Hong Kong pickleball challenge draws 1,000 players to mall venue

More than 1,000 players and more than 1,200 scheduled matches turned D·PARK in Tsuen Wan into Hong Kong’s loudest pickleball argument yet: this sport is no longer waiting for a proper home. The CCG Pickleball Challenge 2026 ran from April 3 to April 12 across four indoor courts, with competitors ranging from 5 to 64 years old and fields spread across men’s, women’s and mixed singles and doubles.

That scale mattered because the setting was the message. D·PARK said it was Hong Kong’s first large-scale pickleball tournament staged inside a shopping mall, and Chinachem Group treated that as more than a novelty. The event was presented by Chinachem, organised by Bay Pickle and co-organised by D·PARK, with Amy Wu describing pickleball as a sport that blends tennis, table tennis and badminton while staying accessible and low-impact. In a city where space is always at a premium, the mall format gave the sport something a court complex cannot always buy: constant foot traffic, visibility and the chance to convert casual passersby into future players.

The tournament also leaned hard into legitimacy. Chinachem said Zhou Yunming, a National Level 1 Referee, served as chief referee, making it the only amateur pickleball tournament in Hong Kong supervised by a national-level referee. That detail separates this from a pop-up exhibition. It was a properly structured event with age divisions from U8 through U16, then 17-34, 35-49, 50-59, 60-plus and open, a spread that made the draw look less like a niche clubhouse meet and more like an actual pathway for the sport.

The opening ceremony gave the challenge extra pull. Peter Brien, Andy Cheung, Albert Fung, Jenny Wan, Linda Chung and Fatboy, also known as Leung Yip, were all part of the launch, which added celebrity shine without losing the core sporting story. The closing weekend then widened the tent further with a Pickleball Carnival, workshops, interactive booths and family activities, a reminder that the real prize here was not just the bracket but the audience walking past it.

Hong Kong’s public infrastructure is moving in the same direction. The Leisure and Cultural Services Department launched a trial scheme on January 15, 2025 to open designated non-fee charging outdoor badminton courts for pickleball, then revised the venue list starting April 1, 2026. Chinachem said D·PARK will add two standard pickleball courts in its atrium after the tournament, bringing the mall’s total to four courts. Put together, the mall event, the new courts and the government’s venue shift point to the same conclusion: pickleball in Hong Kong is starting to look less like a one-off curiosity and more like a repeatable urban growth model.