Less than a year later, parks officials have now banned pickleball from Seravalli after repeated clashes between players and other parkgoers, especially parents with young children who’d come to Seravalli for years to ride bikes, inline skate and toss a baseball. The battle at Seravalli is but one example of pickleballers stepping on toes as more people decide to play and seek an ever-increasing number of courts on which to do so. Some 10,000 facilities registered with USA Pickleball, the nonprofit governing body of the sport, with an average of three new ones opening every day.
“A year ago, it was like the wild west,” one industry insider told The Washington Post earlier this year. “Now it’s like World War III.”
Once confined to retirement communities, pickleball has exploded and shows no signs of slowing down. The number of people playing the sport reached nearly 5 million last year, almost double what it was five years ago, according to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association data cited by NPR. There are three professional leagues vying for players, customers and advertisers as they jockey for supremacy. And communities are scrambling to find space to build courts for millions of new pickleballers who add to their ranks every day.
That includes New York City’s parks department, which offers its 8.8 million residents about 68 pickleball courts.
“We saw around the country, just an … explosion of interest in the sport coming out of the pandemic,” New York City Parks and Recreation CEO Mark Focht told The Washington Post, adding that “it went from almost nowhere to 90 miles an hour in a matter of months.”
To try to keep up, the department painted the lines for two courts at Seravalli in the spring, Focht said. While officials heard “low rumblings” about conflicts in the early months, those murmurs quieted in the summer as people left town for vacation. But clashes exploded as people returned in late summer and school restarted.
Parents, branding themselves “Families United For Open Play,” started a petition in the fall to “Save NYC’s Seravalli Playground (a.k.a. Horatio Park) from the Pickleball Takeover.” The park had been created 60 years ago as a place for kids to play and for generations served as “a vital community gathering place and the heart and soul of life for many West Village children and families,” according to the petition.
Then, pickleballers took over the park in a “sudden land grab,” parents said in the petition, which had racked up nearly 3,300 signatures by Wednesday morning, short of its goal of 5,000.
That sentiment led to a 90-minute meeting in October to discussing pickleball at Seravalli.
Parents pushing for a full ban on pickleball complained that players dominated the space, endangering children as they lunged to hit wayward balls. Two courts quickly became five, then 10 — as many as 12, one parent told committee members. Parents tried to urge players to contain themselves to the two official courts in a “constant cat-and-mouse game,” but pickleballers often overran the playground. Some parents just gave up, she said.
“Our children go into the park, they feel unwelcome and they walk away. It’s to the point now where the confrontations are so frequent that my children don’t even want to go there anymore.”
Pickleballers acknowledged that rogue players had created ad hoc courts, something one of them called “disgusting” at the October meeting. But a full ban wasn’t the answer, they argued. Lydia Hirt, a volunteer ambassador for USA Pickleball, pushed parks officials to increase the number of courts at Seravalli from two to four and enforce a partial ban. She suggested allowing play on the proposed four courts at all times and prohibiting play on other courts during peak times — 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekends.
Hirt said she often plays early in the morning before work. There’s no reason pickleballers couldn’t play at the park when children are in school and then skedaddle in the afternoon, she said.
“To me the bottom line is coexistence,” she said. “Pickleball is so inclusive, accessible and democratic. It really is a sport for the city of New York, where everybody in all shapes, colors, backgrounds is really welcome to play and participate.”
The parks department delivered its verdict on Nov. 30 when officials removed the pickleball lines at Seravalli as they posted a sign at the playground entrance: “Pickleball is no longer allowed in Seravalli Playground.” The sign directed players to three nearby places where they could play.
The department said it created two courts at J.J. Walker Park, less than a mile south of Seravalli, making sure they were finished and available as they removed the ones at Seravalli.
“We were able to come to this what we consider a win-win solution,” Manhattan Borough Parks Commissioner Anthony Perez told The Post.
But Hirt, who also moderates an online group of more than 1,100 pickleball players in the West Village, doesn’t think she and the pickleballers won — and she’s vowed to keep working with officials and parents to get courts back at Seravalli. She said she thinks players, parents and other parkgoers can coexist if they strike a balance somewhere between a ban and pickleball free-for-all.
Focht acknowledged the roughly 70 pickleball courts that the department has created isn’t enough to accommodate the sport’s meteoric rise in America’s largest city. He said he and his colleagues will keep looking for other “underutilized spaces” like J.J. Walker to add courts.
“We serve 8.8 million people and we have limited space, so we have to make strategic decisions on balancing needs amongst all of our constituents and users and patrons,” Focht said.
But, he added, that takes time. “Everybody wants everything where they want it, right?”
