on the parks department building the courts.

For more on CourtsApp: https://courtsapp.com/