Alejandro Rioja, founder of the Austin pickleball facility Pickleland, kept running into the same problem as both an operator and a searcher: every court directory online got built once and then quietly went wrong. He built The Court Scout to fix that specific failure mode.
We sat down with Rioja to talk about what’s actually broken with directories, and why his approach costs more effort to maintain than a normal listings site.
What’s wrong with pickleball directories as they exist today?
Every pickleball directory gets scraped once and left to rot. Wrong numbers, courts that closed years ago. I built agents that check every club weekly instead. Living directory, not a snapshot.
Walk us through what The Court Scout actually is.
It’s a verified directory covering pickleball, padel, tennis, and badminton courts, built and maintained by the same team behind Pickleland. Instead of a one-time research pass, it runs on an ongoing verification loop — agents that revisit every listing on a set cadence and confirm details against primary sources, rather than letting old data quietly expire.
How is that actually different in practice from a normal listings site?
Difference is freshness. Most directories are a one-time scrape. Ours gets re-checked weekly against primary sources. What you see is true right now, not whenever someone last hit Google Maps.
Where does that discipline come from — is it connected to your other projects?
Same itch as Courtlines, the club software I’m also building. I don’t fix things halfway. A directory that’s wrong half the time isn’t hard to beat — you just have to keep checking instead of walking away.
Why has this stayed regional instead of launching everywhere at once?
The Court Scout started in Texas and we’ve been expanding state by state deliberately, because of how much manual verification sits behind each listing. Want it to be the default — not the biggest list, the most current one. Same team running Pickleland runs this. Not a side project we forgot about.
Between Pickleland, Courtlines, and The Court Scout, a pattern shows up: Rioja picks the part of an industry everyone’s agreed to do lazily, and does that part properly instead.
Check out The Court Scout at thecourtscout.com, or learn more about Alejandro Rioja at alejandrorioja.com.
