- July 19, 2025
-
-
Loading
Loading
Upon moving to the Lakewood Ranch area in December, Matt Lund thought he had landed the perfect job.
Lund, who had finished a 16-year career with the YMCA in Wisconsin, had been hired to work at The Pickleball Club at Lakewood Ranch.
But two weeks after starting, The Pickleball Club closed. The closure left the tight-knit pickleball community scrambling for a place to play, and its employees scrambling for a place to work.
“All of a sudden, boom, nothing's there," Lund says. "No more paycheck, no more job. I was like, ‘I think there's a bigger plan going here, and we just need to be patient and see what happens.’”
He only needed to be patient for six months.
The Pickleball Club at Lakewood Ranch has reopened under new owner Scott Hermann, who hired Lund to be his CEO.
The new owners, while keeping the same name for the facility, at 1300 Sarasota Center Blvd., Sarasota, aim to improve the customer experience by being more transparent about costs and other factors.
The previous owner of The Pickleball Club, Brian McCarthy, was a 30-year U.S. Navy veteran. He founded the company in 2019 and in 2022 said he and his business partners planned to invest $180 million into opening 15 high-end pickleball centers across Florida.
The company announced it was shuttering in a mid-December LinkedIn post. “We did not have sufficient financial resources to continue operations," the post stated, in part. "We have started the process of liquidating the company assets, including our two club locations in Lakewood Ranch and Port St. Lucie.”
McCarthy didn't respond to multiple calls and texts for comment when the business shuttered.
Hermann, meanwhile, was impressed with Lund's business experience and thought he was a good fit.
“Scott (Hermann) has been fantastic, and he's put as much trust in me as I put in him that we're going to work together and do this right,” Lund says.
Lund now lives in Lakewood Ranch with his wife Stephanie and their four children. Since the pandemic, they have embraced pickleball as a family. It made Lund's current position seem perfect.
Lund and Hermann connected in March and struck a deal. They began with a soft opening June 1.
“We put in about probably three to six months of work within three weeks,” Lund says. “It was a lot of work, a lot of time, but it was something that we wanted to do, and so we made it happen. Now here we are, and we're halfway to our goal for our membership to be functioning at a sustainable model.”
Lund says they will rely heavily on memberships in order to function as a successful business. "We wanted to be fully transparent about what is included," he says.
The memberships range from $80-$525 per month plus a one-time initiation fee.
“It comes down to customer service — giving adequate space, and understanding that you're dealing with multiple types of individuals who have different needs,” Lund says “A lot of them come here for exercise, some come here for camaraderie, for food, for the Wellness Center. I think overall, they're coming here for socialization.”
Since the June 1 opening, the club has sold 200 memberships. The goal? 450 members.
Lund says there is a good mix of former members returning and new ones coming for the first time.
Besides marketing and word of mouth, Lund says his family has been talking to everyone in the community they meet.
He says the previous owner, McCarthy, might have "outpriced" the business. He also says building costs might have doomed the project. Lund says the building, which was more than $11 million to build, should have been $8 million to $9 million.
In its first run, Lund also says The Pickleball Club changed its operations too many times — which was hard on the clientele.
“It was just charge, charge, charge, charge,” Lund says. “By the time you're done as a member, you're going, what benefits do I have beyond the fact that I'm paying a lot of money for it? I think a lot of it was because they felt they were paying a lot of money to walk into a beautiful building that doesn't serve them, so we tried to adjust that a little bit.”
Although Manatee County is building a pickleball complex at Premier Sports Campus North, off State Road 70 in Lakewood Ranch, and many other public and private pickleball courts are being constructed in the region, Lund says the advantage to The Pickleball Club is all the additional amenities combined with the climate-controlled building.
“You’re not having to deal with wind, the humidity, the heat and the rain,” Lund says.
Lund says while he's looking forward to checking out the outdoor courts at Premier as a facility, he believes The Pickleball Club is a step up. “They have several covered courts, steel frame structure, but they have no sides," he says. "You're still affected by the weather; it just kind of keeps the sun and rain off of you."
The Pickleball Club at Lakewood Ranch currently has three full-time and five part-time staffers. Plans for the future include more employees when the membership base grows.
“As we continue to build on what we're doing here, the community is going to benefit," he says. "We have a heavy focus on not just the pickleball community, but the senior community, the youth community, the development of a healthy lifestyle and that social responsibility aspect."
This article originally appeared on sister site YourObserver.com.
