The name Mark Kundysek might not be familiar to most sports fans, but he has become an impactful member of the Dallas-Fort Worth sports community.
For over three decades, Kundysek has served the area as the president, owner, and founder of NexCourt, Inc. and become the premier residential and commercial game court and surface provider in the North Texas area, selling and installing more than 10,000 courts after playing soccer at Texas Tech.
“All my buddies and I played soccer my whole life,” Kundysek told The Dallas Express. “I ended up going to Texas Tech and playing soccer there, but when I was 15 or 16 years old, I really enjoyed working in construction, and I worked in construction throughout college in Lubbock.”
Kundysek eventually used that love of construction after discovering a unique type of plastic tile that snapped together to form surfaces while he was working for a plastics company in the 1980s. He soon found that the material was used by a Salt Lake City-based client company called Sport Court.
“We sold the raw material to Sport Court back then, and that’s when I learned of these plastic modular tiles,” Kundysek recalled. He said he reached out to the company.
Sport Court responded and told him he could become a “dealer” if he sent them $250 in exchange for a kit. Kundysek obliged, setting up a new career path for himself while plugging away at several part-time jobs. However, in 1991, he was able to leave the part-time gigs behind and transition to running NexCourt full-time.
Sport Court and NexCourt’s surfaces allow families and other clients to play up to 15 games, including basketball, tennis, and volleyball, among others. One sport that has dramatically increased in popularity over recent years is pickleball.
“I don’t know what happened, but somebody lit a fire under that sport, and it’s just booming right now,” Kundysek said. “We’ve always promoted and offered pickleball on our courts, but most families really didn’t get into it.”
According to Kundysek, Sport Court has provided pickleball options with its courts since the 1970s, when a brief popularity surge occurred around the sport’s inception.
“When Sport Court was created in the early seventies, pickleball was created around that same time,” he explained. “So pickleball has been with us for a long time, and it was really, really popular in the seventies, but then it went away, and it’s been dormant all these years.”
Nowadays, more than 8.9 million people across the United States play the sport, and Sport Court has become the official playing surface partner of USA Pickleball.
Dallas has been one of the hotbeds for the pickleball boom, and Kundysek is aptly fit to navigate it.
Over the years, he has worked with many firms and notables across the metroplex, including the Dallas Mavericks Foundation, the Dallas Stars Foundation, the Nancy Lieberman Foundation, the YMCA of Dallas, athletes like Dak Prescott, Troy Aikman, and Nate Newton, legendary broadcaster Pat Summerall, and country music star Toby Keith, among countless others.
He also has a lot of second-generation customers in the residential community.
“We just finished building one for a family in Southlake,” Kundysek told The Dallas Express. “I built one for his mom and dad when he was five years old in Grand Prairie. Now, fast forward 32 years later, we just finished building him a court for his two boys.”
The family and community aspects of the business have been a significant part of Sport Court and NexCourt’s identities, and Kundysek said those are the parts of the business he enjoys the most.
“We build these courts for families and the families that experience these courts with kids growing up over time,” he said. “It’s the memories that they build [and] the family outings that they build. It seems like every family or every person we’ve talked to has said it’s just been one of the best investments because you don’t have to load up all your equipment, go find a gym, or go find a park.”
