The rapid growth of pickleball has outpaced court capacity in many locations in the United States. That creates an impetus for the pickleball players in those areas to advocate for increased court space. Tennis courts have become an obvious target for temporary or permanent conversion. That is significantly faster and less costly than building new courts from the ground up.
Unfortunately, there is also a shortage of tennis courts. The situation isn’t as dire as for pickleball, but the tipping point is rapidly approaching. Building new tennis courts is a capital investment that typically takes a lot of time. The pickleball community in my area doesn’t have the patience for lengthy timelines.
A great illustration of how long this can take is a proposed tennis center in my local area. I first learned of lobbying efforts to build a new facility over a decade ago. The city council just approved a $15 million bond package to fund the new development. If the voters approve the measure in the next election, the facility’s earliest operational date will be 2025. The plan includes 16 tennis courts and 12 pickleball courts.
Pickleball player groups are actively engaging their city councils, neighborhood associations, and private clubs demanding the conversion of tennis courts to pickleball. It plays out over and over in the same basic pattern.
Advocacy groups for pickleball gather petitions and evidence of support for a tennis court conversion project. They take that proposal to the city council along with a price tag that is orders of magnitude less than a new construction project. Typically the cost does not require a bond package. I know of instances where the pickleball community has offered to raise the necessary funds themselves.
That is extraordinarily enticing to the governing organizations. An opportunity to please their constituency for little to no cost is unlikely to be denied. That is particularly true if no counterpoints or objections are raised during the discussion prior to voting on conversion proposals. The tennis community doesn’t know it is happening until the project is already started. That is too late.
Quite simply, tennis is asleep at the wheel. The idea that pre-existing tennis courts will be preserved is a false and dangerous assumption. We have to band together in proactive advocacy for our courts. That includes preemptive engagement with city councils, neighborhood associations, and private clubs to ensure that they know that tennis also has strong support. That has to be done before proposals for repurposing courts for pickleball or any other sport are made.
The “Racquet Sports at War” saga could have possibly been mitigated if tennis had proactively been involved with the club’s racquet sports association. I believe that the club manager and Board of Directors did not understand that many families at the club were only there for tennis. They were caught off guard when so many families left. Perhaps if they had known that the departures were a possibility, they would not have acted with such haste and hubris.
Grassroots advocacy is urgently needed. Additionally, there is an opportunity for the USTA and Sectional associations to help. Tennis needs a playbook and toolkit for proactive engagement with organizations that have purview over tennis courts in all settings. This is urgently needed before the shortage of tennis courts crosses the tipping point where people can no longer easily engage with the sport.
Unlike pickleball, tennis will have no quick solution. It will take decades to recover if we don’t act now.
- Flower Mound calls bond election for new tennis center, Mark Smith, Cross Timbers Gazette, February 7, 2023.
