Entertainment: Morgan Hill breaks ground on dedicated courts
Club spearheaded efforts to create a permanent home for fast-growing sport
Photo by Susan Brazelton
By Calvin Nuttall
The very first pickleball court. Photo courtesy Wikipedia.
The rhythmic popping sounds of pickleball will soon reverberate regularly across Morgan Hill Community Park as construction completes on the city’s first dedicated pickleball courts.
To meet rising demand for the fast-growing sport, a group of local enthusiasts encouraged the city to create the courts over several years.
Tim Hendrick, president of the Morgan Hill Pickleball Club, spoke proudly of their efforts to open the new courts at the groundbreaking ceremony Jan. 5. Morgan Hill Mayor Mark Turner and other city officials attended the event as well as numerous fans of the sport.
“The city has been phenomenal in working with the public to make this all happen,” Hendrick said. “It’s really been a great opportunity.”
He thanked several key members of the Morgan Hill Pickleball Club who were vital in bringing the project to fruition, including Sherry Hemingway, Leo Kirshon, and George Witzel.
“About a year and a half ago, they all said, ‘We have to make this grow,’” Hendrick said. “‘We’ve got to get together with the city and make this happen.’ And now, the courts are coming. They’ve taken a while to get here, but we’re really happy. It’s a big deal to finally have this happening here, and what an incredible location to have it.”
Though pickleball has existed since 1965, its popularity has skyrocketed in recent years from relative obscurity — it is now the fastest-growing sport in the U.S. for the third year in a row. The Morgan Hill Pickleball Club’s ranks have swelled to more than 100 members, with new players picking up the sport.
“Pickleball players say it’s not an addiction, it’s an allegiance,” Turner said at the groundbreaking. “The thing about pickleball that I think is such an attraction to so many people is that it is easily picked up. People don’t walk away angry at one another. You walk away as friends.”
Pickleball’s rapid growth has often been attributed to its ease of learning and relatively low intensity, making the sport widely accessible to newcomers of all stripes.
The city has hired EF&S Concrete to construct the four courts at the park next to the existing basketball courts, which pickleball players had been temporarily sharing with basketball players in the meantime.
“Only a year ago, Morgan Hill had no public outdoor pickleball courts,” Hendrick said. “Now, the sport has skyrocketed. Morgan Hill loves its pickleball! The city’s four new, professional-quality courts will make play safer, reduce congestion, and certainly make the game more enjoyable.”
Everyone is welcome at these pickleball courts, whether they are novices or experts, he said.
“It is a sport you can pick up in a half hour,” he said. “Then you can join us in spending the rest of our lives getting really good.”
Construction is projected to be completed by the end of July. Once finished, the courts will be free and open to the public during most hours, with some hours limited for scheduled use by the Morgan Hill Pickleball Club.
The popular game started with a few bored families, some improvised equipment, and a weekend of experimentation on a backyard court on Bainbridge Island outside Seattle.
Congressman Joel Pritchard, businessman Bill Bell, and their families were looking to occupy themselves one afternoon when they discovered an old badminton court on Pritchard’s property.
Lacking proper equipment, they grabbed some ping pong paddles and a plastic ball and started batting it back and forth over a standard badminton net.
During the course of the weekend, volleys turned into grounded strokes and the net slowly dropped to accommodate rallies and spins. They were onto something fun.
More than 50 years later, that perforated plastic ball is still drawing families together, just as pickleball’s inventors imagined.
Calvin Nuttall is a Morgan Hill-based freelance reporter and columnist.
