Team Pickleball Has Resorted To… Radical Activism?

By Will Huntsberry, the Voice of San Diego

August 4, 2022

If you are like me you may have missed just how insane people are for pickleball. They love it. They must have it.

Only, there isn’t any space.

Pickleball is kind of like tennis and one of the best places to play is on a tennis court. As the U-T detailed earlier this month, this has led to a straight-up war between pickleball players and tennis players. And not just here. Everywhere.

“The city appears to be in bed with tennis, protecting them at every turn,” one pickleballer told the paper.

The battlelines of this drama have largely been confined to planning board rooms, heretofore. But now, as the OB Rag reported, pickleballers are taking their fight for space right to the tennis court.

The city’s two leading pickleball antagonists staged a takeover of the Peninsula Tennis Club at Robb Field in Ocean Beach. The pickleballers learned that Peninsula’s permit had expired, which meant, technically, the club didn’t have exclusive access to the space.

YouTube footage (you should definitely watch it) shows a whole crew of pickleballers rolling up on a row of empty tennis courts. They set up their nets and start playing over objections from the club’s proprietors.

The tennis club contends that the pickleball crew ultimately prevented a tennis camp for kids from happening. But the pickleballers claim the camp was scheduled for other courts and the proprietors were shamelessly using the children as political pawns to protect their hardscape monopoly.

Ultimately, the tennis club proprietors called police to the scene. A police officer can be seen telling the proprietors that, in fact, their permit is out of date and she can not make the pickleballers leave. She asked the pickleballers, nonetheless, to be adults and leave anyway, which they did.

Lest you fear escalated violence between these hardtop rivals, let me reassure you, fellow citizens: City leaders are on the case. They have called in a “national expert on turbulence between pickleball and tennis” to help calm these stormy waters, the U-T reported.

Voice of San Diego is a nonprofit news organization supported by our members. We reveal why things are the way they are and expose facts that people in power might not want out there and explain complex local public policy issues so you can be engaged and make good decisions. Sign up for our newsletters at voiceofsandiego.org/newsletters/.