USA Pickleball Serves awards grants for new Iowa, Kansas courts

The biggest bottleneck in amateur pickleball is still court time, and USA Pickleball Serves pushed money straight at that problem by awarding $25,000 each to Pickleball Iowa County in Williamsburg, Iowa, and the City of Hillsboro in Hillsboro, Kansas. Together, the two projects will add nine dedicated outdoor courts where players now have to fight for space on existing facilities.

The Williamsburg grant will help finish four permanent outdoor courts inside the Williamsburg Recreation Complex, giving Iowa County its first dedicated outdoor pickleball home. USA Pickleball said the site is meant to support open play, leagues, clinics, youth programming and community events, and the payoff is already easy to measure: local indoor participation climbed from roughly 25 players in winter 2024-25 to more than 100 in winter 2025-26. The finished project is expected to serve 500 to 800 people a year, and ownership and maintenance will sit with the City of Williamsburg, a setup that should keep the courts public for the long haul. The complex itself is anchored by the Williamsburg Recreation Center, a more than 30,000-square-foot facility completed in the summer of 2002 with three existing sports courts.

Local backing has also started to stack up behind the Williamsburg build. Iowa County supervisors approved a $5,000 contribution on May 1, adding county support to the USA Pickleball Serves award and making the project look less like a symbolic gesture and more like a real expansion of places to play. For a county that has been relying heavily on indoor and shared space, four permanent outdoor courts change the math immediately.

In Hillsboro, the grant will support five dedicated outdoor courts at the Hillsboro Sports Complex, where pickleball will join a site that already includes eight tennis courts, softball and baseball fields, soccer fields, a covered playground and a concession stand. The city also received a 2026 Hillsboro Community Foundation grant for a pickleball courts lighting project, another sign that the court build is part of a broader push rather than a one-off upgrade.

USA Pickleball Serves said the Play It Forward Grant, launched in April 2025, was the first monetary grant program offered by its charitable arm. The 2026 application window closed April 27, and the new recipients point to the same national trend behind the sport’s explosive rise: the Sports and Fitness Industry Association says U.S. pickleball participation grew from about 4.2 million players in 2020 to more than 24 million in 2025. In places like Williamsburg and Hillsboro, that growth is turning into something players can see, and use, one court at a time.