A new sports club is aiming to create a community hub where people can connect over pickleball and much more.
Pickleball Club of Georgia is planned for West Midtown at 1365 English Street NW. A 110,000-square-foot warehouse is being transformed into an all-encompassing facility with 33 indoor pickleball courts and seven outdoor courts. There will also be golf simulators, a fully equipped fitness center and modern locker rooms and showers.
The club will be one of the largest indoor pickleball facilities in the country, owner Mike Shamus told What Now Atlanta.
“I hope it brings pickleball players of all shapes, sizes and skill sets together to build community around pickleball,” he said. “We will have memberships and drop-ins, after-school programs, lessons and clinics. It’s a club, but it’s not going to be a stuffy country club. It’s going to be an inviting, welcoming place to build community and to have fun.”
Shamus envisions Pickleball Club of Georgia to go beyond pickleball and to serve as an all-encompassing facility. There will be dedicated areas for studying or working, as well as a café with a full bar.
“You can come in, grab a coffee, we’ll have showers and locker rooms, private meeting areas, little pods where someone could take a conference call or work on their computer,” he said. “Like the old Cheers show, the community where everyone knows your name. There’s food and drinks and a place to hang and all that right in your neighborhood.”
To craft the perfect pickleball facility and create the ideal user experience, Shamus researched pickleball facilities, combing through reviews to identify what people love – and what they don’t like so much. He searched for the right location for over a year, checking out facilities in Duluth, Peachtree Corners and Buckhead before finally landing in West Midtown.
Shamus is a seasoned entrepreneur, having experience in technology, music, manufacturing, retail and more. He currently runs a technology consulting firm and a local music production company.
He started playing pickleball about two and a half years ago, and he felt that the city needed a facility like Pickleball Club of Georgia to meet demand, as the sport has surged in popularity in recent years. Pickleball has been considered the fastest-growing sport over the last three years, with a 2025 report indicating there were an estimated 19.8 million pickleball players in the United States in 2024, a 45.8 percent increase from 2023. Other estimates place the amount of U.S. pickleball players closer to 48 million.
“This was really driven by the market demand,” Shamus said. “There’s not enough places to play. Pickleball is growing so fast that subdivisions and parks and recreation and municipalities cannot move fast enough to make courts available to the general public. My entrepreneurial spirit said, if private enterprise doesn’t step up and get involved, we’re gonna have a real problem. I saw a pent-up demand. I knew the market was ripe and thought it could be successful.”
Pickleball Club of Georgia is expected to open by the end of this year, with the facility targeting a December 2025 opening.
Follow on Instagram @pickleballclubofgeorgia.
