Why I built Pickleloonies (and quit my spreadsheet)

My Tuesday-night pickleball pod was being run out of a Google Sheet. It worked for nine months. Then it stopped working, badly, and that's when I started building Pickleloonies.

The setup

Sixteen of us, mostly Orange County folks, mostly 3.5–4.0, mostly between 28 and 40. We play 5:30–8:00pm at a city park with four courts on a permit. Court fees come out to about $11/person/session. Each Tuesday someone has to ask "who's in", count yeses, lock the count by Monday night so I can pay the city, and remember who still owes me from last week.

For most of 2025, that someone was me, and the system was a Google Sheet plus a group chat.

What broke

In late October the pod hit a rough patch I should have seen coming:

The chat scrolled past the question. I'd post "who's in for Tuesday?" at 9am Monday and by lunch it was buried under memes and a screenshot of someone's match recap. Half the pod missed it entirely.
People said "in" then ghosted. Three weeks in a row, one of the courts ran 2v2 instead of doubles because two people who said yes didn't show. Court money paid, court empty.
The Venmo chase was the worst part. I'd front the court fee Sunday night. By the following Sunday, half the pod had paid me. By the next Sunday after that, three people still owed for two sessions. Asking a friend for $22 four weeks later feels worse than just eating it. So I ate it.
Guests broke the math. Someone would bring a coworker. The coworker had a great time, didn't pay (didn't know how), didn't come back. The pod paid for them.

None of these were catastrophic. Together they made me dread Tuesdays for about a month, which is what I think happens to most weekly crews right before they die.

What I actually needed

A few specific things:

A place to post the question that wasn't the group chat. Something where "I'm in" is one tap, not a typed message.
A roster I could trust by 8pm Monday. If you said yes, you're on the hook for the fee whether you show or not. If you bail, your spot goes to the waitlist automatically. Same rule for everyone.
A way to invite a guest that didn't require them to sign up for anything but did pre-collect $11 from them.
A payment ledger that wasn't me in the Notes app at midnight.
Crucially: invite-only. I didn't want public discovery. I didn't want strangers. The pod is the pod.

Why I didn't just use an existing tool

I tried. Three of them.

Pickleheads is the obvious one. Great app — but it's built for finding games and players, the opposite of what I wanted. Our pod is closed.

CourtReserve is for facilities running clubs. It's heavy, expensive, and assumes you're a venue, not a friend group. Wrong shape.

Spond is the closest existing fit — built for youth sports teams. It's fine. But it's also pickleball-agnostic, doesn't understand the wager-the-loser-buys-pho culture, and treats payment as a side feature instead of the main one.

So I started building Pickleloonies in November 2025 nights and weekends. Six months in, it's the thing I use to run my own pod every Tuesday, and a few other Orange County crews have asked to be on it too.

What it is, in one sentence

A pod manager for invite-only pickleball friend groups: RSVPs with guest invites, waitlists, recurring sessions, Venmo/Zelle/Cash payment tracking with screenshot approval, group chat, and a wager system because my pod settles every Tuesday in bowls of pho.

It's free forever. There's no per-member fee. There's no public discovery — your pod is private.

What's next

This blog is the second half of the project. I write about what I'm building, what I'm learning by running a real pod every week, paddle gear I've actually used, and the courts I actually play on in Orange County. Some of it is AI-drafted then edited; the AI-drafted pieces carry a small badge so you know. None of the experience is fabricated.

The product is at pickleloonies.com/demo if you want to poke at it. Sign in's at /login. If you've got a pod that's tired of running on a spreadsheet, this is what I built so I could stop.