USTA Interested in Managing Southern Rec Center, But Locals Worry About Messing With a Good Thing

There’s nothing like success to attract opportunity, or opportunists.

Since the opening of Palm Coast’s $14 million Southern Recreation Center–what used to be the Palm Coast Tennis Center–the facility has drawn raves from residents and membership there has tripled thanks to the addition of a cathedral-like pickleball complex. It even became an early voting site this year.




In came USTA-Florida (the United States Tennis Association) with a $700,000 grant to build five additional clay tennis courts to go with the existing 10. It was the largest such grant by USTA Florida to any city, and it was almost the equivalent of the Tourist Development Grant Palm Coast landed in 2022 to help build the Rec Center.

But the USTA grant came with strings enough to build a gillnet.

One condition was that the project had to be completed by the end of 2024. That goal will be met. Another, more difficult for Palm Coast to swallow, was that USTA, not the city, picked the contractor (Welch Tennis Courts of Sun City). And a third was that USTA had to be given the chance to make one of those pitches made famous, or infamous, by time-share salesmen–and to make it to the City Council. It so happened that USTA’s pitch had a lot in common with time shares. It sounded great–until players and others raised key questions.

Laura Bowen, executive director of Orlando-based USTA Florida, made the opening pitch before the council on Tuesday, with more to come in the future.

USTA-Florida  claims there are 1.7 million tennis players in the state (out of a population of 22.6 million), with 1,000 tournaments in the state. The organization manages four public tennis centers  in partnerships with cities–Fort Walton Beach, Gainesville, Cocoa Beach and Vero Beach. “And yes, two of them include pickleball,” Bowen said. “We get that question quite a bit, and we do collaborate with our municipalities on that and how best to support both activities.”




The organization wants to add Palm Coast.

The 15 clay courts open the facility to more opportunities for recreation, tournaments and revenue, Bowen said–or combine them: tournaments in Palm Coast have typically shut down recreational play for brief periods. The new courts would allow for concurrent tournaments and recreation. “The challenge that you often find is who’s going to host and coordinate them at that level of expertise, particularly for a larger facility,” Bowen said. “But whether we manage a tennis center or not, does not diminish any of the support we provide. We’re always happy to come in and support any city that asks,” Bowen said.

Bowen is familiar with the city’s history of management at the tennis center. It was previously managed by Kemper Sports, among other organizations. It did not go well. Finally in 2017, the city just took over management and incorporated the center in its parks and recreation department. So the city and residents familiar with those years may be understandably hesitant to return to those uncertain times when the city had less control over its facilities. And the Rec Center is the last place it would want to lose control.

The facility in its last full year of operation had $560,530 in expenses and $347,076 in revenue, for a loss of $213,454. Those sort of deficits make some council members queasy, when taken out of the context of parks and recreation amenities–which never make money and aren’t intended to make money. To the contrary: public parks are money pits. If the USTA were to manage the facility, all expenses would be incurred by USTA, including equipment, employees, finances, concessions and marketing.




Bowen stressed, twice: “We’re not here to make money. We’re here to get people playing, so it’s a little bit different than other relationships you may have had with people managing your recreational facilities.” Bowen described her organization as “the experts” in managing such facilities. “When we come in and bring events in, like the pro circuit event and others,” Bowen said, referring to Palm Coast’s annual tournament in January, “it actually supports local jobs, support your hotels, your retails, and hopefully offset some of the tax dollars that you have to spend on these services.”

It may, however, be difficult to see how USTA would run the facility without a loss, and if so, what services it would end up cutting to balance its books.

“We’re not here today to make a management proposal. We just wanted to kind of share what we generally do,” Bowen said. But USTA, which has been inspecting the tennis center’s new courts, would want to hold a “celebratory event” to mark the opening of the new courts, and host a Q&A with current Recreation Center players to hear what residents would like to see at the facility.

“It can be a great partnership,” Palm Coast Parks and Recreation Director James Hirst said, with a distinct note of caution about who would be in charge: “There are some areas that we do well, and there’s some areas that the USTA can help us out as well.”

Residents and users of the Southern Rec Center were equally cautious, starting with Agnes Lightfoot, president of Palm Coast/Flagler Friends of Tennis and a long-time advocate for and voice of the tennis center.

“If the USTA comes in for managing the facility, we want you, the City Council, to keep some things in mind, not just the good part about letting us play, but the maintenance of the facility,” Lightfoot said. “That is a price issue, that is an issue that affects you, me and all of us as taxpayers as well, and also the amount of time that we would have as players. Right now we can schedule time to play. But if another organization comes in, do they reduce that? Do we have less time to play?”




Lightfoot also raised questions about Redefined Food, the current, local operator of the restaurant at the Recreation center: would USTA replace that operator? Would it interfere with pickleball’s growth. which Lightfoot is happy about? “These are the things that needs to be brought up even now, even before you make some final decisions, because tennis is important to us,” Lightfoot said. She was seconded by Nikki White, a member of the Recreation Center. “When you give away your business to somebody else, there are consequences, and we need to look at those carefully,” White said.

Lightfoot and White were followed by Mary, who described herself as “a true pickleball player” who doesn’t “care anything about tennis.” She was concerned about those courts, and whether the city was going to “continue to run the programs as well as James Hirst and his group has always done,” she said. “Are we going to have all our tournaments and ladder leagues, and are they going to maintain the courts as well? Are they going to focus strictly on nothing but tennis tournaments and not do anything for pickleball? Pickleball is a lot bigger. You have more pickleball members at the at the southern rec center than you do tennis. You need to pay a lot more attention to pickleball than you do tennis.”

She wasn’t exaggerating. “We went from like 300 memberships whenever it was just tennis, to 1,200 or 1,500 whenever we added pickleball,” Interim City Manager Lauren Johnston said.

Mary worries that “if you’re going to let tennis run pickleball, then you’re going to run a lot of pickleball players out of the Southern Rec Center.” But she did not say why that would be the case, or how: USTA, which is no stranger to pickleball’s growth clobbering that of tennis in recent decades, is emphasizing its focus on “racket sports,” not just tennis, suggesting that if anything, USTA is scrambling for a strategy to ride pickleball’s coattails.

Another Rec Center pickleball player said she heard “much, much about tennis” in Bowen’s presentation, but “not much about pickleball.” And yet another suggested that USTA could improve the Rec Center with targeted services, like pro services and league play. “So in the end, I suppose that the council would want to hear from the USTA on on how some of these additional services, or amplification of the services,  could be provided, and how that would affect the operation the tennis center overall.”




Then George Opelka spoke, giving USTA-Florida its biggest boost.

He is the father of Reilly Opelka, the tennis pro. He’s worked closely with the USTA, describing its Florida section as arguably its most successful. “They’ve already put their money where their mouth is here with what they’ve done with respect to these five new courts,” Opelka said. “We’ve got an amazing first class facility, but we need first class programming. It doesn’t matter if it’s pickleball, it doesn’t matter if it’s tennis, and five years from now, it’s probably going to be Padel out of our facility. That’s really the fastest growing racket sport around the world. So we need to be able to evolve. And USTA Florida, in my opinion, is an amazing partner opportunity. And I think you’ll find out that they’re going to listen and they’re going to listen to what the city needs, what the community needs. So I think we need to hear them out and see what they have to offer. But this to me, this is an IQ test. It’s a no brainer.”

The last characterization was unfortunate for its condescension, essentially calling idiots those who would not go along, though it was perhaps not meant as harshly. Johnston, the city manager, had in an interview termed the possible arrangement with USTA-Florida in more nuanced terms, and explicitly framed the decision as a matter of policy for the council to decide. She is not too worried that USTA would short-shrift pickleball.

“They are tennis, they are racket sports. They are pickleball now and future things, and they do tournaments,” Johnston said. “So if our expectation is that we want to utilize the facility, to bring in tourism, to have a dynamic youth program, then those are services that they could offer. Then it would just be a negotiation or modified approach of: do we, as the city, run the recreation component? We’ve got Zumba classes in there and rentals in the building. Then they strictly do the tennis side, where they hire a head pro and they’re facilitating the classes, etc. I could see where that could work. I could see how it could work that we keep the same model that we have. So I can see it being successful either way. It just depends on how the council wants us to run the facility. I’m kind of putting it back to the city council’s policy hands, because there’s a lot of talk about how our amenities are run. Are they run where they need to be 100 percent cost recovery, or are they run as a community amenity, where we want some discounted programs, we want seniors to be able to go for free. So we kind of need that policy direction from Council.”

None of the city’s park amenities are self-sustaining, Johnston noted.

Mayor Mike Norris summed up the council’s position at the end of Bowen’s presentation and the numerous public comments on the matter. “We’re just getting started with this whole facility,” Norris said. “I know some people are reluctant to making any agreement, and someone voiced that concern last night to me. But we are not at that stage yet. We are not there yet. So more to come on this one, right, James?” The question was to Hirst, the parks director, who confirmed it.