WEAVERVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — Ballcrank Pickleball Club, a new indoor pickleball facility, is set to open in Weaverville in just a few weeks. The space will host 12 pickleball courts, a pro shop, bathrooms and showers and an outdoor patio, as well as the potential for a restaurant down the line.
BPC will occupy part of the expansive former headquarters of the Balcrank Corporation, located at 115 Reems Creek Road in Weaverville, which has been transformed into Ballcrank Arcade & Fairgrounds.
BPC will likely be the first business open in the new community hub.
“The intent is, yes, we would like it to be cultural. We’d like there to be more entertainment. We’d like there to be restaurants. This sort of activity where it becomes more of an arcade, of a lot of the things you might do under one roof. But we will be the first,” said Teri Lyng, BPC vice president of operations and Asheville Pickleball Association board member. “To some extent, I think the world is kind of waiting for us to open and see how people flow there, and then I think the floodgates will open with people wanting to fill it up.”
Courts in progress
Work on the facility is progressing quickly. According to Claire Counts, owner of Rhythm Design & Construction, the contractor and design company overseeing the renovation of the building, BPC could be ready to go in three to five weeks.
Counts and her crew have already installed the walls for the new bathrooms, designed the club pro shop, put in 78 light fixtures and erected three massive fans, keeping the big warehouse cool.
“We flip pretty quickly,” Counts said. “We get to it, we get to it fast.”
Next, Counts will hand the construction baton to CourTex Construction, a company that specializes in pickleball court installation, to prepare the 12 courts at BPC.
As soon as the facility is ready to go, BPC programming will come with it. Lyng said that a calendar of community events, pickleball tournaments and court reservations is already in the works.
“We want to open with a bang,” Lyng said. “Actually, our general manager, our director of pickleball, he’s already programmed a significant amount into our software system at that time. So, when we get a week or two out, when we get to the point where people could actually start taking those reservations, we’ll have a full slate of programming in the system.“
In the meantime, for community members who want to keep up to date with the progress of construction, Counts has posted weekly update videos to the RDC Instagram account, www.instagram.com/rhythminteriorsavl.
Joining Ballcrank Pickleball Club
BPC will operate on a two-pronged business model: day passes and memberships.
“If you’re an avid player, you’re going to play a lot, you’re going to want to join as a member, and as a member, you’re going to pay a monthly fee and you’re going to have access two weeks in advance. You can reserve your court. You’ll have a discount on any clinics or things like that that we do,” Lyng said.
There will also be activities and social events at BPC exclusive to the membership tier.
“But, if you’re not you’re not playing that much or you don’t want to commit money to a annual membership, anyone can come and play and be a day member,” Lyng said. “A day member is $15. So you show up, you join a session, the sessions are two hours and you just pay your $15. You can do that once a month, you can do that 10 times a month, however much you want to play.”
Day members can reserve their courts up to three days in advance.
Affordability was important to the BPC team when planning the facility, Lyng said, though BPC will provide a different experience from free public courts around the region. For instance, the club setting grants BPC the opportunity to host larger tournaments, and the club website and app gives the ability to organize players for open play sessions.
“Open play is a unique pickleball thing,” Lyng said. “We might set up, let’s say, three courts, which would be 12 people playing at one time, and we might say 16 people can sign up for the open play from 1 to 3 o’clock in the afternoon. So, people just go on our website or our app and they would say, oh yeah, I can play 1 to 3 on Tuesday afternoon, and just put your name on it and pretty soon it fills up with 16 people.“
Pickleball for the people
Lyng sees the new pickleball club as an exciting addition to the Weaverville social sphere.
For one thing, Lyng said, the sport is a lot of fun.
“What I love most about the game, it is just fun and you just forget about everything else. You’re out there, you’re with people, everybody is friendly. It’s fun, the excitement, and you get that competition, but it doesn’t feel like winning and losing competition,” Lyng said. “I don’t ever walk away like, oh, I lost three games and that wasn’t fun. It was fun even if I lost three games.“
Lyng said that when she and her husband moved to Asheville, joining the pickleball community introduced them to “hundreds” of new people.
“We can’t go to a restaurant or a grocery store without running into someone that we know from pickleball,” Lyng said. “You meet so many people.”
For more information about Ballcrank Pickleball Club, visit www.ballcrank.com.