Pickleball Is Scaling: Van Wagner Brings TV-Visible Signage to the Fastest-Growing Sport in America June 16, 2026
Pickleball is growing fast. The advertising opportunity is growing with it.
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Pickleball has graduated from backyard courts and recreational leagues to primetime television. The 2026 SFIA annual report confirms pickleball as America’s fastest-growing sport for the fifth consecutive year — now the fourth-most played sport in the country, with 24.3 million Americans playing in 2025, a 171.8% increase since 2022. The professional game is catching up fast, and with it, a serious sports marketing opportunity is taking shape.
Van Wagner is now offering TV-visible signage opportunities across the top two professional pickleball tours — the Carvana PPA Tour and Major League Pickleball (MLP) presented by DoorDash. Across both tours, the schedule includes 30 tour stops, giving brands consistent, repeatable exposure throughout the season.
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What This Means for Advertisers
For advertisers, this presents an opportunity to reach an engaged, rapidly growing, and increasingly mainstream sports audience through efficient, high-impact marketing inventory built for live broadcasts, streaming coverage, highlights, and social amplification. For brands looking to build awareness with passionate sports audiences without the long-term commitment of an official team or league partnership, TV-visible signage offers a flexible, high-impact alternative.
Van Wagner’s Dorna division specializes in TV-visible signage that places brands directly within game broadcasts, integrating advertisers’ brands and messaging into pickleball coverage. This tried-and-true format has already delivered measurable results across MLB, NHL, NBA, NCAA, MLS, and now professional pickleball.
The signage appears naturally within the broadcast frame through Sidewall LED, Backwall LED, and Virtual On-Court Signage — captured consistently throughout live coverage, highlight packages, and social content. Rather than a single impression, advertisers benefit from sustained brand visibility across every platform the sport reaches.
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A Sport with Serious Media Infrastructure
What separates pickleball from many emerging sports is how quickly it has established a legitimate broadcast ecosystem. The Carvana PPA Tour and MLP presented by DoorDash now reach audiences across linear television, streaming, and digital platforms, including CBS, FOX, ESPN, Tennis Channel, PickleballTV, and YouTube. That growth is already translating into viewership. The 2026 Carvana PPA Masters on CBS averaged 791,000 viewers[JP1.1] and surpassed 1 million peak viewers, signaling pickleball’s continued rise into the mainstream sports landscape.
The momentum is also being reflected at the industry level. Earlier this year, United Pickleball Association (UPA) — the parent company of both the PPA Tour and MLP — secured $225 million in funding, reinforcing long-term investment in pickleball’s professional infrastructure. Nike also signed Anna Leigh Waters, the sport’s biggest star, to its first-ever pickleball endorsement deal, further signaling growing confidence in the sport’s future and commercial potential.
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Why TV-Visible Signage Works in Pickleball
Pickleball broadcasts naturally create strong visibility for signage. The sport’s compact court, consistent camera angles, and fast-paced action ensure courtside and sideline branding stays in frame throughout rallies, replays, and the highlight moments that live far beyond the broadcast itself.
In many ways, it mirrors what has made TV-visible signage so effective in established sports — but with added upside. For advertisers, pickleball offers:
- Sustained on-screen exposure across live coverage, replays, and highlight programming
- Cross-platform longevity as content is clipped, shared, and redistributed across social and digital channels
- An engaged, fast-growing audience that skews active, health-conscious, and highly valuable to brands across categories
- Early-entry inventory in a sport still early in its professional lifecycle, giving advertisers a chance to build presence ahead of increased competition
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What Dorna Does — Across Every Sport
TV-visible signage is one of the most efficient and durable formats in sports advertising, and as the industry leader, Dorna has been building and managing this inventory across professional sports for more than four decades. Working with us, advertisers have access to the largest network of brand-building opportunities in sports, including behind home plate, courtside, and along fields of play across more than 500 professional and collegiate sports teams and events. Dorna specializes in identifying the right placements, negotiating the right inventory, and delivering measurable results in-broadcast, highlights, and across the social and digital content that surrounds every major sporting event.
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The Takeaway
Pickleball is no longer a question of whether it belongs alongside established professional sports. The audience is real, the media distribution is substantial, and the advertising opportunity will only continue to grow as the sport’s professional ecosystem matures.
Van Wagner is positioned to help brands move now — before the space becomes crowded — and deliver the same sustained, cross-platform visibility that TV-visible signage has generated across decades of professional sports broadcasting.