The new pickleball courts at the Indian River Recreational Complex (IRRC) are officially open, ending a year-long saga.

At a Town Council meeting on Sept. 18, Parks and Recreation Department Director Robert Potter updated the council on different initiatives the department is working on. As part of that update, Potter announced the new pickleball courts are installed and open for use.

The three courts are located in a fenced-in area just beyond the Parks and Recreation headquarters building. The courts have been lit and are already a big hit, according to Potter.

“If you go up there every morning, the parking lot is jam-packed,” Potter said.

The announcement of the courts being open ends what has been a long, twisty, and, at times, controversial saga.

Early in 2023, a group of citizens attended a Town Council meeting to talk about the lack of available pickleball courts in Clinton. To alleviate that concern and given the rapid rise in popularity of pickleball, in May 2023, the Parks and Recreation Commission (PRC) recommended that the Town use a portion of its American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to replace the basketball court at IRRC with courts dedicated solely to pickleball courts.

A vocal contingent of the public was largely against that idea. At a public hearing in June 2023, a larger than normal crowd turned out to speak against the idea of taking away the basketball court, which speakers argued was often used by kids, in favor of a use primarily geared toward adults.

Potter said that despite what some people have claimed, the basketball court at the complex was not regulation-sized, nor was it frequently used. Potter said it would get more use as a pickleball court. Speakers pushed back on that assessment as they argued the basketball courts were used primarily outside of business hours when adults wouldn’t be there to monitor the use. At the meeting on Sept. 18, Town Council member Brian Roccapriore suggested the Town look into getting a device that would count how many people access the courts so that the Town could have data on how popular the courts are.

Following that public hearing in 2023, the Town Council decided to cancel a town meeting that was scheduled for voters to approve the APRA spending plan so that a workshop could be held to tweak the pickleball proposal to see if the basketball court could be spared.

Initially, it appeared as though a compromise was found. A revised proposal called for building three courts at a spot of undeveloped land off of IRCC's baseball field's right field. In August 2023, residents finally approved spending $209,122 for that project, along with other ARPA projects.

However, in November 2023, PRC Chairman Joe Schettino and Potter returned to the Town Council to explain that during the preliminary work on the proposed pickleball site, it was discovered that electrical conduits were buried where the courts would have been built. That would lead to unexpected costs, making the project run above the projected cost.

Faced with either shifting the proposed site closer to the wetlands – which presented its own host of potential issues- or building only two courts instead of three, the two men recommended the Town follow the original plan of converting the basketball court to pickleball courts.

Converting the basketball court would allow the town to have three pickleball courts as originally recommended, but the courts would already have lighting and a walkway, which the other proposals did not.

In light of the new cost estimates, the council members agreed that night with the assessment from Potter and Schettino to move forward with the original plan of replacing the basketball court. The reversal of the proposal upset some people who were mad that the basketball court could not be spared, but Chris Aniskovich, then the chairperson of the Town Council, explained that the council had to make the best long-term decision for the town.