Pickleball Zone would rather publish one page that's right than ten that are nearly right. This policy explains how we hold ourselves to that, and what you're entitled to expect from any page carrying our name.
Where our facts come from
- Venues. Sessions, prices and addresses are confirmed against the venue's own booking page or the organisers themselves before publishing, postcodes are validated against official postcode data, and every listing shows the date it was last checked.
- Rules. Anything we state as a rule is checked against the USA Pickleball rulebook as adopted for UK play by Pickleball England, not against forum folklore.
- Gear. Specifications come from manufacturers; prices are the UK retail prices you'd actually pay, in pounds.
- Numbers. Statistics are attributed to a named source with a date. If we can't source a number, we don't use it.
What we refuse to publish
- Claims of hands-on testing for anything we haven't actually played with.
- Invented quotes, invented experiences or reviews written from a spec sheet.
- Sponsored content dressed up as editorial. If something is paid, it's labelled.
- Rankings that money can influence. Venues and brands cannot buy a position.
- Listings scraped from other directories. Every venue is verified by us, at source.
Tested versus curated
Our gear content is explicit about which it is. A tested verdict follows the rubric in how we test and only appears after real play time. A curated guide, like a buying guide, explains how to choose and says so plainly. The UK's rules on genuine reviews make this a legal line as well as an honest one, and we treat it that way.
How pages stay current
Venue prices are re-verified on a rolling quarterly cycle, with busy venues checked first. Evergreen guides are reviewed and refreshed rather than cloned into new URLs, and material changes are noted on the page. If a venue closes, its page says so and points you somewhere that hasn't.
Corrections
Spotted something wrong? Email hello@pickleballzone.co.uk or use the contact form. Factual errors are re-checked at source and usually fixed within a couple of working days; material corrections are acknowledged on the page rather than quietly buried.
Independence
Some retailer links earn us a commission at no cost to you; it never changes a verdict, a ranking or a listing. The full money story is on how we test.
AI
We use AI tools in defined roles with a human editor accountable for every page. The specifics, including what AI is never used for, are in our AI use disclosure.
The sign-off
Every page is reviewed by our editor, Adam Johnson, before it goes live. If a page falls short of this policy, that's our fault, not yours, and we'd like to hear about it.
Sources we lean on
- USA Pickleball rulebook (rules of play, as adopted by Pickleball England)
- Pickleball England (governing-body guidance and the state of the UK game)
- Operator booking systems: Better, Everyone Active, Edinburgh Leisure, Glasgow Club
- LTA ClubSpark and Playtomic (club sessions and court booking)
- postcodes.io (postcode validation and coordinates)
- Venues' and clubs' own published pages, always in preference to third parties