Florida to California. Two women, one very noticeable Sprinter van, and a plan to find out what pickleball looks like when you stop looking at it from behind a screen.
In August 2026, we left Florida in a PB5star-wrapped Sprinter van and pointed it toward California.
The idea was called The Pickleball Route.
We would drive west, stopping at pickleball courts, clubs, pro shops, coffee shops, restaurants, and whatever else looked interesting along the way. We would play with strangers. Talk to customers. Meet retailers and club owners. Put shoes on feet. Ask people why they play.
There was an itinerary, and we mostly stuck to it. We just kept finding spontaneous reasons to run late. Some of the best stops weren't on it at all.
Why Drive Across the Country?
PB5star is a young pickleball brand. Most of our conversations with customers happen through a screen: orders, reviews, emails, social comments, and analytics.
Useful information. Not quite the same as standing next to someone on a court. We wanted to see our shoes being used in the real world and hear what players thought without a survey between us. What were they wearing? What did they notice? What did they like? What didn't they like?
We also wanted to understand something bigger.
Pickleball has grown quickly enough that it can be easy to talk about it as numbers: participation rates, court counts, demographics, retail sales. On the road, it looked different.
It looked like an 83-year-old man in Santa Fe who plays for exercise and friendship. A Florida player putting enough summer miles on his shoes to teach us something about outsole design. Twenty-somethings playing late at night in Dallas. Beginners learning together in Bastrop. A pharmacist in Arizona telling us pickleball helped him through grief.
It looked like people.
The Route
We started in South Florida and drove west.
Florida → Louisiana → Texas → New Mexico → Arizona → California
Along the way, we played on public courts and private ones. We visited new pickleball clubs under construction and old shoe stores that have been fitting customers for generations. We found PB5star shoes unexpectedly on people's feet. We met customers who weren't customers until five minutes after meeting us.
We traded a surprising number of hats.
We drank a lot of coffee and an even more remarkable quantity of matcha.
We stopped at Buc-ee's, spray-painted Cadillacs in Texas, wandered around Route 66, held a baby alligator, ate beignets in oppressive New Orleans heat, and repeatedly discovered that our carefully planned schedule had very little authority over what actually happened.
The van made us conspicuous enough that strangers frequently came to us. Eventually, we started going to them.
“Do you play pickleball?” became a perfectly reasonable thing to ask almost anyone.
The answers continually surprised us.
What We Found
We went looking for pickleball. What we kept finding was community. There were serious players and people who barely knew the rules. Retirees and teenagers. Club owners, coaches, chefs, retailers, runners, bartenders, entrepreneurs, and people we met at gas stations.
The sport crossed more lines than I expected. That may be the most interesting thing about pickleball right now. You can't reliably tell who plays by looking at them.
We tried.
We were terrible at it.
Read The Pickleball Route
We're publishing the road trip in installments rather than trying to compress two weeks of America into one enormous post.
Part One: Florida
Naples → St. Pete → The Villages → Pensacola
Hot courts, honest product feedback, a “Cadillac cruiser,” pickleball retirement communities, and our first PB5star sighting in the wild.
[Read Part One: The Pickleball Route Through Florida →]
Part Two: New Orleans to Austin
New Orleans → Baton Rouge → Houston → Bastrop → Austin
Beignets, baby alligators, a bookstore detour, beginner pickleball in Bastrop, and a look at where the pickleball club may be heading next.
[Coming soon]
Part Three: Across Texas
Austin → Waco → Dallas → Frisco → Fort Worth → Amarillo
Retailers, private courts, pickleball clubs, unexpected introductions, and a very long road west.
[Coming soon]
Part Four: New Mexico & Arizona
Santa Fe → Flagstaff → Sedona → Scottsdale
Route 66, public courts, desert heat, an 83-year-old pickleball player, and more strangers than we expected to meet.
[Coming soon]
Part Five: California
Calabasas → Santa Monica → Los Angeles
The final stretch home, California pickleball, new retail relationships, and an ending we definitely did not have on the itinerary.
[Coming soon]
A Road Trip About Pickleball. Mostly.
By the end, The Pickleball Route had become less about documenting where pickleball is played and more about the people who have built lives around it.
We also came home with notebooks full of product feedback, new retail relationships, potential partnerships, a van full of traded hats, and more footage than I currently know what to do with.
But the thing I keep thinking about is how often a conversation that began with “Do you play pickleball?” ended somewhere completely different.
That's the part of the trip we're going to tell here.
Follow along as we add each stop to The Pickleball Route.
Women's Pickleball Court Shoes, PB5 Court2 | White-Powder Pink
$129.00
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