Gulf Shores Breaks Ground on 12 New Pickleball Courts at the Sportsplex

Gulf Shores is getting in on one of America’s fastest-growing sports. City officials joined Gulf Shores | Orange Beach Sports & Events for a groundbreaking ceremony marking construction of a dozen new pickleball courts at the Gulf Shores Sportsplex, formally adding the sport to a campus already known across the region for youth athletics and weekend tournaments.

The 12 lighted, regulation-size courts will rise on the east side of Mickey Miller Blackwell Stadium at the Sportsplex campus on Oak Road West. The placement puts the new facility alongside one of the centerpiece venues of the Sportsplex, turning space at the edge of the stadium grounds into a dedicated home for a sport whose player base has been expanding faster than nearly any other in the country.

The project carries an estimated $780,000 price tag, with the cost shared between the city and Gulf Shores | Orange Beach Sports & Events. The partnership structure reflects how Gulf Shores has built out its athletic infrastructure over the years: the city provides the land, capital investment and maintenance, while the sports commission contributes funding and — just as important — the tournament business that justifies the spending.

Year-round play and tournament potential

Grant Brown, the city’s Recreation and Cultural Affairs director, noted that local players currently have limited options and said the new facility will let residents play year-round while serving as a major community asset. The lighting on all 12 courts is the detail that makes that possible: lighted courts extend playing hours into the evening, effectively multiplying the facility’s daily capacity and accommodating the after-work crowd that drives so much of pickleball’s growth.

Beth Gendler, president and CEO of Gulf Shores & Orange Beach Tourism, pointed to the sports-tourism upside, saying the courts are expected to draw tournaments as well as everyday play to the Alabama Gulf Coast. Tournament pickleball has become a travel business of its own, with regional events bringing players and their families who fill hotels, restaurants and shops — the same economic pattern that Gulf Shores has already captured through its baseball, softball and soccer complexes.

Construction is scheduled to wrap up by December 2022, putting the courts on a timeline that would have them ready for the winter season, when the city’s population swells with snowbird visitors who have carried the pickleball boom north from Florida’s retirement communities.

A sport that outgrew its courts

Pickleball — a paddle sport combining elements of tennis, badminton and table tennis, played on a court about a third the size of a tennis court — has swept through the Southeast for reasons that fit Gulf Shores perfectly. It is easy to learn, playable at every age, and social in a way that traditional racquet sports often are not, which has made it a staple of active-adult communities and municipal parks alike.

The demand has consistently outrun the supply. Communities across Baldwin County and coastal Alabama have seen players crowding converted tennis courts and improvised setups, and municipal officials have watched the sport grow from a niche pastime into a line item in parks and recreation budgets. A dedicated, regulation facility is the standard municipal response, and Gulf Shores’ decision to build 12 courts at once — rather than a token two or four — signals an intent to compete for regional tournament business rather than simply satisfy local demand.

The Sportsplex is the natural home for that ambition. The campus on Oak Road West already draws thousands of visiting athletes a year to its fields and stadiums, and the supporting infrastructure — parking, concessions, nearby lodging along the Gulf Shores Parkway — is already in place. Adding a pickleball venue there converts an existing sports-tourism engine into a multi-sport one, at a fraction of what a standalone facility would cost.

How the project is funded and built

The shared funding model between the city and Gulf Shores | Orange Beach Sports & Events has become the template for athletic facility development in Gulf Shores, and for good reason. The city cannot fund every project from its own budget without straining other priorities, and the sports commission cannot attract major events without facilities to host them. Splitting a $780,000 project keeps the burden manageable for both while tying the commission’s investment directly to the events it intends to book.

American Tennis Courts, Inc., a Mobile firm, has been tapped as the contractor. Using a local company for a court construction project brings experience with the Gulf Coast’s specific building challenges — sandy soils that require careful base preparation, heavy summer rains that complicate construction schedules, and the salt air that punishes any outdoor metalwork. Court surfacing is a specialty trade, and the choice of a firm with a track record in the region reduces the risk of the cracking and drainage problems that plague poorly built courts within a few seasons.

The regulation sizing of the courts matters for the tournament strategy. Casual players can adapt to almost any surface, but sanctioned competitive play requires standard dimensions, net heights and court spacing, and tournament directors evaluating a host site look first at whether the facility can pass that test. Twelve lighted regulation courts puts the Sportsplex facility in the range where a weekend tournament can run multiple divisions across simultaneous play — the format that fills hotel rooms.

What it means for local players

For residents of Gulf Shores and the surrounding communities, the practical impact is straightforward: reliable places to play. Brown’s comment about limited options describes a real gap in the local market, where players have had to improvise or drive to find consistent court time. A dedicated 12-court facility with lighting and scheduled open play changes that calculus completely.

The year-round capability deserves emphasis in a coastal city. Gulf Shores’ outdoor recreation is seasonal by nature — the beach economy peaks in summer and recedes in winter — but pickleball’s core demographic, including the retirees and snowbirds who winter on the Alabama coast, plays through the mild Gulf Coast winter happily. Lighted courts in December serve exactly the population that arrives when the tourists leave, smoothing the use of public facilities across the calendar.

The community-asset framing Brown used also points to the everyday uses beyond organized competition: drop-in games, leagues, lessons for newcomers and the casual social play that has made the sport as much a gathering place as an athletic outlet. Cities that have built dedicated pickleball facilities have consistently found that the courts become neighborhood institutions, and Gulf Shores is betting the same will hold at the Sportsplex.

Part of a larger play for Gulf Shores

By the time construction finishes in December 2022, the courts will join a Sportsplex campus that has been built deliberately over the years into one of the Southeast’s recognized youth and amateur sports destinations. The groundbreaking ceremony itself — city officials standing alongside the sports commission and tourism leadership — captured the alignment that has made Gulf Shores effective at this: recreation, economic development and tourism marketing treated as a single strategy rather than competing priorities.

If the tournament business materializes as Gendler expects, the $780,000 investment will be measured against hotel nights, restaurant sales and the broader visitor spending that funds a substantial share of the city’s budget. And if it draws tournaments even half as reliably as the city’s team sports complexes have, the pickleball courts will pay for themselves in the same way the rest of the Sportsplex has — by giving visitors one more reason to come to the Alabama Gulf Coast, and locals one more reason to stay.

The Sportsplex role in Gulf Shores’ economy

The Sportsplex campus where the courts will sit has become one of the quiet engines of Gulf Shores’ non-beach economy. Sports tourism operates on a simple multiplier: a tournament that brings 40 teams to town books hotel rooms across a weekend that tourism officials once considered off-peak, fills restaurants on nights that would otherwise be slow, and generates sales tax revenue that funds city services without raising the local property tax burden. The city and Gulf Shores | Orange Beach Sports & Events have spent years building facilities specifically to capture that business, and the pickleball courts are the newest addition to that portfolio.

The division of the $780,000 cost between the two organizations mirrors the division of the benefits. The city recovers its investment through the taxes tournaments generate and gains a recreational asset residents use every week of the year; the sports commission gains inventory it can market to event organizers looking at Gulf Coast destinations. Neither side could justify the project as easily alone, which is precisely why the partnership model has stuck.

Local players stand to benefit first and most visibly. A dozen lighted courts means leagues can run on fixed schedules, clinics can teach newcomers on dedicated courts without pushing out regulars, and the drop-in play that defines the sport’s social character can happen on predictable evenings rather than whenever open space happens to be available. For a city of Gulf Shores’ size, that is a meaningful upgrade in quality of life — the kind of amenity that residents notice and visiting players remember when they consider coming back.

December 2022 is the deadline that matters. Finishing by then means the courts open for the winter season, when the coast’s seasonal residents are present and demand peaks, and gives tournament organizers a full calendar year of runway to put events on the schedule for the following season. If the facility performs as its backers expect, the groundbreaking ceremony at the Sportsplex will read in hindsight like the start of another chapter in Gulf Shores’ deliberate campaign to own the regional sports-tourism market.