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.
How the 20 Courts Are Divided
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, as the Naples Press reported, 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.
The agreement sets out the division, but its implementation has been contested. 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 Public Advisory Group says the current court schedule restricts afternoon play for public players.
The Public Advisory Group says there is no county staff inside the gated pickleball facility to monitor the court allocation. The group also says its volunteers continue to track how the public/member split is working.
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.
The history reflects recurring discussion about land use and court access, from public meetings through the current reservation system.
Membership, Fees and Programs
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. The Public Advisory Group says it is continuing to collect usage data to assess how access works during busy periods.
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. The completed facility therefore differs from some of the original plans.
Alongside these facility details, an important operational question is how the public/member court allocation is administered and monitored.
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, review the posted schedule and the Public Advisory Group's updates on access. The group says it continues to monitor how the arrangement works.
That kind of detail can be easy to miss when assessing a community from its marketing alone.
If you're weighing how a neighborhood's amenities work day to day, 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.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
