Tennis vs. Pickleball: The Rivalry that Shook San Diego’s Courts – Voice of San Diego

Beef Week is a special Voice of San Diego reporting theme week. Our reporters are following the biggest battles in the region. Read all the stories here.

If you board the ferry in Seattle and ride 40 minutes west, into the cold waters of the Puget Sound, you end up on Bainbridge Island. In recent years, the island has become a hot destination for more affluent families looking to put some water between their home and the big city. Its population has swelled to nearly 25,000 people. But back in the 1960s, less than 1,000 people lived there.  

It was there, in the summer of 1965, three men, casting about for a way to entertain their bored families and missing badminton equipment, improvised a substitute. Without a full set of badminton rackets, they tried out ping pong paddles. They couldn’t find a shuttlecock, so they used a wiffle ball. Later in the weekend they also lowered the net from its traditional height. In the process, they created a new sport altogether, which they called pickleball. 

But despite its inauspicious beginnings and an incubation period as an athletic oddity unique to the Pacific Northwest, nearly six decades later pickleball has become the fastest growing sport in America. A 159 percent increase in the number of pickleball players over just three years has spurred the opening of new courts across the country. 

Stefan Boyland, a co-founder of the San Diego Pickleball Association, had long been a tennis devotee, but he was one of the millions of Americans to fall in love with pickleball in recent years. He felt attracted to the sport because of the vibe shift it represented. 

“Tennis is real cutthroat. There’s this elitism thing,” he said. “That happens with pickleball a tiny bit, but nothing like the extent of tennis. Pickleball really mixes and matches all different levels of players, you could be a different level and still have fun on the court,” Boyland said. 

But despite its more laidback feel, pickleball’s meteoric rise has made it some enemies, both on and off the court. In San Diego, for example, residents living near pickleball courts have filed lawsuits because of the racket. The NCAA has also threatened a local pickleball promoter with a lawsuit over the name of his organization. 

But perhaps the fieriest dispute has erupted between pickleball players and tennis players. In a Substack post I choose to believe is not satirical, the account Club Leftist Tennis wrote that pickleball is “a creature of the neoliberal era,” and a “spectre haunting racket sports.”  

Pickleball’s explosion in popularity has meant there haven’t been many courts purpose-built for the sport. In the city of San Diego there were none until recently. Locally, both tennis players and picklers agreed on that point. What the sides couldn’t agree on, however, was where those new pickleball courts should go. 

What some pickleball players really wanted was a central facility in San Diego run by and for picklers: a sort of pickleball mecca for the sport’s increasing numbers of converts. They saw potential to create that mecca at Point Loma’s Peninsula Tennis Club, which pickleball supporters have for years complained is often empty and run down.  

But it wasn’t just the underutilization that made picklers yearn for a home base at Peninsula. The facility not only had plenty of parking, but in their view, tennis players could simply head across the street to play at Barnes Tennis Center, which was recently named one of the best tennis facilities in the country. 

It made sense, then, said Boyland, to give the facility to picklers and allow them to convert the existing courts and potentially build some shiny new facilities that would attract new players. Supporters even offered to dump $1 million of their own money into the venture. The takeover of courts was necessary, said Boyland, because land is hard to come by in San Diego and environmental restrictions make building new courts a bureaucratic nightmare. 

But tennis players, like Todd Sprague, who serves as president of the Peninsula Tennis Club and on the boards of a slew of local tennis organizations, opposed that effort, which they viewed as a sort of cannibalization of tennis courts. Sprague said they were especially opposed to the idea because tennis had seen its own boom in players during the pandemic. 

Local picklers’ zeal for new courts has been downright radical. In an effort to show the Point Loma tennis courts were underused, pickleball supporters hired drones to surveil them. They’ve even taken years’ worth of screenshots of Peninsula’s court logs to prove that many of the courts went unused. Peninsula tennis officials have disputed that characterization. 

Supporters of the upstart paddle sport then took their activism one step further. They stormed the courts, set up nets and a play-in demonstration sesh before police arrived to kick them out. Part of their complaint was that the tennis club, which is a nonprofit operating on public land, didn’t have a valid special use permit. Peninsula officials say that was on the Parks and Recreation department, which at the time had a significant backlog. Those tactics, and the coverage they generated, put tennis players on defense, Sprague said. 

The feud became so heated that both Boyland and Sprague sought ways to bring down the temperature. Sprague invited Boyland to Ocean Beach’s Robb Field to talk about a “path to peace,” while Boyland proposed the pair give mediation a go. His brother happened to be an ethical negotiator, so why not speak to him, Boyland said.  

“We didn’t ultimately resolve anything, but I would say that we got away from some of the venom that seemed to be a part of most of those conversations,” Sprague said. 

But despite their guerrilla tactics and the sport’s unquestionable rise in popularity, pickleball supporters say they encountered stiff opposition from not only tennis players, but also the city.  

“The city appears to be in bed with tennis, protecting them at every turn,” Boyland told the Union Tribune last year. City officials at the time denied such intimacies to the paper. 

In the year since the feud boiled over, pickleball courts have been sprinkled throughout the city. Still, the number of pickleball courts per resident in San Diego is quite low compared to other cities. Madison, Wisconsin and Lincoln, Nebraska both have more than double the number of courts per resident as San Diego. 

To Boyland, that shows the pickleball revolution has long been here, and San Diego is playing catch up, badly. That’s why he views tennis players almost like the reactionary foot soldiers of the counterrevolution. His real beef, he said, is with the mayor and city government, neither of which he believes have given pickleball players a real hearing. He’s particularly frustrated that city officials have never examined the evidence he and his allies have collected about the underutilization of Peninsula’s courts. He’s convinced that the demand for pickleball at Peninsula still far outstrips the demand for tennis. 

“If we can’t solve the pickleball and tennis thing in a way that makes common sense to the masses, how the heck are we going to figure out more important things like public safety and homelessness, and other much more complicated issues,” he said. 

Then in June, another shoe dropped. At a Parks and Recreation meeting, Point Loma’s Barnes Tennis Center, which is located a mere 800 feet from Peninsula, announced plans to create 19 pickleball courts on its property.  

“That really killed off a lot of the acrimony because all pickleball people care about, like what all tennis people care about, is to have a place to play economically,” Sprague said. 

While seemingly a cause for celebration, some picklers weren’t popping champagne. “We’ve been sandbagged,” said one attendee of the meeting. 

“We think they basically did it to prevent pickleball people from creating their own pickleball places and to protect tennis courts,” Boyland said. 

Sure, they got the courts, Boyland said, but the club was still going to be managed by tennis devotees, not picklers. To add insult to injury, at the meeting Parks and Recreation officials said the profits from the pickleball courts would go to youth tennis programs. 

“It was like a slap in the face,” Boyland said. 

There are also plans for new pickleball courts at Robb Field, the home of Peninsula, but construction is likely to take years. As for where things stand now, Boyland isn’t very optimistic. “Tennis has all the cards,” he said. “We have nothing except these 12 additional courts that Barnes has put in to kind of shut us up and to weaken our argument.” 

Sprague disagrees wholeheartedly. Barnes, he said, had “moved heaven and Earth,” to get the new pickleball courts built. Even if picklers don’t have a dedicated facility, those new courts are worthy of celebrating. But he does seem to have a begrudging respect for the picklers’ determination. 

“I don’t necessarily agree with how they went about trying to get more courts, but I do think that they made the community aware that there is this demand for pickleball courts out here and that we need to figure out a way to address and to meet that need, and for that they deserve credit,” Sprague said. 

All these years after beginning his pickleball crusade, Boyland said he doesn’t regret their tactics. Even though picklers haven’t secured their holy grail of a dedicated coastal facility, Boyland said their radical strategies are why they have any new pickleball courts at all. But, if he could go back and do it over again, he would make at least one change. 

“I think we should have gotten like five times louder probably and said ‘hey, this is a glaring error by the city. This is not how it should work. It should be based on serving the majority of the people not just a small minority that happen to have power,’” Boyland said.