# The Pickleball Wars Were Never About Pickleball

*Opinion · August 14, 2026 · by Nixie Worthington*

> The room at the Parks Commission study session on April 1 was full in a way that parks meetings are not usually full. What they were fighting over was eight tennis courts at Hunter Park — and a shortage nobody has budgeted to fix.

Art by CONTRA — Collage: the Hunter Park tennis courts wrapped in a black mourning ribbon, a tennis racket and pickleball paddle tied handle to handle, and an empty dashed outline where a court should be.

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The room at the Parks Commission study session on April 1 was full in a way
that parks meetings are not usually full, and the chair opened by explaining
that twenty-two people had signed up to speak and would therefore be held to
about a minute each, and that if you were in the middle of a sentence when your
minute ended, you should please finish the sentence and stop. A commissioner
looked out at the crowd and said, with the helpless warmth of a man who has
found himself outnumbered by the fit, that it was a room full of beautiful
people of all ages and it made him want to quit the sports he was doing and
take up whatever they were doing.

Seven days later the same commission voted, and the room emptied so fast that
the chair called an unofficial five-minute lull: "not a real recess, just a
lull", to let everyone leave before he could get to the next agenda item.

What they were fighting over was eight tennis courts at Hunter Park.

## What The Money Actually Bought

Here are the numbers, as staff stated them in open session, because the numbers
do most of the arguing in this story.

Ashland Parks and Recreation holds a matching grant from the Oregon Parks and
Recreation Department to rehabilitate the Hunter Park tennis courts. The grant
supplies $720,000, which is 60 percent, the Parks capital improvement plan
supplies the other 40 percent, the total is roughly $1.2 million. The
engineer's estimate for the work is $971,000. A commissioner asked the obvious
question, if we budgeted 1.2 and it costs 971, is there money left over, and
was told that any savings come strictly out of the city's own share. "We don't
give money back on the grant."

The approved grant scope covers eight tennis courts, one of which is a
multi-use court designed for bike polo and futsal. Acting Director Rachel Dials
explained, in the flattest possible terms, why this mattered: "any deviation
from that scope requires a public process and a formal amendment submission."

That is the whole mechanism. The city had over a million dollars to spend on
courts and a scope of work that said what the courts were for, and the entire
civic drama of the spring of 2026 was about whether four of those courts would
have a second set of lines painted on them.

## Three Options, One Of Which Was Free

Option one: no change. Eight tennis courts, one multi-use, no pickleball
striping. Option two: dual-line court five, already multi-use, and put removable
nets on the four back courts. Option three: significant pickleball expansion.

Carlisle Stout, who has lived here 47 years, told the commission he used to play
tennis until he couldn't play anymore, and now plays pickleball, and loves it,
and wanted option one. He said striping the courts "makes it horrible for tennis
players and pickleball players." This is the sort of testimony that ought to
have ended the argument, coming as it did from a man with standing on both sides
of it, and it did not.

The motion, made by Commissioner Gardiner and seconded by Commissioner Adams,
was option one: maintain the original grant submittal, eight tennis courts,
court five multi-use, courts five through eight fitted with removable nets for
future consideration. Speaking to his own motion, Gardiner said the plain
thing: "I think the solution to our issue is additional courts." He named where
they might go — East Main Park, Ashland Creek Park, a partnership with the
school district — and then named the problem with all of it. The courts "really
isn't there yet" in the capital improvement program.

Commissioner Adams, seconding, said he had been torn, and then explained why. He
had recently taken his daughter to play pickleball. They waited an hour and
forty-five minutes. They only stayed, he said, because she was more patient than
he was.

He voted for option one anyway. Weiner, Bachman, Gardiner, Adams, Landt, all
yes. Motion passes.

I want to be careful here, because this is the part that gets misread. The
commission did not choose tennis over pickleball. It chose the grant scope over
a fight, and then told the pickleball players, correctly, that what they need is
courts that do not exist and that nobody has budgeted.

## Enter The Panels

Having declined to build courts, the city moved on to the phase of the problem
it could afford, which is enforcement.

By July the Parks Commission was taking an operational update on the Lithia Park
pickleball courts "in response to concerns regarding off hours use and acoustic
impacts," which is bureaucrat for the neighbors have had it. The menu: updated
rules, physical site controls, improved collaboration with the Ashland Police
Department. A commissioner asked staff to replace "sundown" with actual clock
hours, year round, because the police cannot enforce a sunset. Another
commissioner established the legal position in two sentences: amplified audio
prohibited at all times, and "if they're there after hours, they're
trespassing."

In August, a recreation supervisor reported back on conversations with a
pickleball sound mitigation group, a national outfit, players and officials
themselves, who have done 200 court locations across 36 states and several
Canadian provinces. A commissioner drew the sensible inference out loud: the
existence of a national consultancy in pickleball noise tells you something
about pickleball.

Michael Orender, an Ashland resident since the era when the big hotel in town
was the Mark Antony and Lithia Park was a Forest Service campground, drew a
different inference. The group selling you expensive panels, he noted, has
recommended a sound analysis company, and "lots of pickleball communities know
that these groups are in cahoots," because a non-independent analysis reliably
concludes that you need the panels.

John Frank, who is 80 and plays three or four times a week, volunteered that he
is the man who blows off the courts about 90 percent of the time, that he does
not start before seven with a battery-powered leaf blower, and that anyone
claiming otherwise is "either hearing somebody with a different leaf blower or
they have a very slow watch." He also mentioned, without making anything of it,
that he gives the parks department about a hundred hours a year.

## The Verdict

Margie McKenzie, who has lived here almost 50 years, said she was surprised at
how adversarial it had all become, that police were being involved, that this is
a sport and Lithia Park is a public park and everyone might be more gracious.
She said this is not the tone of the community she has experienced.

She is right, and she is also describing what scarcity does to neighbors. There
is one set of good courts on the south end of town and two constituencies who
both want to be outdoors, and the city's answers so far have been paint,
signage, posted hours, a trespass theory, and a quote for acoustic panels from
the people who sell acoustic panels, but none of that makes a court.

Build the courts. Put them in the capital plan where Commissioner Gardiner
said they aren't. Until then, understand what we are actually asking of an
eighty-year-old with a leaf blower and a man who waited an hour and forty-five
minutes with his daughter: that they keep sharing a shortage politely, and
take it up with the police if they don't.

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*Sources: Ashland Parks & Recreation Commission study session, April 1, 2026;
regular meetings of April 8, July 8 and March 11, 2026; joint Parks Commission
and City Council meeting, August 12, 2026. Figures as stated by staff in open
session; quotations as transcribed from the meeting record. Speakers are named
where they identified themselves or were named by the chair.*

Source: https://ashlandfreepress.com/opinion/2026-08-14-pickleball-wars