For years, if you lived in Pelican Bay and wanted to play pickleball, your options were a converted racquetball court that beat up your knees or a drive of several miles to Veterans Community Park or East Naples Community Park. That second option meant driving past your own private beach clubs, your own tennis courts, and your own 27-hole golf course to go play a sport that half of Naples had already figured out how to offer at home. Pelican Bay, one of the most amenity-dense communities on the Gulf Coast, was pickleball-poor in a city that now hosts the sport's biggest tournament in the country.
That changed earlier this year. But the way it changed is the part worth knowing if you live here, because the fix came with a condition nobody who bought into a private, card-access beach club expects: half of the twenty new courts at Pelican Bay Community Park are legally required to stay open to the public, permanently, under a rule the Foundation itself agreed to. The community that keeps its beaches behind a tram line just built its newest amenity to spec for the general public.
The Sport Everyone Else In Naples Already Had
The workaround residents lived with for years was a set of racquetball and handball courts repurposed for pickleball. Players who wanted real courts, and lights, and a surface that didn't punish their joints, had to head to Veterans Community Park, which has 16 courts, or East Naples Community Park, which has more than 60 and hosts the US Open Pickleball Championships each spring. Both are legitimate facilities. Neither is inside Pelican Bay.
Resident Edie Verbesky and her neighbor Chris O'Sullivan started pushing for courts inside the community roughly seven years before anything got built. Verbesky later described the early going this way:
"We were the first ones to stand up in a meeting seven years ago and got booted out, but we persevered."
O'Sullivan kept making the same point at every Foundation meeting he could attend: every comparable community in the area already had pickleball, and Pelican Bay didn't. The argument eventually worked, but not on the timeline anyone expected, and not inside the neighborhood's own boundaries.
Why the Wait Ran Seven Years
The delay wasn't indecision. It was a real estate problem layered on top of a governance problem. Pelican Bay's developer, WCI, deeded the nearly 15-acre site at 764 Vanderbilt Beach Road to Collier County back in 1994 in exchange for permission to build more densely elsewhere in the 6,500-home community. The county has owned the land ever since, which meant the Foundation couldn't simply build courts on it without county sign-off. The Foundation tried to buy the park outright about eight years ago. The county said no.
Building courts inside Pelican Bay's own boundaries ran into a different wall: neighbors objecting to the noise. Pickleball's paddle-and-ball sound carries, and residents living near proposed in-neighborhood sites pushed back hard enough that the plan died. It took roughly four more years of negotiation, town halls, and noise mitigation planning before the Foundation and the county landed on a structure both sides could accept, using land the county already owned.
The Fine Print That Comes With $6 Million
The Foundation ultimately funded the entire $6 million renovation itself, under a 30-year land lease with Collier County. In exchange, the county attached a condition that governs how the courts operate today: no more than 50 percent of the twenty pickleball courts can be used by Pelican Bay Foundation members at any given time. The other ten courts belong to the general public, on the same days and at the same hours as Foundation courts, for a fee of ten dollars a day or ninety-five dollars a year for Collier County residents.
The mechanics catch first-time users off guard. A Foundation member can't fill in on a public court if all ten Foundation courts happen to be booked. The amendment that governs this, approved by both the Pelican Bay Foundation and the Collier County Board of County Commissioners in February 2024, states plainly that members of the public get access to half the courts on equal terms, and that Foundation members can't exceed their half even if public courts sit empty. If you're used to Pelican Bay's private beach clubs, where a resident card gets you in and that's the end of the conversation, the courts work on a different logic entirely.
What Actually Got Built
The $6 million covered more than the courts themselves. The finished project includes:
- 20 Novacrylic pickleball courts, split 10 and 10 between Foundation members and the public
- 8 Har-Tru clay tennis courts, two newly built where old racquetball and handball courts used to sit, six refurbished
- A pro shop, a shaded waiting area, and a maintenance building
- A 12-foot-high sound-absorbing fence along the property line, addressing the noise concerns that killed the earlier in-neighborhood proposal
- Parking expanded to 109 spaces, plus new bike racks, landscaping, and repaved walkways
The park itself is the largest green space west of U.S. 41 in Collier County and serves roughly 40,000 people a year within a four-mile radius. Despite the scale of construction, the new courts and buildings used only about 22 percent of the park's total footprint. The playground, the lake, the walking trails, and the multipurpose field were left alone. This was a precise build on unused acreage, not a teardown of the park residents already knew.
The Courts As They Run Today
Crews broke ground in December 2025, and the Foundation marked the finished courts with a formal grand opening on February 16, 2026, headlined by Ben Johns, the world's top-ranked pickleball player with more than 150 PPA Tour titles. Johns and his brother Collin, through their company Johns Design & Consulting, were brought on to build the facility's coaching curriculum, and the Foundation has said it expects to run more than 40 different programs a year, from clinics to tournaments.
By late spring, the numbers backed up the demand that drove the seven-year fight. Maury Bozman, the Foundation's Director of Community Center and Racquets, told USTA Florida the renovation helped "modernize a tired facility from the 90's to a tennis destination for all ages." The tennis side alone was drawing roughly 200 players a day across its eight courts, described as fully booked from morning lessons through evening league play under the lights. When neighbors raised noise concerns during planning, county officials pointed out they hadn't received pickleball noise complaints at any of their other parks, a track record that helped the sound-wall compromise move forward.
For a resident who's been away since the courts were still a converted racquetball setup, the practical change is straightforward: you no longer need to drive to Veterans Park or East Naples for a real court, and you'll be playing next to people who don't live in Pelican Bay. Club Pelican Bay's golf membership still runs a long private waitlist with no such public carve-out. The courts up the street from it operate on an entirely different set of rules, and that contrast says something about how the neighborhood is actually built: a mix of amenities that are yours alone, and now, at least at one park, a few that never were.
If you're weighing what Pelican Bay actually offers day to day, beyond the beach clubs and the golf waitlist everyone already mentions, the courts are a useful data point. The neighborhood's newest amenity isn't private, and understanding why tells you more about how Pelican Bay works than the sales brochure does.
For a closer look at what living in Pelican Bay is really like season to season, Alfred Robbins Realty Group is happy to walk you through it. Request a private consultation to talk through the neighborhood, the numbers, or anything else on your mind.
