New renovations to Tinsley Park

Mar 2

Mar 2 New renovations to Tinsley Park

Photo by Senior Photographer Riley Evans

Over the past several months, the city of Cleveland discussed a new renovation project for Tinsley Park. Part of those renovations are new Pickleball courts, which would enable the city of Cleveland to begin hosting tournaments.

At a city council meeting in October, Blake Lively, a member of the Cleveland Pickleball Association, gave a presentation to the council in which he talked about how hosting tournaments can bring increased revenue to the city. According to Lively, Opalika, Alabama invested $650,000 and is now seeing an investment return of over 2 million dollars a year.

“Opelika is just one of these amazing gold mine stories, and what they decided is what I'm hoping we will do here. They decided to make as I called it pickleball the stake on the plate, right? There's nothing wrong with having other things but the stake’s the main thing you have,” said Lively.

Currently, Tinsley Park has six permanent Pickleball Courts, plus 22 temporary courts if the tennis courts are utilized.

“12 courts gets you into the lower tier of the professional tour. It doesn't get you into the super large tournaments. You really need mid 20s or more to get into the top tier,” said Blake Condo, President of the Cleveland Pickleball Association.

Cleveland currently has the capacity to begin hosting tournaments with the courts they already have. According to Lively, having more courts will only make Cleveland more desirable to the Association of Pickleball Professionals, the organization which manages the professional tour.

"I told him (the director of APP) at the time we had six permanent courts and then 22ish temporary courts if we use the tennis courts for a weekend and he said oh, yeah, that's plenty but I just know that we could do even better if we had more permanent courts," said Lively

Even if you take the tournament aspect out of the equation, there is still a need for more Pickleball courts at Tinsley Park.

“On some nights, you can have as many as 50 to 60 people waiting to play,” said Shawn O’Kelley, a local member of the Cleveland Pickleball Association.

In addition to new courts, one of the ways proposed to help solve this issue is a reservation system. Currently, the courts are on a first-come-first-serve basis.

“The pros would be that you would know exactly how long you've got the court and who's gonna be there. So I think that's really good because sometimes when you go currently, you don't know who's gonna go and and if they want to wait that long,” said Tracy Watson, a Nationals Champion who lives in the area.

Currently, there are 250 official members of the Cleveland Pickleball Association. Even if just 125 people show up on a particular evening, that means roughly 22 people per court. With the average pickleball game lasting 25 minutes, that roughs out to 2.5 hours for everyone to get a chance to play.

The Cleveland Pickleball Association hosts supervised play on Mondays from 5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. and on Tuesdays from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.