The sixth installment of RacquetX Trends 2026 argues that the clubs winning with AI won’t be the most automated, but the ones that use the hours it saves to pay closer attention to players.
Almost everyone in racquet sports is using artificial intelligence. Very few are using it to make the sports, or the clubs that host them, any better. That gap is the focus of “AI Is Becoming Core to the Experience,” the sixth of eight trend briefs in RacquetX Trends 2026, the industry event’s annual look at the forces shaping the business of tennis, pickleball and padel.
The numbers show how far adoption has already gone. Roughly 62% of working-age Americans now use generative AI, and a Goldman Sachs survey of small businesses found that 76% of owners use AI in some form, though only 14% say it is fully built into their core operations. In a recent survey of golf and club vendors, more than half of respondents pointed to reporting and analytics as the area where AI could create the most value over the next year.
RacquetX saw the same disconnect in the room. When operators at its NY Metro City Series stop were asked who regularly downloads spreadsheets to make sense of their business, plenty of hands went up. When they were asked who could quickly pull revenue per player, or would know whether that number was good, almost none did. The data is already there, the report argues; what clubs lack is the habit of asking it real questions and the time to act on the answers.
That time is the report’s central theme. Racquet directors are increasingly running tennis, pickleball and padel on the same hours they once gave a single sport, and industry estimates cited in the report suggest up to 30% of today’s teaching pros could leave the profession within five years because of burnout and unsustainable schedules. Every hour AI pulls off the admin pile, RacquetX contends, is an hour that can go back to the court, the front desk or the member who quietly stopped booking.
Mali Hall, director of racquet sports at Hunters Run Country Club, offered a concrete example at RacquetX’s Club Summit. Building the club’s member-guest round robin used to take six hours in Excel. Using AI, she and her husband rebuilt the process, including pairings, court assignments and printable scorecards, in about an hour without writing any code.
The report maps the opportunity across five club functions: faster operations and scheduling, marketing that reaches the right players for the right clinic, onboarding and retention outreach that flags members whose play is slipping, programming that matches players with partners at their level, and revenue from coaches who turn saved hours into small-group clinics. For multi-sport clubs that track each sport in a separate system, AI also makes it practical to see a member’s full activity in one place.
RacquetX is equally direct about the limits. AI amplifies whoever is using it, struggles with the human read on a member who is about to leave, and needs someone accountable for it. The report points to a 2025 Wimbledon mishap, when ball tracking was accidentally switched off for a game on Centre Court, as a reminder that the handoff between technology and people is where things break. Its core rule for clubs is that AI drafts and a person approves, with nothing reaching a member that a staff member has not read. Some clubs are already formalizing that approach; Carmel Country Club in Charlotte is piloting an approved AI tool so staff have a secure, governed place to use it.
The bottom line, according to the report, is that the clubs that win the next five years will not be the ones with the most AI, but the ones where players walk out feeling known. RacquetX will continue the conversation at its City Series events for club owners and operators, including Dallas on Nov. 3 at Brookhaven Country Club and Phoenix on Jan. 21, 2027, at Padel Pals Club.
