Should badminton be the racket sport of the next generation?

Pickleball was invented in 1965 on a badminton court. Two dads on Bainbridge Island, Washington, couldn’t find a full set of badminton rackets, so they grabbed ping-pong paddles and a plastic ball. A third dad joined in, they lowered the net, and a new game was born.

Sixty years later, pickleball has built thousands of courts across America. Every one of them is the exact size of a badminton court. And a lot of the indoor ones are looking for more people to fill them.

So here’s a question worth asking. Much of the world already treats badminton as a serious sport. Could America use pickleball’s courts to make it the racket sport of the next generation?

The world already decided

Look at how much attention badminton gets compared with tennis, language by language.

In Hindi, badminton draws twelve times the attention of tennis. In Indonesian it’s about eight times, and in Thai and Malay about six. It leads in Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese too. China’s sports agency puts the number of recreational players there at roughly 250 million.

And it isn’t only an Asian game. Badminton is named after an English country house, and its oldest tournament, the All England, dates to 1899. Denmark, a country of under six million people, has more than 660 badminton clubs and produced Viktor Axelsen, the Olympic champion in Tokyo and Paris. In Danish, badminton outdraws tennis. Spain shows what one star can do: Carolina Marín, the 2016 Olympic champion, turned a niche sport into a national story, and Spanish attention to badminton now runs close to tennis.

In the US the order flips. By our estimate, tennis draws about 1.4 times the attention of badminton, roughly where Italy and France sit. Americans mostly know badminton as something you set up at a picnic, somewhere between the cornhole and the potato salad.

America has a bigger base than you’d think

About 6.8 million Americans played badminton last year. That’s more than racquetball, squash and padel combined. Most play casually, a few times a year. But it’s a real base, and it has been there for a decade without anyone trying very hard to grow it.

The young players are the interesting part. High school badminton now has about 19,600 players in seven states, up about 13% in three years, and roughly seven in ten are girls. The big specialist clubs in the Bay Area, Southern California, Dallas and New Jersey are built around junior programs, and they’re still opening new courts.

The next generation is already on campus

Between those high school players and the adult clubs there’s a gap, and it’s college. The NCAA doesn’t sponsor badminton, so every college team in America is a student-run club.

The clubs are real anyway. Cal’s has more than 80 members a semester, and its two tournaments draw over 1,000 entries a year. It won the national collegiate title in 2024, in a field of about 30 schools. In the Northeast, a college team championship grew from 15 teams to almost 50 before the pandemic stopped it. What’s missing is anyone pulling it all together.

College also solves the roof problem. Campus rec centers are built for basketball and volleyball, so most already have the height badminton needs. And the players are already there. American colleges hosted about 1.18 million international students last year, and the two biggest groups came from India and China, where badminton is part of growing up.

Tennis has already shown how to do this. USTA Tennis on Campus started in 2000 as a coed club league with a national championship, and it now runs at about 370 colleges. It kept a generation of non-varsity players playing. Badminton needs its own version.

The court is already built

A pickleball court and a badminton doubles court are both 44 by 20 feet. That’s not a coincidence. It’s inheritance. To play badminton on a pickleball court, you need taller net posts and a second set of lines. That’s about it.

The economics line up too. Badminton clubs rent courts for roughly $30 to $55 an hour, in the same range as pickleball clubs. But the real money in badminton is coaching. Junior group training runs about $32 to $36 per player per hour, and elite junior programs charge around $1,500 a month. Pickleball has never had a youth pipeline like that.

Why it hasn’t happened yet

Three things have kept badminton small in the US, and pickleball fixed none of them.

It’s an indoor sport. Wind wrecks a shuttlecock, so badminton never got the free public-court on-ramp that made pickleball explode.

It needs a tall room.

It has an image problem. The backyard version is easy. The real sport is something else. In 2023, India’s Satwiksairaj Rankireddy hit a smash measured at 565 km/h, a Guinness world record and more than twice the speed of the fastest tennis serve ever recorded. Most Americans have never seen that version.

How we’d do it

None of this needs to be national on day one. Pickleball didn’t start that way either. It needs a few dozen clubs with tall ceilings in the right neighborhoods, a few great coaches, and a reason for kids to show up. That’s how Denmark did it: local clubs everywhere, kids starting young, and a culture that grew from there.

And it has a deadline. In 2028, Olympic badminton comes to Los Angeles, with five events and stars from Copenhagen to Jakarta playing on American soil.

How we’ll know it’s working

Attention will show it first. Pickleball’s attention climbed for years before the courts and the investors arrived. If badminton is going to break out in America, it will show up in our numbers in the launch cities well before it shows up in participation surveys. We’ll be watching.

Pickleball borrowed badminton’s court in 1965. It might be time to give it back, at least a few nights a week.

How we measured it

Attention: our attention measure for badminton and for tennis in each language, October 2025 through September 2026. The US figure is estimated from English-language attention by country. Players: Sports & Fitness Industry Association participation data, age 6 and up, 2025. High school: National Federation of State High School Associations participation survey, 2024–25. College: club and USA Badminton collegiate records, Institute of International Education (Open Doors 2025), USTA. Club prices: published rates at US badminton clubs, October 2026. Denmark clubs: Badminton Denmark. Court and ceiling guidance: Badminton World Federation and national facility guidance. China player estimate: China’s General Administration of Sport survey, as reported by state media.