Here's a weird one....

San Francisco tennis and pickleball players continue to clash in quest for more courts

Tessa McLean

The San Francisco Recreation & Parks Department held a community meeting last week to discuss the proposal of converting some of Stern Grove’s tennis courts into dedicated pickleball courts. 

As hundreds packed the standing-room-only meeting and pickleball enthusiasts came out in droves, it became the latest chapter in the ongoing discussion about the need for more space for pickleball play in the city. While pickleball enthusiasts claim they don’t have enough dedicated court space in the city, tennis players attest that the courts at Stern Grove are needed for tennis, which is also growing in popularity.

Martha Ehrenfeld, co-chair of the SF Tennis Coalition, said she attended the meeting and defended the coalition’s opposition to converting the courts to dedicated pickleball courts. She said she’s a pickleball player herself — she’s even a certified coach — but San Francisco is a dense city and the two sports have to coexist and share the city’s limited resources. The coalition is supportive of dual-lined courts, good for both tennis and pickleball, which Stern Grove had before the facility underwent massive flooding in 2021. 

“A tennis court isn’t the only option to creating a pickleball court. We would love to have the pickleball community think outside the box,” Ehrenfeld said. “We believe that pickleball can find some other flat places to build pickleball places without taking away from tennis.”

San Francisco Pickleball Community member Ward Naughton said his group is concerned about the need for courts being framed as a “pickleball versus tennis thing.”

“The main thing is we don’t want conflict…It’s how to figure out how to utilize space for the greatest number of San Francisco residents,” said Naughton.

He said he hopes the city can convert underutilized tennis courts into pickleball courts as the wait time for pickleball courts has been rising, especially on the weekends. He said that additional courts at Stern Grove would be helpful and that the city desperately needs more courts on the north side of the city, too. 

Reservations for both sports can be snapped up within minute. Tamara Aparton, a spokesperson for San Francisco's Recreation and Park Department, said approximately 97 percent of the city’s tennis courts are reserved within five minutes of opening the online reservation system. Even with high demand for reservations, most pickleball courts have “group hours” rather than reservations.

“It’s safe to say that demand is outweighing supply for both tennis and pickleball, both of which exploded in popularity since the start of the pandemic,” Aparton said in an email. “We are constantly looking for more ways to increase play.”

While hybrid courts seem like an easy answer, this solution could pose a problem for players of both sports down the line, said Seth Socolow, executive director of San Franciscans for Sports and Recreation. A typical tennis court needs to be resurfaced every four to eight years, depending on the weather and rate of play, but with four pickleball courts per one tennis court, that’s more players treading on the surface, and courts may fall into disrepair sooner, Socolow argues. He pointed to the Recreation and Park’s department’s current maintenance deficit and worries about the quality of the city’s tennis courts as more are converted into hybrid courts.

“There’s not a long-term strategic plan,” Socolow said. “Everybody needs to come together. From my perspective, there is a lot of short-term thinking…If it’s not thought through carefully there will be issues down the line.”

Aparton, recreation and park department spokesperson, said she’s not aware of the need for more frequent resurfacing because of dual-lining.

The San Franciscans for Sports and Recreation organization does not support turning the courts at Stern Grove into pickleball courts. Socolow said he worries that the voices of tennis players are being drowned out in this ongoing debate because pickleball players have been more vocal. Such was the case at Thursday’s meeting, when many more pickleball players showed up than tennis players. “The tennis players will have to get organized or they’re going to see more courts go away,” he said.

San Francisco currently has more than 60 pickleball courts, Aparton said, with 11 of those dedicated to exclusive pickleball play. The rest are dual-lined courts, with lines for both tennis and pickleball on the court. 

Aparton said the amount of places to play pickleball has increased 500 percent in the past four years and “every routine tennis court repaving now includes dual painted lines so it can also be used for pickleball.”

The first pickleball court in San Francisco was officially established in 2018 at Louis Sutter in McLaren Park, though people played unofficially at many places since 2015.

“The main challenge is that creating dedicated pickleball courts out of tennis courts means there are fewer places to play tennis — and tennis is also more popular than ever!” Aparton said in an email.

Tennis players lost one of the few places they had to play tennis indoors, the San Francisco Tennis Club (also known as the Bay Club) in SoMa when it shuttered in Aug. 2020, with plans for development after the land was purchased by a real estate developer in 2015. It’s still unclear if new tennis courts will be built on the site.

Rec and Park will make the decision on the fate of Stern Grove’s courts, though it’s unclear when.