PickleballCentral Acquires PickleballTournaments.com for Easier Tournament Management and Success

In September of last year, PickleballCentral and PickleballTournaments.com became affiliate partners through the creation of products to help tournament directors run a successful event. Since then, PickleballCentral has also started using the PickleballTournaments.com system to help manage and run tournaments for our sister business, Pickleball Station. We just finished running our 7th tournament in the last 6 months.

A Continued Partnership

As both of our companies have found success in this partnership, PickleballCentral is pleased to announce that PickleballTournaments.com is officially joining the PickleballCentral family. On February 9, 2018 both organizations announced publicly that PickleballCentral’s parent company was acquiring PickleballTournaments.com.

We want everyone to know how excited we are to bring Melissa McCurley, the president of Pickleball Tournaments, into our family. She will be president of our Tournament Operations Division which is responsible for operating PickleballTournaments.com and other tournament-related businesses.

Melissa will remain based in Arizona along with much of her team and will continue to lead these efforts with the same drive and energy that makes her one of the most powerful forces in pickleball!

PickleballCentral has always taken a very serious approach to customer service and support. Our 40 employees already work with over 100,000 pickleball players, and we work hard to make sure our various websites and businesses run smoothly. Last year alone we sponsored almost 300 tournaments and provided support to over 1,200 clubs.

Pickleball Tournaments' Success

These factors made joining forces with PickleballTournaments.com logical from both an operational and strategic perspective. This unification will allow for even more resources to be made available that will immediately benefit tournament directors, players and partners of PickleballTournaments.com.

Pickleball Tournaments' meteoric growth has been nothing short of spectacular. Originally founded in 2004 by Bob and Jettye Lanius, PickleballTournaments.com has provided software, services, advice and on-site operational assistance to over 1,000 tournament. As they were “retired” and wanted to say that way, when the business took off they sought a way to have some serious 'pickleball people' take over the company.

In 2014 Bob and Jettye sold the business to Melissa McCurley and her brother, Greg. Melissa and Greg were both I.T. professionals and Melissa was becoming a very good player. They continued the grass roots commitment to supporting tournaments of all types with Melissa traveling around the United States from event to event making sure things ran well for the tournament directors.

To give you some perspective on how far things have come since just 2014, in 2015  (their first full year of operations) Melissa and Greg helped tournament directors operate over 150 tournaments with over 22,000 participants. Compare that to what is planned for 2018 where they expect to support over 550 tournaments with over 60,000 registrants!

New Opportunities

So why is there such synergy with PickleballCentral? What many of our customers and readers of this blog may not know is that the partners in PickleballCentral have over 70 years of software development experience in their background, and these skills have helped PickleballCentral.com (and its related properties) become the largest company in the world exclusively devoted to pickleball.

These skills have served our customers well as we have designed and deployed 5 websites to support our business including Pickleball.com and the USAPA’s online store USAPAStore.com.

As frequent users of PickleballTournaments.com's software, PickleballCentral will assist Melissa in nurturing this incredible software platform with upgrades that will benefit the growing number of tournament organizers and players using the system. Stay tuned for more details as we intend to make another announcement about this topic soon.

With the addition of the resources available from PickleballCentral, Melissa plans to use this additional bandwidth to spend more time 'in the field' in order to help make events successful and focus feedback from users back into new software features that will benefit tournament directors.

The Best Pickleball Competitions in One Place

PickleballTournaments.com can be used for both casual and USAPA-sanctioned tournaments in the handling of player sign-ups, organization and structure. No matter the size of the tournament, having all associated data stored in one easy-to-use web database allows for easy management and sharing of brackets and results.

The PickleballTournaments.com software is already used to operate over 90% of the major pickleball tournaments around the world including the USAPA Nationals and Regionals, the US Open Pickleball Championships, Tournament of Champions and the International Indoor Pickleball Championships.

The management team here at PickleballCentral is truly humbled by having someone with Melissa’s reputation join us. We are already home to some of the sport’s very best players, instructors and product development professionals including Peter Huduchko, Brian Ashworth, Glen Peterson, Tonja Major, John Cowley and Jimmy Blue.

Continued Growth

This event is part of PickleballCentral’s continued evolution as a company devoted to meeting the needs of players around the world. In 2015 we acquired PickleballPaddlesPlus.com, and in 2016 we acquired Pickleball Inc. (the company which originally introduced pickleball to the world and continues to produce popular products like the Dura Ball and Champion Paddles.)

In 2017 we launched Pickleball Station, the Pacific Northwest’s premier pickleball athletic facility.

We hope to continue unifying the world's best pickleball organizations and businesses so that players everywhere will benefit from these wonderful services.

If you have any suggestions for features you'd like to see included on PickleballTournaments.com, please let us know in the comments or email us at info@pickleballcentral.com!