By early next year, Boulder is set to lose 27 courts: Fifteen at the Rocky Mountain Tennis Center were demolished this spring to build student housing, and twelve at CU South will be removed to make way for a flood mitigation project that starts construction in late 2024 or early 2025.
To help fill the gap, Boulder Parks and Recreation plans to develop up to nineteen new courts in 2025: three for tennis and sixteen for pickleball.
The city plans to construct more tennis courts down the line, but is prioritizing pickleball courts short-term as Boulder currently has twenty public outdoor tennis courts and eight multi-use courts (with lines for both tennis and pickleball). The new developments will be the city's first pickleball-exclusive public courts, with pickleball players calling the plan a win. But tennis players say the additions will do little to make up for their lost courts, leaving hundreds of players "without a home."
"Tennis is endangered. We've made it a game of exclusivity," says Michael Xu, president of the Boulder Tennis Association. "Tennis is no longer a sport of merit in Boulder. You either have the money and the access, or you don't and you don't get to play."
Xu says Boulder residents already struggle to find available public courts, and private options are inaccessible. Meadows Tennis Club in Boulder has a five- to six-year-long wait list for family memberships and is not accepting applications for single memberships due to excessive wait times, according to the club's website. To play tennis at Boulder Country Club, a base-level membership costs a $16,500 initiation fee, with 93 people on the waitlist, says the club's membership director.
The access issues are driving some tennis players out of the city. Xu is moving out of state next month, and he says other tennis enthusiasts are also planning to leave.
"This tennis community is going to disintegrate," Xu says. "We wouldn't have been looking [to move] if it wasn't for this issue. A lot of people are considering moving. I have friends who are moving down to Denver. Somebody else is moving to Atlanta, other people said California or Florida."
Meanwhile, other Boulder tennis players have started a Change.org petition and a GoFundMe campaign seeking to raise money for a full-page newspaper ad to explain their court crisis and call on the city to take additional action. "Boulder has abandoned its tennis community," reads the campaign, organized by Boulder resident and tennis player Alia Ghandour. The GoFundMe had raised just under $500 as of July 26.
"The city and county have been instrumental in creating this problem, and now it's time to help resolve it," Ghandour says.
Xu says the Boulder Tennis Association has been complaining to the city about a court shortage for three years. During that time, the city has completed studies but taken "very little action" to tangibly improve the situation, he claims.
When owners of the closing Rocky Mountain Tennis Center tried to build a new facility nearby in Gunbarrel, the City of Boulder recommended that the county reject their application, which was ultimately tabled due to local pushback. In a letter from February, the city said the tennis facility would disrupt the "rural land uses and character" of the area.
The Rocky Mountain Tennis Center was a private club, but it had no wait list and was more affordable, costing up to $175 per month for an individual. It was also known to host accessible tennis programs, such as those for wheelchair users.
"We have exercised almost every single option that we have," Xu says. "We have not been heard. We have sent thousands of comments, spent hundreds of hours attending public meetings. The amount of time and energy that we've spent to try to do something about it, to just be ignored is incredible."
Boulder's Tennis Plan
City spokesperson Jonathan Thornton points out that the tennis center and the CU South facility that collectively housed the 27 doomed courts were privately owned. According to Thornton, Boulder Parks and Recreation has no plans to close any of its courts.Instead, Parks and Rec has moved to increase the public supply to mitigate the dwindling private supply.
The department presented its Tennis and Pickleball Court System Plan to the advisory board on Monday, July 22, which includes the sixteen new pickleball courts and three new tennis courts slated for next year. The plan also features maintenance and improvements for existing tennis courts.
"We understand how there are courts closing...and their impact to the racket sport community. This informed our plan and our desire to do what we can to help out this community," Thornton says. "We are excited to be able to help our racket sport community through this new construction and court maintenance. Their feedback and ideas have been invaluable as we’ve gone through this process."
The plan recommends that Parks and Rec develop an additional 44 outdoor courts in total — 22 for tennis and 22 for pickleball. A document detailing the plan says the courts should be completed by 2036, though Thornton says they would be built "over the next six years."
"We value pickleball. We value tennis," said Ali Rhodes, director of Boulder Parks and Rec, during Monday's meeting. "We're going to do a better job serving this portion of our community, and we're really excited about it."
However, the plan has not put Boulder's tennis community at ease. It includes no solid specifics for indoor courts, which are sorely needed after the "only five publicly accessible indoor tennis courts" closed with the Rocky Mountain Tennis Center, Xu says. The plan recommends that Parks and Rec "determine the feasibility" of constructing a temporary indoor tennis facility at East Boulder Community Park in 2025 and explore other options long-term.
"We really need indoor tennis courts in order to play for six months out of the year," Xu says. "The fact that there's zero publicly accessible indoor courts means that...you're basically looking at the inability to play tennis consistently for half of the year."
The years-long rollout of the new courts would make slow work of replacing the 27 courts closing in the next year — and there's no concrete guarantee that the plan will make it that far anyway. During the July 22 meeting, organizers said they do not have a funding source for the long-term elements of the court plan.
"I want to make sure that the public understands that just because we've created a plan and an aspiration to do these things, that doesn't necessarily mean we are going to do that because we have the funds to do it," said Elliott Hood, a member of the Parks and Rec Advisory Board, during the meeting.
The Pickleball of It All
As the tennis community is shaken by the court shortage, the pickleball community is in better shape. Since pickleball players don't currently have any designated public pickleball courts, they say the city's plan is a net positive. In addition, Boulder Pickleball opened an indoor pickleball facility in the city last year, helping to solve a year-round access issue.Robert Constable, president of BOCO Pickleball Club, says his organization's primary mission was to get the city to build dedicated courts for pickleball.
"We'll be going from zero to sixteen next year. From our perspective, we were coming from nothing," Constable says. "From a selfish perspective, we want it to happen tomorrow...but it's happening fast enough for us in terms of how realistic it is. Overall, we're satisfied."
Although the fates of Boulder's tennis and pickleball communities are diverging, Xu says the sports are not enemies.
Nationally, as pickleball has exploded in popularity in recent years, tennis and pickleball players have clashed over court space, noise, player etiquette and more. Hints of that conflict are evident in Boulder. The multi-use courts at the South Boulder Recreation Center have more or less become a pickleball-only territory, with the tennis GoFundMe lamenting how the courts are "gone to pickleball," worsening the strain on tennis players seeking courts.
However, the leaders of Boulder's tennis and pickleball communities have made a point to come together in their push for a city response to the court shortage. “We have a great relationship," Constable says. "We’re working together and seeing this as something that benefits all of us.”
"It's not pickleball that we're fighting against," Xu adds. "The real problem is we need more courts."
