Pickleball Brawl: Players Hash Out Gripes, Antisemitism On UES Courts

UPPER EAST SIDE — Some predicted it would be a pickleball “war.”

When most people were preparing their dinner, more than 80 Upper East Side pickleball players squared off in Carl Schurz Park on a recent Sunday to address rising tensions within the otherwise tight-knit and friendly community, including accusations of anti-Semitic comments made towards the progenitor of the three extremely busy courts.

The colorfully nicknamed “Albert the Pickleball Doctor” casts the controversy as a match that pickleball elites have pitted against hoi polloi players, with whom he’s allied.

“We think about the whole community,” Albert said, “they only think about themselves.”

But Albert’s opponents see things otherwise. To them, Albert deserves another nickname: “Adolf the Pickleball Dictator.”

A pickleball brawl

Albert is in some ways a victim of his own success.

Since he began showing up early every morning to set up three nets for people to play pickleball in Carl Schurz Park more than a year ago, the sport — and controversy around the use of a formerly open play space — has exploded.

By Albert’s estimate, up to 300 pickle-hungry players show up daily to paddle on the three courts, recently refinished and painted by the city.

This summer, a schism has broken out in the normally tightly-knit community at Carl Schurz Park, partially because of how big of a hit the courts have been.

For months, advanced players, who say that the sometimes hour-long waits to play aren’t worth it if they happen to get paired up with less-skilled players, argued that they should be entitled to a special skilled-court time for high-level play.

Other players, like Albert, say that it’s a public park with limited court space; the courts should be open for all to play.

This debate has led to a number of flashpoints over the summer, including players refusing to leave courts when their time was up and a scene when Albert removed other nets during a game to set up his own per his morning routine.

One person in an online pickleball group compared Albert to Adolf Hitler, dubbing him “Adolf the Pickleball Dictator,” and altering an image of him to include the fascist genocidal dictator’s iconic mustache.

Tensions were so raised that ahead of last Sunday’s meeting on Oct. 1, players on the court worried that there might even be a pickleball brawl.

It wasn’t always that way.

Not a big deal

The blue-painted courts where the 80 or so passionate pickleball players gathered on Sunday didn’t exist prior to last summer.

And they actually came about because of a death.

Back when Albert the Pickleball Doctor was known as just Albert the retiree in November 2022, his mother died from cancer.

In the wake of her death, Albert said he wanted to do a project to benefit others.

A longtime pickleball player himself and a retired anesthesiologist — and reluctant to divulge other personal details — he traveled all over the city to play.

One day he noticed that the “underutilized” multi-use space at Carl Schurz Park could fit full-sized, regulation pickle courts, a rare find in Manhattan.

So one day he and his brother, Gilbert, set up a net to play. Word spread quickly, with curious neighbors and dedicated players coming to wait for their turn at the net.

“After a month and a half, we went from one net to three,” Albert said.

Since then, he shows up every morning — weather permitting — with a customized bike and his three nets at 8:15 a.m. and sets them up.

Most of the time, he leaves for the rest of the day and returns at sundown to take them home.

"It's not a big deal," Albert said of his efforts.

He soon noticed that cracks littered the long-neglected multi-use area where the nets were set up, so Albert and his brother decided to try and reseal huge cracks in the surface, probably illegally and at a considerable financial cost, he said.

“The second time we did it, there was a police officer here,” Albert said, “and he said: ‘you’re doing good to the community, we don’t care.’”

And for a long time, everyone on the courts felt the same way. More and more people started to flood to play, with about 600 people joining a pickleball app chat group.

“It just exploded,” Albert said.

Jeanine Beck, who is now Albert’s friend and said she considers him “family,” started to play one day after her fiancé saw the action and suggested they play.

She’s now a super fan — not just of the game Albert taught her, and many others, how to play, but of the community that’s formed around the courts.

“The rest is history,” she said.

In just a few short months after the first pickleball dink, Albert received an award from the city Parks Department presented by Assembly Member Rebecca Seawight, and in May, the city re-surfaced part of the multi-use area in the park and painted in three permanent courts.

“It’s not about Albert — he helped start the community, and he’s part of it, but this is about the community,” Beck, 64, said. “We love this. We love that seniors, kids, anybody can play. We welcome everyone to play.”

Players losing patience

Tensions began rising when the advanced players suggested they receive reserved play time for a "challenge court" a few times a week at the start of this past season, as more people flooded the courts.

“The wait time is not proportional to the quality of the game, period,” said Amanda Johnson, a player advocating for the advanced group, at Sunday’s meeting, a phrase repeated by many in their camp.

Many players, including Albert, argue that the courts should be open-play for all and that the idea would be exclusionary.

The small group of advanced players claimed that Albert started banning players from their online Pickleball discussion group for simply mentioning the topic, with some calling him “autocratic," and that he once removed a set of nets so he could put his own, nicer nets, up.

For his part, Albert said he only removed people due poor behavior from the group, and said he deeply regrets the net incident.

But the so-called advanced players have also been accused of anti-social incidents, like placing multiple paddles in the court's informal queuing system, effectively cutting the line, while others say players were lowering their scores so they could play for longer.

At least once, players sat on courts and refused to get up after playing the generally agreed upon limit of games, according to some of the open-play advocates.

The volleys carried into online — it’s here where the “Hitler” image got shared, shocking the community.

“I’m outraged by it,” one player told Patch regarding the anti-semitic escalation, "it's a debasement of the conversation."

“Who does that?" he added, "It’s horrible.”

A Patch reporter spoke with a few players from the so-called advanced group — some of whom have long been advocates of the courts and Albert’s efforts. They denounced the anti-semitism and some of the more boorish behavior, but none agreed to speak on the record for this story.

“Three or four bad apples are ruining our little paradise,” Albert said.

The tensions acutely mirror the same debate initiated by critics of the sport’s proliferation: how best should a limited resource — open park space on the Upper East Side — be utilized?

“What happened was the community more than quadrupled in size,” Beck diagnosed. “And you can't stop that, we’re in a highly-dense residential area.”

‘A couple of sour pickles’

As tensions increased, players decided to call a meeting, face to face, so all players could voice their concerns.

“I don’t want the Parks Department to take this away,” said Kathryn Hedden, a USA Pickleball Ambassador for the metro region and CityPickle’s Director of Community Outreach, who was called in to serve as a moderator of sorts.

“If Parks enforcement officers are coming out everyday to solve issues because they can’t solve them within the community," Hedden said, " then that needs to change.”

Right at the start, Johnson laid out the argument that advanced players should have their own court time. Afterwards, Albert addressed the group reading a statement in favor of open-play.

As he spoke, some on the court sneered.

“He doesn't speak for the community,” one man said quietly.

Another in hushed tones called a player standing across the court gathering an “Albert-lover.”

The audience, a mix of ages but decisively skewed towards older, mostly spoke of their love for the sport, the courts and of the “amazing” community, where many said they had formed new, close friendships after years of pandemic isolation.

And there was admonishment, too.

A player named Bonnie, an Upper East Sider since the 1970’s, recounted a time her late husband queried when exactly children learn to share as they watched kids line up to use the park's slide years ago and just steps away.

“And I said: ‘I know some adults who have difficulty with that concept.’”

Parks department employee Dave Velasquez — who appeared as an avid pickle player and not as a city representative — gave the group a dose of New York City values.

“The voices need to be heard,” he said, “but how we put our voices out there and the words that we use should not antagonize anyone in the city of New York.”

Velasquez said that some players needed to respect that the playground and park belongs to all.

“Stop telling the community to go away,” he told the crowd. “Who are you to tell me when I can play and when I can’t play? When I show up, let me play. I want to have fun. Who cares?”

Susan, who said she plays for hours every day, said that “we love Albert, and we’re really sick of all the anti-semitic comments that we’re seeing."

Another player said the first time she came to the courts, she was “in love” with how welcoming the community was towards her.

“We’re getting a chance to be a part of a community and exercise,” she said, and said she would hate to “put in a lot of rules.”

“Let’s stay the way we are — friendly and nice,” the player said.

Many suggested a fourth court be installed during an upcoming $2.78 million full reconstruction of the multi-use space, which could shut down the courts for up to a year.

That idea was recently shut down by a Parks official at a Community Board 8 meeting in September, who said that neighborhood opposition barely allowed them the existing three courts.

Nico, who just moved to the Upper East Side from Washington D.C., said that in the nation’s capital, they deal with so-called “sour pickles” by banning them from the courts entirely.

“And I feel like we have a couple of sour pickles,” he said.

If you’re an advanced player, he said, “go to a different park.”

While advanced players in the crowd scoffed at the idea of traveling for competition, a player named Gilbert told the crowd he’s already doing that, traveling to Central Park or further uptown for challenges.

“That's where I go to have competition,” he said, “but when I want to have fun with friends and family, I come here.”

‘When you hit the ball, it’s fun’

“The advanced players are getting pushed out,” said a player named Dave. “I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for two hours a week. I want to play the best players in the community.”

One lifelong resident of the neighborhood, Brad Henderson, spoke in favor of the advanced player group.

Henderson, whose mother, Assembly Member Seawright, gave Albert that citation for initiating the courts nearly a year prior, and nearly right where he stood during the meeting, spoke of the unfair wait times that skilled players endured, only to be teamed up with players of unpredictable quality.

“People don't want to feel that they wait 25 minutes or an hour,” Henderson said, “to play a game that's not worth it — they want the game to be proportional to the amount of time we wait.”

By the end of the meeting one thing was clear: getting together and venting with 80 friends seemed to do everyone some good, and players seemed lighter, and more hopeful, at the evening's close.

Hedden said the meeting “was a great first step.”

A few days later, one player told Patch that "the meeting did a lot of good."

One potential path for compromise between the two groups seemed promising: a new sticker system would help revamp the current way that players self-assess their ranks.

Albert said he was still against the challenge court, but other ideas, like the suggestion of a rotating board to make and enforce rules, made more sense to him.

In the sea of mostly gray and white hair was Logan Vendetti, a nine-year-old pickleball player who, as soon as the meeting ended, immediately dominated the courts with his precise, strong swings and quick reflexes.

He just started playing a few months ago, and said his new friends in Carl Schurz Park park offer him great competition. And fun.

“It’s so fun to play,” said Vendetti, who lives just down the street. “Especially when you slam it, it feels really good.”