Selangor launches RM500,000 pickleball school tour across 50 schools

Selangor backed its pickleball push with RM500,000 on May 15, launching Picklespark 2026/2027 as a 12-month school tour that will visit 50 schools across the state. The plan is not just to spark interest in a fast-growing sport. It is built to find new players, train 500 students and 100 teachers, and create a pathway from school exposure into club and state-team development.

State youth, sports and entrepreneurship executive councillor Mohd Najwan Halimi framed the programme as an attempt to build a proper school ecosystem for pickleball. The rollout will run through five zones across Selangor and begin with cooperation from the Selangor State Education Department, a sign that the state wants a formal pipeline rather than a one-off promotion. Najwan said teachers will be given space to become coaches, while schools are expected to develop more systematic training plans around the sport.

That matters because pickleball is still outside National Sports Council school training, leaving Selangor to build its own route into the game. By starting in schools, the state is trying to solve several problems at once: coaching, equipment access, and court time. In practical terms, Picklespark is designed to turn first contact with the sport into regular training, then into team structures, and eventually into a pool of athletes who can feed club and state-level competition.

The programme also fits Selangor’s wider competitive ambitions. In November 2024, Menteri Besar Amirudin Shari said the state intended to introduce pickleball as a medal sport at SUKMA 2026. In June 2025, Najwan said pickleball could be included as a demonstration sport at the 2026 Malaysia Games, noting that only a handful of states, including Selangor, Sarawak, Perak and Penang, had the kind of participation and infrastructure needed to push the sport forward.

That wider push sits inside a bigger national and regional boom. The Malaysia Pickleball Association says the country has more than 400,000 players, 73 tournaments, 472-plus venues and 500-plus certified coaches. Separate reporting in August 2025 put Malaysia at at least 50 privately owned pickleball arenas and more than 400 courts. Across Asia, UPA Asia and YouGov research found about 1.9 billion people in 12 territories had heard of pickleball, while about 812 million had played it at least once. Selangor’s school tour is a test of whether state money can turn that mass awareness into a lasting development model.