Pickleball Surges in Philippines as SM North Hosts Championship Series

Pickleball’s next Philippine proving ground was a mall concourse, not a club court. At The Block in SM North EDSA, the 2026 SM Supermalls Pickleball Super Series ended its championship round on Sunday, April 12, and turned a retail center into a stage for a sport that is now being sold as both competition and lifestyle.

The format was built for pace and pressure. Teams went through a five-game match made up of men’s doubles, women’s doubles and two mixed doubles contests, with the best mixed doubles result deciding the team outcome. Each game was played to 11 points under standard scoring, but the time limits changed depending on the round, creating a faster rhythm early and a sharper finish in the semifinals and final. The series was open to novice, intermediate and advanced players, a structure that widened the field while keeping the tournament competitive enough to matter.

That mix of access and spectacle is what makes SM Supermalls such a powerful force in the Philippines’ pickleball boom. The company said on January 7 that it closed 2025 with 61 pickleball court locations nationwide, including 37 permanent courts and 24 semi-permanent courts, and that it planned to push its inventory close to 80 courts in 2026. It also said demand had been strong enough that courts were fully booked through the end of 2025. In practical terms, pickleball has moved from being something people try once to something mall operators can schedule, scale and sell repeatedly.

The bigger story in the Philippines runs deeper than one championship weekend. The Philippine Pickleball Federation says the first clinic was held in Cebu in early 2016, the first established venue was the LDS Church on Buendia Avenue in Makati in 2017, and street pickleball later took hold in Ortigas Center, Pasig, where weekly Saturday evening playdates drew as many as 20 to 30 players by 2019. The federation says the sport is now played daily by thousands of Filipinos nationwide. When the Philippine Olympic Committee formally welcomed the federation as the country’s National Sports Association for pickleball on April 14, 2024, the group said it already had 89 member clubs and more than 4,300 players.

The commercial signal was reinforced by the presence of Toby’s Sports, Smart Communications and the Philippine launch of RPM Pickleball, a performance-driven brand co-founded by professional athlete James Ignatowich. Ignatowich said at The Block Atrium that pickleball’s rise in the Philippines was “crazy,” that it kept getting better, and that the sport still needed more good coaches. His fix was simple: get more people playing now, because today’s players will become tomorrow’s coaches. For a market that began in church halls and street sessions, the path from grassroots curiosity to mall-headline business has never looked clearer.