BTS and celebrities fuel South Korea’s pickleball boom

Pickleball in South Korea crossed a different kind of baseline when BTS members Jin, V and RM started talking about playing it on a livestream. Add in videos of the group playing overseas, and a sport once dismissed as a senior pastime suddenly had the kind of celebrity lift that younger fans notice.

That shift matters because the player base is changing fast. Courts in Seoul parks are getting heavier use, and the sport is drawing office workers, students, foreign residents and former tennis players, not just older recreational players. Variety-show personality Jun Hyun-moo and martial artist Choo Sung-hoon have also put pickleball on television, giving the game a second lane of visibility beyond the celebrity chatter around BTS.

Seoul has already responded with infrastructure. On April 16, 2026, the city opened a dedicated 14-court pickleball complex at Gwangnaru Hangang Park, one of the largest purpose-built facilities for the sport in the city to date. That kind of buildout is the clearest sign that pickleball has moved from curiosity to demand problem, with public space now being asked to catch up to a sport that is filling up faster than many local courts can handle.

The Korea Pickleball Association gives the boom more structure than a viral moment would suggest. Founded in 2015, the group says its website now carries 2026 notices, rules updates, training courses, seminars and competition schedules. Pickleball has been in South Korea since the early 2010s, but the organized push in 2026 shows how quickly the sport has matured from scattered play into a more formal ecosystem.

The bigger picture reaches well beyond Seoul. Recent research from UPA Asia and YouGov found that about 1.9 billion people across 12 Asian territories have heard of pickleball, 812 million have played at least once and 282 million are playing monthly. South Korea’s surge fits that regional pattern, but the celebrity effect gives it a sharper edge: when names like Jin, V and RM help sell the sport, pickleball stops looking imported and starts looking aspirational.