How Kaizen Pickleball Started

A Letter From Chip

In the spring of 2024, at 53 years old, I decided to get back into tennis.

As a teenager, I spent a lot of time around the game. I worked at a country club, maintained clay courts, and played whenever I could. But like a lot of things in adulthood, tennis slowly disappeared from my life over the years.

So I hired an instructor and got back on the court for the first time in a long time.

Within a few minutes I was exhausted. Running corner to corner, trying to keep up, wondering how the sport I remembered being so fun suddenly felt so hard. I remember thinking either the court had doubled in size or I had gotten a whole lot slower.

But while I was standing there trying to catch my breath, I kept noticing the courts beside us.

There were probably 50 people over there playing this game I had never seen before. Everybody was laughing. Talking between points. High-fiving.

Nobody looked stressed. They just looked like they were having a genuinely good time.

At the time, I had never even heard of it.

So I gave it a shot.

And I was hooked almost immediately.

What stood out to me wasn't just the game itself. It was what was happening around the game. You had older people playing with younger people.

Couples playing together. Friends laughing at bad shots. Everybody seemed included. It felt competitive, but also welcoming in a way that a lot of sports don't.

And standing there watching it all, I remember thinking:

This is what people are actually looking for.

Not just exercise.

Connection.

Fun.

Time together.

Around that same time, I had already been thinking about building a short-term rental property in Blue Ridge. But I wasn't interested in building just another cabin that looked like every other cabin. I wanted to create something people would specifically travel for. Something they would talk about after they got home.

Then a friend showed me a project he was working on. It was a barndominium.

I had never heard the term before, but the second I saw it, the wheels started turning. The open space. The high ceilings.

The flexibility of the layout.

That's when the whole thing really started.

And to be honest, there were definitely moments where I thought the idea might be a little crazy.

I remember joking to myself more than once, “If nobody likes this idea, I guess I'll eventually have to tell my wife we're moving into a pickleball house.”

But the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that this could become something special.

Because to me, pickleball isn't really just about pickleball.

It's about connection.

It's about getting people together again.

It's about movement, competition, laughter, wellness, late-night conversations, and experiences that people actually remember.

That became the vision behind Kaizen.

Not just building a house with a court inside it.

Building a place where people could reconnect with the people they care about most.

Once the vision became clear, the next step was finding the right property.

My background is actually in real estate, specifically helping source land for cell tower sites, so I took on the land search myself.

The second I walked it, I knew it was different.

It was quiet. Peaceful. Gated. Surrounded by nature. There was even a creek running through the property, and it was only about 10 minutes from downtown Blue Ridge.

It just felt right.

From there, the real work started.

There were a lot of challenges along the way.

The ceilings over the court needed to reach 23 feet high, which required custom roof trusses, additional engineering, and structural reinforcements.

Because of the creek nearby, we had to elevate the foundation nearly five feet before construction could even begin.

The HVAC system became another major challenge because cooling and heating a large indoor court space is completely different from designing a standard home. After a lot of conversations and planning, we ended up using two main units for the side spaces and four mini-split units specifically for the court area.

Natural light was also really important to me. The challenge was that there really aren't standard residential windows designed for indoor pickleball courts, so we ended up using custom storefront windows to create the open feeling I wanted inside the space.

We also spent a lot of time thinking about balance inside the house.

That's why we added insulation and sound-dampening materials between the bedrooms and the court. I wanted people to be able to fully relax and recharge, even while games were happening nearby.

Even the court surface itself took a lot of research. We ultimately chose Pickleroll because of the quality of their courts and their reputation within professional tournaments around the country.

Today, one of my favorite moments is watching people walk into Kaizen for the first time.

You can usually see it on their face right away.

The open space. The court sitting right at the center of the home. The atmosphere. The sound of paddles echoing through the building once the games start.

That's what this place was built for.

Not just to give people somewhere to stay.

But to give them a place to laugh more, move more, reconnect, and spend real time together again.

In a lot of ways, this is just the beginning.

Kaizen was never meant to be just one property.

This is the first step toward building something much bigger. A collection of places built around connection, wellness, play, and the idea that we can all keep improving little by little.

One rally at a time.

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