Hudson: twelve pickleball and five tennis courts at Barlow Farm Park

Hudson asked for the thing every city is being asked for: somewhere for the pickleball players to go that was not the tennis courts. The city's answer, after a year of design, was a seventeen-court complex at Barlow Farm Park, twelve dedicated pickleball courts and five tennis courts with a parking lot, a plaza and fence, built by Mr. Excavator Inc. and opened with a ribbon-cutting. The courts are ours: the color coating and the lines on all seventeen, which is the work we do on big complexes as the surfacing specialist under a paving prime, as we did for Bay Village at Reese Park.

Dedicated pickleball courts are laid out differently from converted ones. Each of the twelve has its full playing area, a permanent net on posts set in concrete, and fence between the blocks so balls stay where they were hit without turning the bank into a cage. The surface is a SportMaster acrylic system: an acrylic resurfacer to fill the texture of the new asphalt, two color coats with sand for the footing the game needs, and lines hand taped and hand painted in a white that stays white. The kitchen lines are the ones people look at, so they are the ones we measure three times.

The city says the courts "have quickly become one of the most used facilities in the Hudson Parks system," and the players' Facebook group went from twenty people to several hundred in the weeks after opening. Our drone flew the complex; the video is on the videos page. The photographs here were taken on an ordinary weekday, which is the point: they were full.