🤝 Meet Drummond Munro. He’s the co-founder and co-CEO of Fairgrounds, a reimagined take on the antiquated racquet club with pickleball, padel, and soon enough, tennis. We sat down with Drummond to talk about the racquet sports boom, how vacant Sears box stores helped get Fairgrounds off the ground, and why the pickleball court can be a great place to find a date.
What was the inspiration for starting Fairgrounds?
I grew up playing racquet sports. I played on Team Canada for badminton, I played competitive squash — my brother's actually a squash pro in New York. I was privileged enough to grow up around one of these private clubs, and it really was this true community hub, but it was inaccessible. It always felt like I was walking on eggshells — not wearing the appropriate attire, everyone turning their nose up if your shirt wasn’t tucked in, or you weren’t wearing white clothing. It didn't make sense to me that no one had come with the times and said, this stuff's ridiculous — we don't need dress codes anymore, let's rethink this whole experience.
We wanted to reimagine the modern-day racquet club. Fairgrounds launched in 2022, when most Canadians didn't even know what pickleball was. Since then we've opened 13 permanent clubs across Canada, across three provinces, with 120,000 members, and we're opening another 10 clubs this year, which will put us at over 20 courts in both pickleball and padel. We're actually adding tennis into our sporting mix toward the end of this year.
Fairgrounds seemed to catch on right away — was there just that much demand?
We opened at, arguably, one of the highest-visibility corners in the city — one block from Yonge and Eglinton, where the old Best Buy was. We built it, and then thought, "oh, we didn't actually tell anyone about it." For the first day or two, no one showed up. Then it quickly caught on — thousands of people a day were walking by. That was a pretty cool catalyst. We both had our other jobs at the time, and after three months we said, okay, this is really interesting — let's see what this could become. That was the foundation for taking it on full-time.
There’s still a shortage of courts in cities like Toronto even as racquet sports get more popular. Why is that?
There's a reason you don't see a lot of public-private tennis clubs: tennis is traditionally hard to monetize. It's a massive court, it's primarily played as singles — are you going to pay $200 a court for an hour when there's so much public infrastructure around, even if it's hard to get into? So tennis doesn't make a ton of sense economically, but just like pickleball and padel, it keeps getting more popular, and it's still regarded as the king of racquet sports. If we can find a way to add it into our sporting mix, that's always been the goal.
Do you think padel has the legs to have a pickleball-style boom, or was there something unique about pickleball?
I think it's the latter — there's something unique about pickleball's physical accessibility. Padel can get there, I just don't think it'll happen with the same explosive growth trajectory. I think how padel has entered North America — positioning itself as a luxury sport — is going to stymie its growth. If you go to Mexico, Spain, or Argentina, courts are on every corner and you're paying two or three euros to play. It's not a luxury sport there. If you go play at one of the clubs in New York City, you're paying close to US$300 for 90 minutes.
Padel is still pretty isolated to a community that already plays racquet sports, or upper-class circles with access to private courts. There are more padel courts in Muskoka per capita than anywhere else in Canada.
There seems to be conflict over court space between tennis and pickleball players. Is there too much animosity or do you think you can get tennis players into pickleball or vice versa?
It's a good question. I think that conflict it's slightly hyped up, it’s not as bad as it’s made out to seem. That said, people who play competitive tennis have sort of turned their nose up at pickleball, like "this isn't a real sport, I don't want to play this." They've embraced padel much more enthusiastically. I think eventually everyone will play in the same sandbox, and pickleball is a really good gateway sport to both tennis and padel.
You guys ran some speed dating pickleball events. Has it worked well?
They’ve been great. There's a cultural shift — no one wants to be on dating apps anymore. People are spending so much time on their phones, and things like Barry's Bootcamp have become "the new bar." Pickleball is community-centric, so we've tried to rethink what programming could look like. Our competitors aren't doing partnerships with Tinder or running date nights, so we thought it was a great way to create a new social programming element. We're going to be relaunching them — they were a huge hit. I want to keep doing fun things like that.
What was the biggest hurdle in building a facility like this in a city like Toronto or Vancouver?
I really wanted to start a cool racquet club, and my co-founder Matt was the guy who came in and said, "the development market's stalled, big-box retail is dying, there's vacant space everywhere — what if we use this as an animation tool for developers to bring underutilized space to life?"
Building out a full permanent club from scratch is a hard project to get off the ground — it’s a big undertaking. Putting courts down in an existing vacant space is significantly easier. So we started going directly to developers and asking what land they had. Our first permanent location was in Cloverdale Mall — an old Sears box that had been vacant for seven years, and no one was doing anything with it. We opened our first club there, and that's how a lot of the initial clubs got off the ground. That model has since shifted. Now we're shifting to building out more
What's the biggest lesson you've learned building Fairgrounds that you'd want to share with a young entrepreneur?
Be flexible, be willing to change, don't assume you're getting it right. We've messed up more times than you can possibly imagine on pretty substantial things, and it's only made us better. You can have a great vision, but stay open to iterating, changing, and getting better. That's the best thing any entrepreneur can do.
What’s on the horizon in terms of expansion?
We're at 13 clubs now. Ottawa just opened. We're opening across the country — Halifax to Vancouver, Langley, Abbotsford, St. Catharines, Edmonton, Markham. Our core focus is really the GTA and Greater Vancouver, so you'll see a lot more there. We're also launching our newest format — a true flagship model in Toronto in Midtown.
And what are you charging there?
Honestly, I don't know yet. I don't think any good entrepreneur plants a flag in the sand and says "this is exactly how we're going to do it." We've iterated more times than I can count, and pricing is an ongoing piece of that — do we have the right membership model, the right pricing strategy, the right amenities? Probably annoyingly so, we're constantly thinking we can do better.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
