Omaha, Nebraska, the longtime host of the NCAA’s College World Series for baseball, is boosting its local pickleball presence with multiple planned additions.
Chicken N Pickle, a Kansas City-based restaurant chain that combines food and drinks with pickleball courts and yard games, will build a new location in Omaha’s Tranquility Park youth sports complex. The restaurant is expected to open in 2025 with six indoor pickleball courts and two outdoor courts.
In June 2023, Omaha’s government announced a $54 million investment in Tranquility Park to renovate the space with 16 soccer fields and up to 11 baseball and softball fields. The investment will also add restaurants, retailers, and hotels aimed at families who travel to Omaha for youth sports tournaments.
Tranquility Park is managed by the city of Omaha, while Tranquility Commons is the name for the surrounding area that’s adding hotels and dining options near the park. The Tranquility Commons project is being developed by Omaha real estate group Wicklow Companies.
Meeting in the middle
“The hope is this will become a premier youth sports facility in the Midwest. What’s really nice about Omaha is that it’s a good meeting spot for any New York and Californian teams to kinda meet halfway,” Tranquility Commons development manager Patrick Mulhall told NoVolleys. “We’re expecting a lot of visitors per year at Tranquility Park, so we need new restaurants to provide for that incoming crowd.”
Investors in Chicken N Pickle include former tennis star turned pickleball pro Jack Sock, as well as NFL stars Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs. The concept has been compared to Topgolf, which operates over 80 popular golf entertainment venues.
Chicken N Pickle opened its flagship Kansas City location in 2017 and it now has nine restaurants with five others planned to open this year across Texas, Indiana, Nevada, and Colorado.
Calls for more pickleball
“[Chicken N Pickle] has gone in the same markets as some of Topgolf’s, they do really well in those,” Mulhall said. “There’s a lot of different groups you could pull from—we know there’s gonna be the older pickleball crowd there during the weekday hours, but it’s a really good family spot during the nights and weekends. They’ve got a lot of plans to keep growing.”
Omaha will also open another indoor pickleball facility courtesy of The Picklr, which announced Omaha in December as the winner of its Picklr Your City contest. The city’s current pickleball options include Blue Sky Patio & Pickleball, which opened in 2022 as a restaurant with two outdoor pickleball courts, but Omaha’s demand for the sport has outpaced its available courts.
“One of our new [real estate] projects is a newly built subdivision in west Omaha. In a park like that twenty years ago they would have put tennis courts, now they put two pickleball courts,” Mulhall said. “I’ll see them full at noon on a Monday and people go there after work. Last Thursday the Mayor said they keep getting calls of people wanting more and more pickleball courts.”
