Queen City Open draws 506 players to Springfield pickleball event
A 506-player field turned the Queen City Open into Springfield’s biggest pickleball weekend yet, while every entry helped pay for Meador Park upgrades.
The Queen City Open opened Friday at Cooper Tennis Complex with a 506-player field, a size that underscored how quickly amateur pickleball has grown in Springfield. Registration was closed, start times were set and players were already on court for the fifth annual edition, turning the event into a full-scale competition rather than a mere weekend gathering.
The tournament was hosted by the Ozarks Pickleball Club and the Springfield-Greene County Park Board, a partnership that tied competitive play directly to public recreation investment. All proceeds from the event are set to benefit improvements to the Meador Park pickleball courts and pickleball programming run by the Ozarks Pickleball Club, making the open as much a funding engine as a bracketed championship. The field also reflected the event’s reach, with singles, men’s doubles, women’s doubles and mixed doubles spread across age and skill divisions at the indoor complex.
The numbers show a tournament that has moved from novelty to fixture. The 2025 Queen City Open drew 502 players, so this year’s 506-player count pushed the event to a new high. The inaugural 2022 Queen City Open had more than 300 players and about 500 people in attendance, and the 2022 and 2023 tournaments collectively raised close to $100,000 for pickleball improvements at Springfield-Greene County Park Board facilities. By 2023, all 12 courts at Meador Park had been converted to pickleball courts, giving the fundraising a visible payoff that players can see every time they return.
Ozarks Pickleball Club has been part of that rise from the start. The club was established in 2015 and became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2021, then grew from about 500 members to more than 3,000 by 2023. Club president Matt Battaglia, who said he began playing pickleball in 2019, now helps oversee about a dozen tournaments a year, a workload that mirrors the sport’s rapid expansion in southwest Missouri.
Springfield’s broader event infrastructure has helped make that scale possible. The Springfield-Greene County Park Board says its system includes 102 sites and hosts more than 50 national, state and regional tournaments each year, generating an estimated $13 million to $15 million for the local economy. The Queen City Open now fits squarely into that model: a major amateur draw that fills courts, strengthens the calendar and sends money back into the facilities that keep the sport growing.
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