Pelican Bay Got Its Pickleball Courts. Getting Onto One Is a Different Story.

On the morning of February 16, banners went up along Vanderbilt Beach Road, an exhibition court got its final coat of paint, and Ben Johns, the player with more than 150 PPA Tour titles and the top singles and doubles ranking in the sport, walked onto Pelican Bay Community Park's brand-new courts for a headline match. Emmy-winning sportscaster Michelle McMahon moderated a panel on where racquet sports are headed. The Pelican Bay Foundation, which had just spent roughly $6 million of its own money building the thing, called it a grand opening.

It was also, by then, already two months into daily use. The courts had quietly opened for play back in December. The ceremony was a ribbon-cutting for a facility residents had already been walking onto for weeks. That gap between the party and the plumbing tells you something about how this project actually works, and it's the part that matters if you're the one trying to book a court on a Tuesday afternoon rather than watch a pro match on a Sunday.

The Number That Was Never Really 20

Pelican Bay Community Park now has 20 pickleball courts and eight Har-Tru clay tennis courts, six refurbished and two newly built, sitting on land the county has owned since 1994, when developer WCI deeded the park over in exchange for permission to build more densely across the 6,500-home community. But 20 was never the operative number for anyone outside the Pelican Bay Foundation. Ten courts belong to the public. Ten belong to Foundation members. A February 2024 amendment to the management agreement between Collier County and the Foundation made that split contractual: the public gets equal access, the same days and same hours as Foundation members, to half the facility.

On paper, that's a clean deal. In practice, it's been anything but automatic. In November 2025, according to the resident-run Public Advisory Group that pushed for the amendment in the first place, the Foundation reversed an earlier commitment to designate courts 11 through 20 specifically for public use, a plan the group says the Foundation itself had presented at a public meeting the year before. The county stepped in, and the ten public courts were restored. The group's own website still flags the current friction point: a court schedule they say restricts afternoon play for public players, an issue they're continuing to track.

Part of the reason this keeps surfacing is structural. The Public Advisory Group notes plainly that there is no county staff inside the gated pickleball facility, so no one from outside is watching how the split actually plays out day to day. The volunteers who spent years lobbying for these courts are now the ones auditing them.

A Decade to Get Here

The timeline explains why both sides are protective of what they won. Around 2017, Pelican Bay Foundation first offered to buy the park outright; the county said no. Around 2021, after Pelican Bay residents rejected an earlier plan to put courts inside the community itself over noise concerns, the Foundation shifted its proposal to this county-owned site instead. The Public Advisory Group formed in August 2023 specifically to make sure that if courts got built here, the public wouldn't get squeezed out. The amendment guaranteeing the 50/50 split followed in February 2024. Construction broke ground that December, with the Foundation footing the entire bill and Owen Ames Kimball, Ritzman Courts, Peninsula Engineering, and Parker Mudgett Smith Architects doing the building. A 12-foot sound-mitigation wall went in to answer the original noise objections. Courts opened for play in December 2025, and by May 2026 Collier County's own park page confirmed the sound-mitigation system was fully complete and the facility open for both sports.

Every step of that decade was a negotiation over who gets to use the land and on what terms. The ribbon-cutting didn't end that negotiation. It just moved it from public meetings to a court reservation app.

What You're Actually Buying Into

If you live inside Pelican Bay and already pay into the Foundation, your ten reserved courts come with your community dues. If you don't, you can still join as a public member, with annual fees set by county residency: $95 for pickleball if you live in Collier County, $125.40 if you don't, and $477 for tennis if you're a county resident, $632 if you're not. Either way, Ben and Collin Johns, through their company Johns Design & Consulting, built the coaching curriculum, and the day-to-day pro shop is staffed by a mix of credentialed instructors, including Dino Dinopoulos, a Hilton Head transplant with pro-level pickleball main-draw experience, and USTA-certified tennis pro Tatiana Batalla. Foundation Director Maury Bozman has said the goal is more than 40 different programs across tournaments, clinics, and events.

Public or Foundation, everyone books through the same Chelsea app and PodPlay system, on paper the same hours: 8 a.m. to dusk for pickleball, 8:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. for tennis. Whether that access holds up on a busy Saturday afternoon is the question the Public Advisory Group is still trying to answer with real usage data rather than assurances.

Set against the rest of the county, Pelican Bay's 20 courts are modest. East Naples Community Park runs 65 pickleball courts and hosts the U.S. Open Pickleball Championships every spring. Veterans Community Park has 16, self-managed by players since the county let its previous concessionaire go. What Pelican Bay has that neither of those does is a contractual promise that half its courts stay open to non-residents regardless of demand from inside the gates, a promise written into a public-private partnership the county itself has called a pioneer arrangement worth watching for future parks.

What Didn't Change

For everyone worried this meant paving over park space, the numbers cut the other way. Only 22 percent of the park's green space went toward the expansion. Parking grew to 109 spaces. The park still serves roughly 40,000 visitors a year within a four-mile radius and remains the largest public green space west of U.S. 41 in Collier County.

Not every early promise made it into the finished facility, though. The baseball and softball practice field, originally slated for relocation elsewhere on site, was removed instead. The ADA-compliant playground included in the original plans hasn't materialized either; the existing playground remains in its original, pre-project form. Small gaps, but the same pattern as the court split: what gets announced and what gets built aren't always identical, and nobody outside the project is tracking the difference unless someone volunteers to.

None of that was really in question. The question that took a decade, an amendment, a reversed commitment, and a county intervention to answer was much narrower: when a private homeowners' foundation builds and operates courts on public land, who actually gets to play, and who checks.

The Practical Read

If you already live in Pelican Bay and want a Foundation membership, the fees and hours above are what you're signing up for, along with access to instructors your dues are already funding. If you're a public player hoping to use one of the ten courts set aside for you, the mechanism worth understanding isn't the schedule posted at the gate. It's that the schedule has been contested before and the people best positioned to tell you whether it's holding this month are the volunteers still watching it, not the Foundation's own materials.

That's the part the grand opening didn't cover, and it's the part worth knowing before you show up with your paddle.

If you're weighing what a neighborhood's amenities actually deliver, day to day, versus what the brochure promises, that's the kind of groundwork Cheena Chandra does before ever showing a property. Let's connect if you want a clearer read on how Pelican Bay, or any North Naples community, really functions for the people who live there.