Ace Pickleball Club to open 11-court indoor venue in San Jose

Ace Pickleball Club is turning a long-vacant retail box at 5502 Monterey Road into an 11-court indoor club, a move that puts one of the Bay Area’s most familiar empty formats to work for one of the sport’s fastest-growing uses. The San Jose site will cover about 31,000 square feet, is expected to create roughly 30 local jobs, and is slated to open in the third quarter of 2026.

What makes the project matter beyond one address is the way Ace is packaging access. The San Jose club is being built for open play, court reservations, social mixers, events, tournaments, clinics, entry into the APC Member Championship Series, and unlimited paddle demos. Ace says the courts will be divided by skill level so beginners, intermediate players, and advanced players can all find games, and it is promoting a limited-time first month free offer as it pushes the location as a simple, all-inclusive monthly membership.

That model is built for the exact kind of weekend that makes pickleball getaways work: a friend group that wants predictable court time, or a corporate retreat that needs a clean, weatherproof activity without spending half the day chasing reservations. In a region where outdoor courts can be crowded, windy, or overheated, an indoor club with a fixed schedule and reserve-a-court system removes a lot of the friction that keeps groups from committing.

Founder Bobby Singh’s own path helps explain the bet. He started playing at a local San Jose court only a few years ago, saw demand rising, and concluded the city needed more high-quality indoor space because public courts were crowded and often under-maintained. That is a local complaint with a broader real-estate consequence: if players are willing to pay for reliability, dead retail can be revalued as recreation infrastructure.

The address itself already has a long retail afterlife. Walmart announced in January 2016 that it would close its South San Jose store there as part of a 269-store shutdown, and later reporting said part of the former supercenter footprint had already been repurposed for entertainment tenants, including a trampoline park. Ace is not just filling a vacancy, it is extending a multi-year conversion of a large box store into active-use space.

The broader company footprint shows why this keeps happening. Ace Pickleball Club, founded by Jay Diederich and Joe Sexton, launched franchising in February 2023 and said in January 2024 that it already had 86 franchises in development across 24 franchisees and 17 states. San Jose now gives that national rollout a Bay Area test case, and if it works, vacant retail around expensive metros will look even more like the next frontier for pickleball access.