4 new pickleball courts coming to Beaufort park. $635K project includes basketball
The opening of a new pickleball complex at a popular park in Beaufort will be an early Christmas gift for the area’s growing legion of players as the wildly popular sport taking the nation by storm continues to grow locally as well.
Four new public courts at South Side Park off of Battery Creek Road are scheduled to open in early December, said Hannah Nichols, a Beaufort County spokeswoman.
The $635,000 Southside Park project was part of Beaufort County’s $154.2 million budget for the fiscal year 2025. The Southside improvements also include a full-length basketball court.
The addition of the 44-by-20-foot courts at Southside comes a year after Beaufort County unveiled eight new courts at the Burton Wells Recreation Center in October 2023. Burton Wells is located 9 miles northwest of Southside Park.
Lowcountry residents can’t seem to get enough of the sport, in which players smack a plastic ball with holes in it with paddles about twice the size of ping-pong paddles on a badminton-sized court with a 34-inch-high net.
Beaufort County alone has financed construction of 18 public pickleball courts since 2021, with 16 of those courts in the Beaufort and Port Royal area and two in Bluffton.
That figure does not include private courts in gated communities or clubs of Town of Hilton Head courts.
“We expect the sport, and the need for courts, to continue to grow,” Nichols said.
Beaufort County boasts thousands of active pickleball players and has seen a tremendous response to the new courts at Burton Wells, Nichols said. Nationally, USA Pickleball, which maintains the rules, promotes the sport, sanctions tournaments and provides player ratings, reports 13.6 million players in the country as of 2023 with more than 50,003 places to play. The sports accessibility, simplicity and social nature are cited for the interest.
When they open, the new pickleball courts at Beaufort’s Southside Park will bring the total number there to six, making it the second largest complex north of the Broad River behind Burton Wells. The park’s first two courts opened in September of 2021, when a tennis court was converted.
The Town of Hilton Head and the private sector are also responding to the demand for more pickleball courts.
In October 2023, the Town spent $250,000 to convert existing tennis/pickleball courts at Old Schoolhouse Park located at 152 William Hilton Parkway into six dedicated pickleball courts.
Hilton Head also is considering a 24-court pickleball complex at Chaplin Park.
The Local Pickle, a private 11-court indoor pickleball facility, is set to open on Bluffton’s Fording Island Road near the Tanger Outlets between December and January.
This story was originally published November 27, 2024 at 12:50 PM.
