Tallassee Reallocates $46,730 To Turn A Tennis Court Into New Pickleball Courts By October
- Tallassee’s city council reallocated $46,730 to turn one of two tennis courts in East Tallassee into three new pickleball courts.
- Parks and Recreation director Eric Phillips says local players now drive 30 to 40 minutes to find open pickleball courts.
- The conversion follows recent additions in nearby Millbrook and Wetumpka, with work expected to finish in October.
A Small Alabama City Runs Out Of Room For Its Fastest Growing Sport
Tallassee Mayor Joey Wiginton stood before the city council on a Monday night in late August with news that pickleball players in this stretch of East Alabama had waited years to hear: their sport was getting its own courts. Wiginton told council members the city would tear down the fence around one of two tennis courts near the youth baseball fields and rebuild the space with three pickleball courts, leaving a single upgraded tennis court next door. “We will take down the entire fence and repave the surface,” Wiginton said. “We’ll have a fence in between the tennis court and pickleball courts. We’ll redo all the fencing again. It will look brand new.” The council backed the plan by pulling $46,730 from the existing budget, a small build that puts Tallassee in the same spot as dozens of American cities hunting for court space for a sport that outgrew its available real estate years ago.
One Tennis Court In, Three Pickleball Courts Out
The site sits near Tallassee’s youth baseball fields and currently holds two tennis courts. Under the plan Wiginton laid out, one tennis court stays in place and gets upgraded. The other comes out entirely, replaced by three dedicated pickleball courts built where the old surface used to be. New fencing separates the two sports rather than leaving them to share a single enclosure the way the old setup did, giving each group its own space instead of splitting time on shared lines.
Wiginton expects the work finished in October, only about two months after the council’s vote to fund it. That timeline covers the fence removal, the repaving, and the new fencing separating the two sports, a fast turnaround for a public recreation project built entirely through a mid-year budget reallocation rather than a new bond or grant.
Players Are Already Driving Somewhere Else
Eric Phillips, director of Tallassee Parks and Recreation, put the shortage in plain terms. “Pickleball is such a growing sport,” Phillips said. “We had a big following at the rec center. Now, everybody is driving 30 to 40 minutes to play.” That is the gap the new courts are meant to close: a city with real demand for the sport but no dedicated place to play it, forcing residents onto the road to reach courts in other towns.
Tallassee’s existing lighted courts already run on an automatic timer that cuts the lights around 10 each night, a detail that speaks to how much of the current play already happens after work hours, squeezed onto shared or improvised surfaces rather than courts built for the sport. That after-work demand is exactly the crowd Wiginton and Phillips are trying to keep in town instead of on the road to Millbrook or Wetumpka once the new courts are finished.
The Regional Pickleball Race
Tallassee is not building in isolation. In nearby Millbrook, the 17 Springs facility already runs 12 pickleball courts. In Wetumpka, the city unveiled eight new courts of its own just days before Wiginton’s announcement. Three East Alabama cities within a short drive of each other have all added or expanded pickleball courts inside the same few weeks, a pace that tracks with how fast the sport has spread through small Southern towns that a few years ago had no dedicated courts at all.
Tallassee has bigger plans in motion too. A new recreation center is under construction as a 16 month project, expected to open in the fall of 2027, and it will include multi-purpose courts built to accommodate pickleball alongside other sports. The East Tallassee conversion is the short-term fix. The recreation center is the longer-term answer to a sport city officials expect to keep growing well past October.
Line up the three cities and the scale differences show how uneven pickleball’s build-out has been even within one small stretch of Alabama. Millbrook’s 17 Springs facility, with 12 courts, functions as a regional hub players will drive to from surrounding towns and counties. Wetumpka’s eight new courts put that city solidly in the middle of the pack. Tallassee’s three courts are the smallest of the three additions, but for a city that previously had no dedicated pickleball space at all, going from zero to three courts is the larger relative change, regardless of how the raw court count compares to its neighbors.
A Boom That Keeps Reaching Smaller Cities
The numbers behind Tallassee’s decision are national ones. According to the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, pickleball has ranked as the fastest growing sport in America for four straight years running, with more than 24 million people now playing it nationwide. That growth started in retirement communities and warm-weather cities with the court space to spare, but it has worked its way into small cities like Tallassee, where officials are now retrofitting existing tennis infrastructure rather than building from a blank slate.
That pattern, converting a single underused tennis court into multiple pickleball courts, has become the default playbook for cities with tight recreation budgets. It costs less than a new build, uses land the city already owns, avoids a lengthy land acquisition or zoning process, and can be finished in months rather than years. Tallassee’s $46,730 price tag and two-month build window fit that mold closely. For a city government balancing a fast-growing sport against a limited budget, retrofitting one underused court is proving to be the fastest way to answer resident demand.
What This Means For Local Players
For Tallassee residents who have spent the past couple of years driving to Millbrook, Wetumpka, or further afield for a court, October brings the first dedicated pickleball courts in town. The build is modest by the standards of the sport’s bigger commercial facilities elsewhere in the country, three courts on the site of a single old tennis court, but it solves the actual problem local players described to city officials: nowhere close to home to play. Once the fencing goes up and the surface is repaved, players who currently squeeze in games at the rec center or drive across county lines will have a court built specifically for the sport, with lights already running on an automatic timer that keeps evening play possible after work.
As the new recreation center moves toward its 2027 opening with pickleball built into its plans from the start, Tallassee’s fix looks less like a one-off and more like the opening move in a city catching up to a sport its own residents already embraced. Wiginton’s council vote settles the short-term question. The bigger recreation center settles the long-term one, and together the two projects suggest Tallassee expects pickleball demand to keep climbing rather than level off once the new courts open in October.
Sources:
- Tallassee Times, “City to Add Pickleball Courts,” https://tallasseetimes.com/2026/08/27/city-to-add-pickleball-courts/
Image: Depositphotos
