Big news. Starting today, the Pickleheads x CourtReserve integration is available to every CourtReserve facility on Pickleheads Ultra.
If your club already runs programming, especially leagues and ladders, this integration helps you run it seamlessly from signup to final standings, with more revenue per court and a better experience for your players. And if you haven't started programming yet, you can launch best-in-class events as soon as this week, without changing a thing about how your club works today.
CourtReserve powers your club. Pickleheads powers the play.
Run a club on CourtReserve?
Founding facilities get a free 60-day trial and personal onboarding from me. Full details at the bottom of this post.
Play at a CourtReserve club?
Tell us where you play and we'll talk to your club about bringing Pickleheads to your facility. Free Pickleheads t-shirt for you if we connect.
Where pickleball integrations go wrong
Last year I played in a league where two of the four league nights never synced with the leaderboard, and by the end nobody could say who actually won. I know that feeling from both sides: as a player it's deflating, and as a facility it's the one promise your most engaged players paid you to keep.
If you've run integrated events before, you may have experienced one of these issues (or if you're unlucky, all of them!):
- Recurring league nights that never roll up into a single leaderboard, so you keep a spreadsheet on the side just to know where everyone stands.
- Duplicate players in the standings because someone was a guest in week one and made an account in week three.
- An hourly sync that overwrites your work, breaks up teams right before a league night, or drops the player you added yourself.
- Twenty people crowding the front desk trying to claim their spot in an app while the 6:00 event starts at 6:20.
- Staff re-entering scores into another system after every session so results can be sent to DUPR.
We heard versions of every one of these from clubs across the country while we were building. That's exactly what we set out to fix.
Five things this integration does that others don't
We spent the past seven months building this integration with the CourtReserve team, including two months in a closed beta with 10 facilities who ran it in live leagues, ladders, and round robins and told us everything that was wrong.
We fixed what they found, and I couldn't be prouder of where it landed. Here's what makes it different.
Leagues and ladders that work end to end. Link a whole recurring event series from CourtReserve to a Pickleheads league with one dropdown. From there:
- Every occurrence maps to the league automatically. No manual linking, no support ticket to Pickleheads.
- Scores flow into the standings in real time as games finish.
- Players merge into one profile, even if they signed up as a guest in week one and created an account in week three.
- Teams stay together on the leaderboard all season. Subs can join the existing team or start a new one, your call.
At the end of the season you can crown a winner and seed a playoff bracket with total confidence, because the standings are right.
A sync you can trust. Players you add on Pickleheads are never overwritten. Teams are never broken apart. What you see in CourtReserve is what you get in Pickleheads.
You can even add a player after an event has started, which is the exact moment other integrations lock you out. One manager told me the hour before start time was her most stressful hour of the week, adding last-minute players in two systems and hoping the sync didn't undo it. Not anymore.
Automation instead of a sync button. Every time an event's details change, a session gets cancelled, or players register, it all flows to Pickleheads on its own. Nobody has to remember to press a sync button.
You even pick your Pickleheads format right inside CourtReserve when you build the event, so a 12-week league doesn't mean changing the format 12 times in a second system. And there's more automation coming soon.
Linked accounts, done once. A player links their Pickleheads account to CourtReserve one time, the same way they'd link DUPR. From then on, every event they register for knows exactly who they are.
Players get their starting court notification as they walk in the door, no need to claim a spot at the desk. Matchups, live standings, and score entry all happen from their own phones or a tablet at your club.
DUPR without the manual work. DUPR sits at the center of many clubs' programming, so we went deep here. If a player has DUPR linked to either CourtReserve or Pickleheads, you can send scores to DUPR with one click at the end of the session.
And if someone has no DUPR linked to either platform, your staff can add a DUPR ID whenever, even after the event, and send the scores in later. One beta customer estimates that this alone saves his director of programming over eight hours per week.
What a league night looks like now
Say you run a Tuesday night league. At the start of the season, you spend five minutes in CourtReserve: create the recurring event, pick your format, link your Pickleheads league. Done.
All week, signups flow in. Tuesday at 5:45 the doors open and phones start buzzing: "Court 3. First match at 6:00." Between rounds, players enter their own scores and watch the standings move. At 8:00 the night's winner is crowned, and the league standings are already updated as players head out the door talking about next week.
Your staff did three things: started the event, ended it, and sent everyone home happy.
What programming does for your bottom line
The facility market is getting crowded. Players are more advanced than they were even a year ago, and open play alone doesn't hold members the way it used to.
If you're charging players $100 to $200 a month, programming is your product. And here's what ours does for it:
- Grows revenue per court. Our formats accommodate more than four players per court, and some run up to six or more. During prime time, that's up to 50% more paying members on the same courts.
- Keeps members loyal. Pickleheads has twelve competitive and social formats, many of them seeded so players always get good games. Players also get the personal stats, match history, and leaderboards that keep them coming back week after week.
- Streamlines operations. Within a few weeks, events run with almost no staff time. Co-hosts, self-entered scores, and court assignments on players' phones do the heavy lifting.
Dill Dinkers West End in Atlanta, Georgia runs its entire weekly programming calendar on Pickleheads. Their director tells me the automated league tools alone save him at least two hours a week.
How to tell a deep integration from a shallow one
"Integrated" shows up on a lot of feature lists these days. Sometimes it just means a list of names gets pushed from one system into another. What matters is how deep it goes.
My co-founder Max calls the right approach an open tech stack, and the idea is simple: pick the best tool for each job and make sure they work together.
CourtReserve is the best at running your club. Pickleheads is the best at running play. Connected this deeply, you get both without changing how your club works today.
And if a tool ever stops earning its spot, you can swap it out without replacing everything else. That's the real advantage over all-in-one platforms, and Max makes the full case here.
So before you trust any integration, I recommend you ask five questions:
- Does the sync overwrite manual changes?
- Do recurring events roll up into one leaderboard?
- Can players see their own courts and matchups?
- Can you add players after the event starts?
- Does your existing workflow have to change?
We built this integration so you'd get a resounding "yes!" to all five.
How it works
- Players sign up on CourtReserve like usual. Registration, payments, waivers, and reservations stay in your existing environment.
- Events populate on Pickleheads automatically. Player lists, event details, format, and league linkage sync with no duplicate entry.
- Players arrive ready to play. They open Pickleheads and see their court, matchups, and format.
- Scores and stats sync automatically. Results, standings, and DUPR submissions are captured without manual work.
That's really it. Your players sign up the way they always have, and everything they need on game day is waiting for them in the app.
Quick note: when players register, they're prompted to link a Pickleheads account, and a few will want a hand the first time. Your staff can add any player manually, with or without an account. Guests are tracked cleanly, and if they create an account later, their history merges into one profile. This flexibility allows you to launch a league today and let players link at their own pace.
What's next
We're just getting started, and there's a lot we're excited about:
- Automated check-in. Check in once at the front desk and you're checked into your event on Pickleheads. In active development.
- Two-way booking. Set up a game on Pickleheads and have the court reservation and player list flow back into CourtReserve, so player-organized games fill your court time too.
- Discovery. Pickleheads brings the largest digital audience in pickleball: more than 720,000 registered players and hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors looking for games to join. We're working with CourtReserve to make each other's programming discoverable and bookable. For founding facilities, that becomes a marketing channel: fill your events with players from beyond your own membership.
Become a founding facility: 60 days free
For a limited time, new facilities get a free 60-day trial of Pickleheads Ultra, including the CourtReserve integration. No risk, no commitment.
You'll also get premium onboarding directly from me: a personal demo, staff training, and help getting your first event live. Over 1 million players use Pickleheads every month at more than 24,000 locations, and I'd love to help your club put best-in-class programming in front of yours.
Three ways to start:
- Fill out the interest form. It comes straight to me, not a support queue.
- Book a demo.
- Email me: [email protected]
We poured seven months into this because we believe programming is the future of every great pickleball club, and we're honored to build it alongside the CourtReserve team. Now let's go run some leagues!
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Brandon Mackie is Co-Founder & COO of Pickleheads, the leading platform to find and organize pickleball. He leads Pickleheads Ultra, the programming platform powering leagues, ladders, round robins and tournaments at clubs across the country, and he personally onboards every facility that joins the CourtReserve integration. Reach him at [email protected]
