English brothers Mark and Chris Fuller are set to open a $2.5m rackets club that combines squash, padel and pickleball in a 34,000 sq ft warehouse in Colorado.
Three Rackets, which is scheduled to open in September, will feature three all-glass squash courts, four pickleball courts and five padel courts, with a central bar and lounge area offering visibility of all three sports.
The venue's fusion of squash with padel and pickleball will provide a fascinating case study in how squash can benefit from aligning itself closely with the two arrivistes of the racket sports world, which are seeing unprecedented explosions across the globe.
The brothers initially wanted to build the club in Chicago, but were scuppered by a lack of viable venues with adequate ceiling height. They switched focus to Colorado (where Chris is based) and found a warehouse on Hoyt Street in Bloomfield which ticked all the boxes.
The Three Rackets project is backed by a healthy roster of investors, many of whom the brothers know through squash circles. Despite this, Mark admits he had to go to great efforts to persuade them that squash should be part of the project, with the sport's commercial confidence and public awareness currently lagging some distance behind pickleball in the States, and US padel's fortunes heading very much in an upwards direction.
"Yes, I had to sell it to them," Mark tells Squash Player. "Some of my big investors are squash people and I still had to persuade them.
"I stand by the decision to include squash. We wouldn't be making this level of investment if we didn't believe there was a strong business argument for including squash."
"Yes, the economics of including squash are difficult because squash courts cost more than padel and pickleball, so you have to have some balls to put a number of squash courts in.
"But squash is in there because it's been my and Chris' life up to this point. If anyone's going to make a squash project work in Colorado, it'll be us."
Indeed, Mark, 41, reached world PSA no.118 before founding the hugely successful UK Racketball and working as head squash coach at Nottingham University. He later moved to the States to coach at Metro Squash, a Squash and Education Alliance programme in Chicago. Chris, 35, is a former world no.89 who relocated from the UK to the US eight years ago and now works in real estate.
"We're not trying to build a squash club here — I think that would have been a difficult argument, especially in Colorado where there's not much of an existing squash scene," Mark explains.
"If it's a cold-call investor looking at a spreadsheet, it's a little more difficult to persuade them, but I have a personal relationship with a lot of my investors and that enables me to take them a journey with us."
Three Rackets follows the lead set by Nicol New Jersey, the project spearheaded by former world squash champion Peter Nicol and his wife Jess Winstanley, which opened in March 2025 and also combines the same three sports. Other examples can be found in Malaysia, Austria, France and Canada.
Three Rackets will operate on both a membership and pay-to-play basis. A top-tier membership will offer free bookings across all courts, or players can opt for specific pickleball or squash memberships.
Mark predicts that pickleball — which has an estimated 24.3 million participants in the States — will act as an 'entry point' to initially get people through the Three Rackets front door, before players discover squash and padel as enjoyable alternatives which each offer distinct racket sports experiences.
"Our club ecosystem will encourage lots of crossover, which is something we're really excited about," states Mark.
"Pickleball is huge out here, so we could create a ready community of several hundred players straight off the bat, which we can use to keep the lights on.
"Then, the layout of the club ensures they're going to see all the other courts, so it's geared up for that soft sell. We'll have taster sessions, beer leagues and plenty of activities to persuade these guys to try squash and padel too, which will hopefully take off once we get that critical volume of friendship groups.
"If people want a social hit they can play pickle or padel, or if they want a harder workout or prefer a singles format they might gravitate to squash. The variety allows them to find their own space within Three Rackets, rather than having just a squash club which might be out of bounds to 95% of the population."
Mark ran UK Racketball for 13 years, delivering exactly 100 events before passing it on to present incumbent Mike Harris. Mark is keen to embed racketball (Squash 57) at Three Rackets and believes its benefits are hugely under-exploited.
"I think there is more of an economic argument for Squash 57," he explains. "It increases the demographic and number of people who will enjoy using squash courts.
"That's where other people aren't fully calculating the economic benefit of having squash courts. They're ignoring that subsection of the game, which I think can really drive participation."
The brothers' masterplan is to grow the Three Rackets brand in other US cities — which puts big pressure on the multi-rackets model proving a success in Colorado.
"Our investors are backing more than one club, so we need proof of concept," says Mark.
"We want to be able to prove that squash is generating this amount of revenue and that it needs to go in clubs two and three. This is why we've developed the 'Three Rackets' brand, to lock squash in there.
"We need to make sure the economics of all three sports work because we really want squash to be included in that expansion."
