WTF is happening with Pickleball. A local government perspective.

The Background

You would have to have your head in the sand not to have observed the "explosion" of pickleball across Australia over the last 1-2 years. I am not going to tell you what pickleball is, other than to say that it is very popular in the US, and has jumped off the boat from there.

What I want to unpack in this article is the impact this increase in participation in pickleball is having on local government, who are the main land manager for all (but for a rare exception) outdoor sports courts in Australia.

I am going to write this from my perspective, but I am noting the same issues in many LGA's.

At one point tennis was the most dominant sport in Australia. Hundreds and hundreds of courts were built all over the country, starting in the 1800's and onwards. There are not many towns without one tennis court. So tennis is our dominant racket sport. LG has delivered court sports with tennis in mind. We have just adopted our new MidCoast Outdoor Sports Court Strategy, and even though court sports such as basketball, netball and pickleball are considered, tennis still leads the strategy.

We have 97 tennis courts in our LGA.

The Problem/s.

First, Pickleball can not be played on a synthetic surface, unless it is a very low mat surface.

Pickleball is presenting some challenges for LG, from an infrastructure perspective. Its not pickleball per se, its the impact on tennis that is the main concern.

Pickleball clubs aren't speaking with council about building new courts. They want courts NOW. They are taking over multi-purpose courts, but more significantly they are eyeing tennis courts.

What a lot of people don't realise is that tennis is different than most sports, in the way that LG deals with it. We tend to have a hands-off approach, letting the clubs do what they do, until they want to do capital works, then we require them to seek the landowners (us) permission.

Tennis clubs themselves work on a slightly different model than most sports. Discounting the small one-court rural tennis clubs many tennis clubs have a professional coach “buried” within their operating model. Quite a number of our clubs have professional coaches. This creates a situation where you have a commercial activity, making income, operating behind a not for profit. Added to this we allow our not for profit tennis clubs to hire out an asset (courts) that belongs to LG (the community), thus creating two income streams. We don’t allow any other sport to do this. This then creates an attractive opportunity for someone to come in and take over, and it also incentivises the club to get as much court hire as they can, to make money, and pickleball is creating a lot of court hire.

We now have tennis clubs approaching us to convert some of their courts to acrylic to attract pickleball players, and hence creating hire fees from pickleball for the club. That makes both the courts and the clubs very attractive to someone like pickleball. They want the courts, and they want the income from the hire fees.

Remember that it has taken hundreds of years to build all these courts. And it has cost government hundreds of millions of dollars to build them.

With this pressure coming from pickleball, and from tennis clubs that want to convert their facilities for pickleball our Outdoor Sports Court Strategy becomes our critical policy mechanism. Our overarching policy is to enforce, where practical, the Outdoor Sports Court actions for tennis, to ensure that the sport of tennis is protected, often from the tennis clubs themselves. This means that where the strategy says that a court should have its synthetic surface replaced at a certain point that we ensure that it is synthetic, and not acrylic, unless the club can give us a really good argument that is based on the sport of tennis i.e. that they want to attract more junior players and that is why they want a faster court surface. ?

At the end of the day a surface is a surface, and as long as the sport of tennis is still being played then we have achieved our outcomes. However, even though tennis is played on acrylic so is pickleball. Hence converting to acrylic opens the facility and club up to a takeover. And we start to lose tennis.

We don’t want pickleball taking over struggling tennis clubs by stealth, all because of money (court hire fees).

We have also been asked by tennis clubs about building pickleball courts, insitu to the tennis courts, in addition to the tennis courts, and not change the surface of the existing courts, hence providing tennis and pickleball at the same club. This becomes an infrastructure and space question, and as long as it does not contradict the Strategy it is an internal decision for council to make.

However, this creates another issue, oversupply, and this is where the Strategy is vital. If you look at our Strategy it is broken into different types of courts, tennis, basketball, netball, croquet and multi-purpose. The purpose of multi-purpose courts is to provide for basketball, netball AND pickleball.

These multi-purpose (MP) courts are situated in areas where they value-add to the existing tennis courts. This, once again, is a mechanism to not only provide for these sports but is also to protect the tennis courts and clubs. If the Strategy has an action to replace synthetic, then a multi-purpose court in that tennis court’s catchment is there to ensure that pickleball uses the MP and not the tennis court. In short, the MP are for pickleball.

But MP that are open to the public cant be hired, so if a pickleball club is motivated by hire fees then MP don’t give that to them. Hence why they still might go after a tennis club, or why a tennis club with a MP near them might still want to convert. So rule of thumb, if approached about a tennis court conversion to acrylic, for pickleball, check to see if there is a MP near it in the Strategy. If there is, say no.

Here is an example of how things can go. We have a small country two-court tennis facility. Very run down. It has just received a $900,000 grant through the Commonwealth Government's Play our Way program for a complete upgrade. There is limited use, due to its condition, and the committee members are aging. Before we even undertake the upgrade there are conversations about pickleball being played there. We obviously support that happening but once that happens it is a very short step to where pickleball is the main sport played there (besides netball) and the tennis club has folded, or been taken over by pickleball people.

Yesterday I had a meeting with TNSW and we spent more time talking about pickleball and its impact than we did about tennis. Their response to the conversation is that PB is a game, and until it is recognised it will be just that. PB have no discernible structure and the Australian Sports Commission has not recognised it on their list of recognised sports (187), as of writing this article. ?

Noise

Besides its impact on tennis, pickleball is also presenting LG a noise issue. We have had a number of residents complain to us about the noise being generated by pickleball being played on the MP court near them. We are not the only LGA to be affected. Tweed Council has so many complaints about pickleball that they contracted an independent noise consultant to do testing and write a report. From the report Tweed Council has implemented restrictions on pickleball in some locations.

The issue is, is that the pickleball ball is hard plastic, and it makes a loud noise when it hits the racquet and the hard ground. Much louder than tennis.

Summary

Pickleball presents an opportunity and a challenge for LG, which we have to balance. We acknowledge that getting more people active is our outcome, especially as pickleball is mainly popular with older people, who are attracted to the slower pace of the game. But we also need to protect our other sports, and the millions of dollars invested in their assets.

Recognition by the ASC will give LG some authority on how to manage pickleball.

But ultimately having a good Outdoor Sports Court Strategy is probably the best mechanism to manage these competing influences.

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