For more than a decade, US Squash managed its own software service, Club Locker, to support squash clubs and players around the country. A tech team developed the app, which included features ranging from tournament organization tools to an athlete ranking system. 

But for Club Locker to keep up in an increasingly crowded category, with other apps also trying to woo players as sports such as pickleball and padel explode in popularity, it was better off going on its own. In November, US Squash sold a majority stake in Club Locker to Artisan Ventures. The SaaS business will continue developing squash infrastructure ahead of the sport’s Olympics debut in 2028, while also building out features for other racquet sports such as table tennis and, yes, pickleball. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, though US Squash retains a minority stake in the business, for which it will continue to be the largest client—and longest-running benefactor.

When former US Squash chief technology officer Ryan Rayfield first joined in 2012, its membership growth was flattening, he said. The sport is relatively small; approximately 1.3 million people play squash each year in the U.S, according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, with a smaller slice of them signing up for memberships with the governing body.

Rayfield’s job was to make it easier for people to play the sport—and more enticing for players to sign up for a US Squash membership—through technology. At first, US Squash built a court reservation system that clubs could use, creating the foundation for a service that could also offer live scoring, tournament scheduling, match finding and rating data as it grew.

Club Locker now powers more than 500 annual tournaments, all of college squash, and hundreds of local leagues at nearly 900 facilities, connecting 160,000 players. Former US Squash CEO Kevin Klipstein said memberships more than doubled to roughly 17,000, in large part thanks to the stickiness of Club Locker’s platform. Dues doubled too. Working with developers directly rather than going through agencies—and eventually bringing a core team in house—set Club Locker up to be spun out, as its creators had long envisioned. 

The name Club Locker was meant to reflect the variety of products stuffed into the service, while also leaving the door open for the platform to expand to other sports. In part, that would be a necessity for clubs that also offered tennis or racquetball. 

“The vision was always, let’s do this right,” Rayfield said, “and let’s have that catch on across racket sports.”

Artisan invested more than seven figures in the system’s growth. It also brings managerial talent to the team that has moved from a sport governing body to a VC-backed enterprise, a nearly unprecedented evolution. Rayfield now serves as Club Locker chief strategy officer.  

Club Locker will launch a mobile app this month, with plans to double its engineering team in 2026. And while the team would love the time to perfect the squash product before expanding its focus to other sports, that luxury doesn’t exist. Competitors have entered the marketplace. New players and clubs are picking up pickleball and offering padel every day. “It’s a land grab, a little bit,” Artisan CEO Nick Shah said. Club Locker already has a foothold in table tennis and badminton as well as with squash organizations outside the U.S.

Even during the sales process, which took roughly three years, Shah gained a sense of US Squash’s previous challenges of running a business within a nonprofit, including the deliberate pace of a governing body and an unusual budget structure for a startup, with money that could be attributed to Club Locker not always hitting its books directly. Another complicating factor: the wealth of the board members helping to oversee the transaction. Without a profit motive, they focused entirely on what a deal would mean for the sport.

“Frankly, most of the board members could have bought the whole thing themselves,” Shah said. “It’s not about the money and the capital.”

As part of the deal, the organization can take back the product if Club Locker doesn’t hit pre-determined success metrics. “Without Club Locker, we can’t really operate our programs or federation,” Klipstein said.

In many ways, Club Locker’s mission hasn’t changed. It benefits by getting more people to play squash and getting squash players to hit the courts more often. If it succeeds, it could also lead other investors to ask whether there might be yet more viable businesses hiding within sports’ governing bodies, destined to be set free.