Most pickleball directories get built once and then quietly go wrong. Alejandro Rioja got tired of dealing with the fallout.
“Every pickleball directory gets scraped once and left to rot,” says Rioja, who runs Pickleland, an indoor pickleball facility in Austin. “Wrong numbers, courts that closed years ago. I built agents that check every club weekly instead. Living directory, not a snapshot.”
The result is The Court Scout, a directory covering pickleball, padel, tennis, and badminton courts, built and maintained by the same team behind Pickleland. Instead of a one-time research pass, it runs on an ongoing verification loop — agents that revisit every listing on a set cadence and confirm details against primary sources, rather than letting old data quietly expire.
“Verified court directory — pickleball, padel, tennis, badminton,” Rioja says. “Difference is freshness. Most directories are a one-time scrape. Ours gets re-checked weekly against primary sources. What you see is true right now, not whenever someone last hit Google Maps.”
It’s the re-checking — the unglamorous part of the job — that most competitors skip once the initial listing goes live. Rioja doesn’t pretend it’s more complicated than that. “Same itch as Courtlines,” he says, referring to the club software he’s also building. “I don’t fix things halfway. A directory that’s wrong half the time isn’t hard to beat — you just have to keep checking instead of walking away.”
The Court Scout started in Texas and has been expanding state by state since, deliberately, given how much manual verification sits behind each listing. Rioja’s bar for success isn’t size. “Want it to be the default — not the biggest list, the most current one,” he says. “Same team running Pickleland runs this. Not a side project we forgot about.”
Between Pickleland, Courtlines, and The Court Scout, a pattern shows up: Rioja picks the part of an industry everyone’s agreed to do lazily, and does that part properly instead.
