Methodology

This page describes how each venue entry on the site is researched, written, and maintained. The goal is plain transparency: if you want to know where any specific fact came from, you should be able to trace it back to a public source or to a documented editorial decision.

Sources

Every venue page draws from a defined set of public sources, layered in this order:

• Google Maps reviews and place data. The Google Places API provides the venue's name, address, hours, photos, and a sample of recent reviews. For higher-volume venues, additional reviews are pulled via Outscraper so the editorial draws from a more representative sample.
• Venue websites. If a venue has an official site (city parks page, club site, recreation center landing page), its text is fetched as a source. This is where things like membership pricing, programs, league schedules, and rules typically come from.
• City government pages. Parks & Recreation department pages for the relevant city. These provide tournament schedules, league registration, reservation policies, and program info.
• Local news. When a venue has been covered by a recognized local outlet (KSL, Salt Lake Tribune, Daily Herald, Deseret News, Lehi Free Press, Utah Business, Axios Salt Lake City, and similar), those articles are pulled as additional source material. Press coverage gets a dedicated, more prominent section in the page footer.

Source URLs appear in each venue's footer. Quotes from reviewers are verbatim substrings of public reviews; they are not paraphrased or invented.

AI assistance

Editorials are written by an AI writing system (Anthropic's Claude) operating under a strict editorial specification. The AI reads the collected source material and produces a draft with a fixed structure: 80 to 120 words of "vibe," 60 to 100 words of "practical notes," two to four verbatim review quotes with author attribution, and a machine-readable map linking specific claims to the source URLs that support them.

The AI is constrained by the spec from inventing facts, paraphrasing reviews as if they were verbatim quotes, or using marketing-style language. The constraints and the voice rules are reproduced below.

House voice

• Direct, specific, evidence-anchored. "Busy after 5 p.m. all summer" instead of "can get crowded."
• No marketing language. Words like "premier," "amazing," "ultimate destination," and "discover the" are cut.
• No first-person. The directory does not pretend the editor personally visited each venue.
• No invented personas. No fake bylines or character profiles. The editor of record is the Find Pickleball Courts editorial team, contactable for corrections.

Quality control

Every page goes through an automated quality-control pass before publication. The QC harness checks:

• Word counts against the spec.
• Presence of source URLs on every verbatim quote.
• Em dashes, AI-tell phrases ("nestled," "hidden gem," "boasts"), and other voice violations.
• That the editorial's referenced place identifier matches the underlying source data (a common defect after refetching).
• That a sources footer exists with at least one reference.

On top of the automated checks, the editor spot-checks a sample of new pages end-to-end (reading the writeup, opening a few citation URLs, confirming the quote is actually in the linked review). The sample is not 100 percent of pages: this is a one-person side project, and the trade is that consistent sourcing rules plus automated checks scale where per-page hand-editing does not.

Refresh cadence

Each venue page carries a visible "Last updated" date. Editorials are scheduled to refresh at least quarterly, sooner when a venue announces renovations, opens new courts, changes programming, or gets material local-news coverage. The refresh cycle pulls new reviews so the "what locals say" excerpts reflect the current player community, not the venue's first year.

How to report an inaccuracy

Email jeffcchapman@gmail.com with the page URL and the specific claim that's wrong. Factual errors are prioritized and rolled into the next refresh; for outright wrong listings (a closed venue, a renamed facility, a court count that's off) the fix usually goes out faster than the quarterly cycle. Common reasons for corrections:

• Court count or amenity has changed (renovation, addition).
• A venue has closed, been renamed, or moved (especially common with indoor clubs).
• Hours, fees, or reservation policy has changed (per the city or club's own announcement).
• A factual error that wasn't caught in QC or sampling.

What the site doesn't do

• No user accounts, ratings, or parallel review system. The linked Google reviews are the authoritative crowd signal. Re-implementing that wheel would dilute, not improve, the directory.
• No individual player profiles. This is a venue directory.
• No pay-to-list or pay-to-rank. See the monetization section on the about page for what we do and don't accept.

Open about the limits

This is run by one person with the help of AI tools. It cannot be everywhere at once and it cannot replace local knowledge from a regular at any given venue. For time-sensitive questions ("is the league running this Wednesday"), contact the venue directly. For anything where the source link is broken, the page is stale, or the write-up reads wrong, contact us and we'll dig in.