Jakob McWhinney, a writer at Voice of San Diego, has documented the acrimony between San Diego pickleball players and tennis players in a recent post, including a brief synopsis of pickleball’s origins. But he also outlines why pickleball players are angry with the City of San Diego and why they feel the mayor and city council are prejudiced against them.
Here’s a peek in how it all has impacted OB and Point Loma:
Then in June, another shoe dropped. At a Parks and Recreation meeting, Point Loma’s Barnes Tennis Center, which is located a mere 800 feet from Peninsula, announced plans to create 19 pickleball courts on its property. … While seemingly a cause for celebration, some picklers weren’t popping champagne. “We’ve been sandbagged,” said one attendee of the meeting.
“We think they basically did it to prevent pickleball people from creating their own pickleball places and to protect tennis courts,” [Stefan] Boyland said. Sure, they got the courts, Boyland said, but the club was still going to be managed by tennis devotees, not picklers. To add insult to injury, at the meeting Parks and Recreation officials said the profits from the pickleball courts would go to youth tennis programs.
“It was like a slap in the face,” Boyland said.
There are also plans for new pickleball courts at Robb Field, the home of Peninsula, but construction is likely to take years. As for where things stand now, Boyland isn’t very optimistic. “Tennis has all the cards,” he said. “We have nothing except these 12 additional courts that Barnes has put in to kind of shut us up and to weaken our argument.”
[Todd] Sprague disagrees wholeheartedly. Barnes, he said, had “moved heaven and Earth,” to get the new pickleball courts built. Even if picklers don’t have a dedicated facility, those new courts are worthy of celebrating. But he does seem to have a begrudging respect for the picklers’ determination.
“I don’t necessarily agree with how they went about trying to get more courts, but I do think that they made the community aware that there is this demand for pickleball courts out here and that we need to figure out a way to address and to meet that need, and for that they deserve credit,” Sprague said.
For the bulk of the post, please go here.
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Consider that Rancho Santa Fe and Fairbanks Ranch are excellent locations to construct a major pickleball facility while potentially providing market rate and luxury high-density rental housing in an area that can likely support the density increase. Plenty of pickleball space, bounded by the 56, 15 & 5 freeways. And an ideal place to put a major transit center linking North, Central and South SD for the benefit of the pickleball community.