‘Rally’ Reinvents Pickleball Experience: Alum Brings a Hospitality Bent to a Booming Sport

In 2017, Worthington, then a student at the Darden School of Business, created an app to match tennis and pickleball coaches with players. Working with her partner, Meg Charity—a former tennis pro—they added pickleball to the app as an afterthought. Remember, this was before the sport’s explosive, COVID-era growth. That was a life-changing decision.

“The pickleball part of the app just organically took off,” Worthington said. “Even then, we could see that pickleball had a devoted following, even if it was a niche activity.”

Charity and Worthington began staging day-long pickleball events that attracted enthusiastic participants. In the first year, they had to tape pickleball court lines on unused tennis courts. Two years later, players from around the country were flying in to attend.

Though the two loved the game, they realized pickleball was merely an entrée into their real passion.

“Even though we’re both sports people, the hospitality piece of it is what really excites us,” Worthington said.

They wanted to build a permanent space, so they lined up investors and found a location in nearby Richmond. Then the pandemic hit.

While the Richmond plan withered, pickleball took off. The sport offered an accessible, fun way to be social outside. It exploded in 2020 and shows no signs of slowing. Pickleball has been the fastest-growing sport in America for the past four years.

Worthington and Charity started looking for another city that was warm enough to offer indoor and outdoor courts year-round and found an old warehouse in Charlotte’s South End.

Rally Pickleball opened in 2023 and looks nothing like a racquet club. Imagine a third-wave coffee shop, a picturesque bar, and a high-end restaurant built around eight indoor and outdoor pickleball courts. Instead of the typical blue courts, Rally courts are a welcoming peach tone.

Courts are booked around the clock. In June, they converted event space into Henrietta’s, an upscale restaurant with reservations filling weeks in advance. They are looking for more locations and building out technology they hope will make pickleball even more fun and accessible to players of all ages and skill levels.

Worthington said Davidson equipped her for the world.

“The ability to problem-solve, to think on your feet, to be an entrepreneur—I feel like all of my classes instilled that type of thinking in me,” she said. “Even business school can’t prepare you for that. There’s no question that that is what Davidson did for me.”