“In 2022, SPR created new 16 [sic] pickleball courts and is working to enhance Solstice Park with new lines and incorporate more rolling nets for our courts.”
Seattle Parks and Recreation, via Facebook
What New Pickleball Courts?
Seattle Parks did not “create new pickleball courts” in 2022. It “painted lines for pickleball on existing tennis courts“. Seattle Parks conveniently seems to not understand the difference, but pickleball and tennis players certainly do.
If Seattle Parks added lines for lacrosse and soccer on an existing athletic field that already had lines for football, would it be fair for it to say that it “created new lacrosse and soccer fields”?
Moreover, Seattle Parks failed to provide pickleball nets for those courts.
If Seattle Parks added new lines for football and soccer on an existing lacrosse field but failed to provide football goal posts and soccer goals, would it be fair for it to call those new lines “football and soccer fields”?
Coerced Creation
Instead of saying that Seattle Parks “created new pickleball courts,” it might be more accurate to say that there was an attempt to coerce Seattle Parks to paint lines for 25 pickleball courts in low-income neighborhoods. Seattle Parks could have embraced the opportunity. Instead, it did its best to wriggle its way out of most of it.
All the credit for the new lines goes to the city council and the pickleball players who convinced the city council to include in its 2022 budget $50,000 for Seattle Parks to paint lines for 25 pickleball courts on tennis courts in low-income neighborhoods. That was more than enough money for the task. All Seattle Parks had to do was to hire contractors to paint the lines and pay them.
We must however acknowledge Seattle Parks’ unbridled creativity in the way it chose to spend the money. It managed to paint lines for a total of 16 pickleball “courts” instead of 25, and only 8 were located in a low-income neighborhood.
More Rolling Nets?
We have to give Seattle Parks some credit: It seems to have finally realized that it should start providing some semi-permanent pickleball nets.
But what do they mean when they say they are “working to […] incorporate more rolling nets for our courts”? Of the 25 semi-permanent pickleball nets scheduled to be installed on pickleball courts this year, fewer than half have been ordered by Seattle Parks. So, this year the pickleball community is yet again directly funding most public pickleball net purchases. And where does the money come from for those nets ordered by Seattle Parks? It comes from the $50,000 that were supposed to go to pickleball lines in low-income neighborhoods: money that fell in Seattle Parks’ lap thanks to pickleball players.
At the same time that Seattle Parks is pointing to its starting to “incorporate more rolling nets,” it is allegedly planning to prohibit Douglas semi-permanent rolling nets at the Solstice courts. More on that in a later post, as that story unfolds.
What’s Wrong with a Little Spin Amongst Friends?
This spin directly hurts pickleball players. When the media, the Board of Parks and Recreation Commissioners, your favorite City Council member or the Mayor‘s office engage with Seattle Parks, Seattle Parks smoothly distils its alternate reality narrative about how it is handling pickleball. It tells them that it has everything under control. It even has a “plan”.
What reason would all those people have to doubt Seattle Parks when it says it created 16 new pickleball courts last year and is planning on creating more this year? What reason would they have to doubt Seattle Parks if it says it already makes a gazillion pickleball courts available to the public? What reason would they have to believe the players that say that there is only one acceptable dedicated pickleball court in the entire city when Seattle Parks assures them that it created 16 new courts just last year and more are on the way? None.
And so, Seattle Parks goes on its merry unsupervised way, doing what it does best: talk about how good a job it is doing supporting pickleball players throughout the city. Meanwhile pickleball players are left in a pickle.