When Zach Hunter was first introduced to pickleball, he wasn’t a big fan.

That’s not surprising, especially when you consider the fact that Hunter was a high-level tennis player who competed for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the late 2000s.

Now, though, the 36-year-old is all-in on America’s fastest-growing sport as the co-owner of the Palm Beach Royals, the newest Major League Pickleball franchise.

Hunter founded the franchise alongside fellow UNC alumni Taylor Meyer, Alex Rafiee, and Peter Fox, with whom he also owns Hyperspace Ventures, a digital development and investment firm.

Though the Royals were officially announced as MLP’s newest expansion franchise at a record-high $16 million valuation back in August of 2025, Hunter says that the idea to join the league really took off after the PPA Tour and Major League Pickleball merged in early in 2024.

“Once the merger happened, I think everybody was rooting for MLP and saw the vision of having one unified league. You have the same players playing in it, and you can get all the firepower from PPA, Pickleball.com, all the entities that are under the Pickleball Inc umbrella pushing it, and we felt like that was the perfect time go into it,” he recalls. “And I think it’s been a huge success. I think if you look at the numbers across the board since the merger happened, things have really taken off.”

The Sunshine State is already home to three other MLP franchises in the Orlando Squeeze, Miami Pickleball Club, and Florida Smash, but Hunter is confident that Palm Beach and the surrounding areas are ready to wholeheartedly embrace a pro pickleball team.

“All these areas are hungry for pro sports. Right now, if you’re living in that area, you’re coming down and driving to go watch the Florida Panthers play. You’re even driving down two hours to Miami to watch the Heat. They don’t really have a team,” he mentioned. “For pickleball specifically, with the amount of recreational play that goes on in this area, you could call it the epicenter of the world for pickleball on the rec side. On the pro side, it’s very well documented that a majority of the best players in the world live here, are from here, or have moved here. Ben Johns, for example, was living in Austin. He wanted to train and play with the best, so where did he go? He went to Palm Beach County.”

The Royals are already taking steps to integrate themselves into the Palm Beach community through their partnership with Boca Paddle, an indoor facility that is scheduled to open in late summer 2026 in Boca Raton.

The $20 million dollar facility will feature 25 courts, an office for the Royals staff, and a dedicated 750-seat stadium named the Royal Court, where Palm Beach will play their home matches starting in 2027.

“Obviously having a court for us to do not just Major League Pickleball matches, but also activations within the community for our charity partners, our sponsors, our Minor League Pickleball events, as well as our youth and junior camps will be great,” Hunter said. “The city and county are so hungry for facilities and courts, and I think this one, with it being indoors, is going to be a huge success.”

With community impact at the forefront of the team’s goals, Royals leadership has looked to other MLP organizations like the Brooklyn Pickleball Team and St. Louis Shock for guidance on how to foster an impact that extends beyond the court.

“The other teams have been super helpful. You may think that in a sports league where everyone’s trying to beat everyone, they’re not going to look out and help you, but it’s really an emerging sport, and we’re all in this together. If one team succeeds, then really the whole league succeeds,” Hunter affirmed. “So, the Brooklyn guys with Adam [Behnke] have done an incredible job through their community programming. We’ve talked to them a bunch, and obviously the St. Louis guys with Ross [Chaifetz] are awesome. We’ve really tried to talk to these teams that have done it right and tried to take notes, and we’re really going all-in on the community.”

Even though the Royals have yet to play a match, they have had a busy preseason and have made three player acquisitions: newly UPA-signed free agent Sofia Sewing, Tina Pisnik from the Texas Ranchers, and Dekel Bar from Brooklyn.

“Getting Sofia was massive. She’s a local girl, we’re putting everything behind her, and we really see her as the future of this franchise,” Hunter mentioned. “So, when we got her, honestly the first thing we did was ask her, ‘Who do you want to play with? What girls do you like? What guys do you like?’ And one thing that’s just been abundantly clear, whether you talk to Sofia or anybody in the space, is that everyone loves Tina. On court, off the court, she’s a great girl. She’s just a competitor. She’s rock solid. She’s got experience. She’s not going to let you down, and she’s always going to be that person that you can rely on. For Sofia to say that to us was amazing.”

Palm Beach will fill out the rest of its roster at the 2026 MLP Draft on Feb. 27 before making its league debut at MLP Columbus in late May.

Regardless of how the Royals roster turns out or how their first season goes, though, Hunter has a clear vision for what he wants the organization to represent.

And considering his tennis background, it’s a fitting vision: tennis royalty.

“We want to be the Roger Federer of Major League Pickleball. It doesn’t have to just be winning everything, but when you lose, how do you handle losing? How do you carry yourself on the court and off the court? We want to be a team that everyone looks up to. We want people to look at us and say, ‘They’re doing it the right way. They’re going out there every day and giving it their all, but they’re also giving back to the community. They’re authentic. You can talk to them. You can approach them.’ We want the Royals to have that type of identity, and we’re going to try and do everything we can to achieve it.”

The full video interview with Zach Hunter will be available to watch on the Pickleball.com and Major League Pickleball YouTube channels in the coming days.