CatchCorner partners with CityPickle to streamline New York court bookings

The hardest part of a New York pickleball trip is often not the flight or the hotel. It is finding a court that is actually open when you want to play. CatchCorner by Sports Illustrated is betting that removing that friction is the next big unlock, and its new partnership with CityPickle is designed to put some of the city’s most recognizable courts a few clicks away.

Announced on May 18, 2026, the deal launches with CityPickle’s Wollman Rink in Central Park, its Times Square flagship, and the indoor courts in Long Island City. A fourth site at Brooklyn Bridge is expected to open shortly thereafter. CatchCorner says players will be able to discover, book, and pay for those venues through its platform, which it describes as North America’s leading sports-facility reservation system with real-time availability, instant booking, and seamless payment options. For CityPickle, which calls itself New York City’s home for pickleball, the arrangement gives its urban courts a single digital doorway.

That matters in a market like New York, where time, transit, and court access shape whether a visitor turns a city weekend into a pickleball getaway or gives up before the first dink. CatchCorner already moved deeper into booking infrastructure in 2025 with a Google Reserve integration for courts and fields, and the CityPickle tie-up extends that logic into one of the sport’s most visible urban brands. CityPickle’s Brooklyn Bridge location is listed as opening in summer 2026, adding another piece to a footprint that already reaches Manhattan and Queens.

The partnership also sits inside a larger buildout. In 2025, New York City’s parks concessions process advanced toward a 20-year license for Wollman Rink, a long runway that shows how closely CityPickle’s growth is tied to public space and long-term venue management. In June 2024, Avenue Sports Fund announced a significant minority investment in the company, backing an urban model that mixes indoor courts, food and beverage, and activity in iconic settings. A separate May 2025 report said CityPickle was planning a 60,000-square-foot Brooklyn Bridge complex in Dumbo with 11 courts, food trucks, public green space, and programming.

Taken together, the partnership points to a different kind of pickleball travel story. New courts still matter, but so does the software layer that tells a player where to go, when to show up, and how to lock in a session before the day slips away. In New York, that could be the difference between a one-off visit and a city break built around the courts themselves.