The Pickleball Wars Were Never About Pickleball

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 Gardner 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, Gardner 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, Gardner, 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. None of that makes a court.

Build the courts. Put them in the capital plan where Commissioner Gardner 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.