Bay Village: a basketball court becomes four pickleball courts at Reese Park

Bay Village had a basketball court at Reese Park that had become a problem and a pickleball crowd that had become a lobby. The city weighed converting the basketball court into four pickleball courts against building six new ones that would sit closer to the houses across the culvert, and chose the conversion. The city asked us for a number.

The job is a textbook conversion. Power wash the whole surface. One coat of acrylic resurfacer. Two coats of SportMaster ColorPlus, blue inside the lines and green outside. Lay out and paint white lines for four pickleball courts, hand taped and hand painted. Then the part that makes four courts out of one slab: a five-foot fence in the shape of a cross, 56 by 104 feet with eight-foot openings on the sides, so each court has its own gate and its own balls; post holes dug and cemented to pickleball standards; new nets, posts, sleeves and center tie-downs on all four.

Council authorized it, with a county community-development grant covering the cost, and the courts were in use soon after. The staff memo recommending us said that Carl would be the point person "like the other jobs they've done for the city," which is the sentence we would put on the truck if it fit.