Minneapolis Park Board members have heard pickleballers' cry for more courts and are poised to change three park master plans to accommodate the pickleball passion sweeping the Twin Cities.
Minneapolis Park Board will adjust park plans to sate pickleball craze
The fast-growing intergenerational sport is taking Minneapolis parks by storm.
February 3, 2022 at 4:01PM
From October to January, the board received 976 responses to proposals for new pickleball courts at Loring Park, the Lake Nokomis Community Center and near the intersection of Minnehaha Parkway and Bloomington Avenue.
This was extremely high engagement for an online survey, said Adam Arvidson, parks director of strategic planning. He said about 60% of comments highly supportive of two out of three plans.
"I can tell you from experience, with community engagement like this we hardly ever see a 60% consensus on anything. These are really, really huge numbers," Arvidson said.
Pickleball is an intergenerational net sport played on a badminton-size court with a plastic ball and paddles. In 2020, there were 4.2 million players in the United States, up more than 20% from the year before, according to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association's latest Topline Participation Report.
Callers phoning into Wednesday night's Park Board meeting said they were eager for new pickleball-dedicated courts but not enthusiastic about alienating tennis players in the process. Plans call for building pickleball courts next to the old tennis courts at Loring Park, but up to six pickleball courts would replace two tennis courts at the Lake Nokomis Community Center. Additional pickleball striping of tennis courts at Minnehaha Parkway could be confusing for players of both sports.
Some commenters said the board was sidelining tennis in a short-sighted bid to meet the demand for pickleball, a relatively recent trend. Others complained about the poor maintenance of tennis courts.
Arvidson acknowledged that dual tennis and pickleball courts are not ideal because they are very different sports, but he said Minneapolis' constrained urban park system requires some courts to accommodate multiple sports.
A condition analysis has been done on all sports courts, including tennis, within the system, with each one scheduled for resurfacing or reconstruction depending on their needs. The Lake Hiawatha tennis courts, where Roosevelt High School teams play, are in line for resurfacing within the year, Arvidson said.
The Park Planning Committee unanimously approved the master plan amendments, which will be presented to the full board in two weeks.
The Downtown Service Area Master Plan and Nokomis-Hiawatha Regional Park Master Plan preceded the current pickleball craze, but pickleball courts have been included in more recently created blueprints, such as the North, Southwest and East of the River Service Area Master Plans.
The first pickleball-specific courts in the city's parks system will open this spring at Dickman Park in northeast Minneapolis.
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