Drive past Pelican Bay Community Park most weeknights this year and you'll see something that wasn't there not long ago: lights on at 8 p.m., eight courts running, and a parking lot that doesn't empty out when the sun goes down. For years, the opposite was true. Residents who wanted competitive league tennis had learned to look elsewhere, because the courts at their own community park had quietly become the kind of place serious players avoided.
That's the part of this story that doesn't show up in the amenity brochures. Pelican Bay is known for its beaches, its tram system, its restaurants on the sand. The tennis renovation that just wrapped at the Community Park didn't touch any of that. It fixed a problem that had been building for three decades on a set of courts most people driving to the beach barely notice.
Two Court Systems, One Zip Code
Ask a longtime resident where to play tennis in Pelican Bay and you'll usually get an answer about the Foundation's courts, the private facilities tied to homeownership. The Pelican Bay Foundation racquets program runs 18 Har-Tru tennis courts across two locations, reserved for members and their guests, alongside fitness, pickleball, and a full social calendar built around them.
What gets overlooked is that Pelican Bay Community Park sits right next door, and it runs on a different track entirely. It's a Collier County facility, open to a wider circle of players, and it's home to its own Racquets Center with eight tennis courts and twenty pickleball courts. The Foundation has folded some of that capacity into member access, three of the tennis courts and ten of the pickleball courts are set aside for members and guests, but the park itself, and the recent overhaul that just happened there, belongs to the county and to USTA Florida, not to the HOA most residents think of first.
That distinction matters right now, because the overhaul is the actual news.
What Was Actually Broken
Before this year's project, the Community Park's courts had drainage problems that limited play after rain and lighting that no longer met the needs of a growing tennis population. Maury Bozman, the park's Director of Community Center and Racquets, put it plainly:
"The grant and facility improvements were game changing, the expertise provided by the USTA, along the way enabled us to modernize a tired facility from the 90's to a tennis destination for all ages, along with locals and tourists alike."
A facility from the 90s, still running on 90s infrastructure, in a community that has spent the last decade building some of the most active racquets programming in Southwest Florida. The gap between what Pelican Bay residents expected and what the public courts next door could actually deliver had become wide enough that players simply left. League matches moved to other clubs. Evening play mostly didn't happen, because there was nothing to play under once the sun went down.
The Fix, Court by Court
The renovation came through a grant from the USTA's Tennis Venue Services program, and it addressed the specific things that had driven players away rather than a cosmetic refresh. Six of the existing courts were resurfaced with modern HydroCourt surfaces. Two brand-new standalone HydroCourts were added. Lighting was installed across all eight, not just a few marquee courts, which is the detail that actually changes daily use.
What that adds up to, in practical terms:
- Eight HydroCourt tennis courts where six aging courts previously struggled with drainage
- Two courts that didn't exist before the project
- Full lighting on every court, meaning evening and night play is now routine rather than the exception
- A twenty-court pickleball complex operating alongside the tennis courts in the same Racquets Center
None of this required touching the beach pavilions, the tram stations, or anything the Foundation manages directly. It's a separate investment that happened to land in the same three-mile stretch of Pelican Bay that everyone already associates with sand and sunsets.
The League That Came Back
The clearest sign the fix worked isn't the surface material or the light poles. It's who showed up afterward. USTA League Play, which had drifted to other facilities as the courts aged, has returned to Pelican Bay Community Park. As of this spring, roughly 200 players are using the eight courts, with matches running from morning lessons through evening league play under the new lighting.
That's not a modest bounce back. It's a full reversal of the pattern that had set in over the previous several years, when the park's own tennis community had effectively voted with their car keys and taken their league nights somewhere with working lights and courts that drained properly.
Who's Teaching on These Courts Now
The renovation also gave the park room to build out programming that wasn't really possible on the old courts. Head Professional Tatiana Batalla, originally from Spain and a former collegiate player at Edinboro University, leads the youth tennis program, and her focus has become one of the park's more visible additions since the courts reopened at full capacity. She holds both USTA and USPTA certification, and the emphasis on getting kids through their first lessons in a structured way is part of what's turned this into a park families plan around rather than pass by.
Pickleball has its own instruction roster too, including certified professional Evan "Dino" Dinopoulos, who played college tennis at Wittenberg University before transitioning full time into competitive pickleball. Between the tennis and pickleball sides, the Racquets Center now covers a wider range of ages and skill levels than the old six-court setup ever could, and it does it on a facility that's actually built for the volume it's getting.
What It Adds Up To If You Live Here
If you've lived in Pelican Bay for a while, the practical change is straightforward. Evening tennis and pickleball are now something you can plan around rather than work around. Booking runs through the park's own site rather than the Foundation portal, which is worth knowing if you've only ever used the private Har-Tru courts and assumed that was the whole tennis picture in the neighborhood. And if you're the kind of player who left for league night at another club a few years back, there's a real case for checking whether your old Tuesday match could move back home.
None of this changes what Pelican Bay is known for. The tram still runs its 900,000-plus trips a year out to Marker 36 and Sandbar. The beaches still stretch close to three miles. What changed is quieter than that, a public park most residents drove past without much thought has become one of the busier racquets destinations on this stretch of the Gulf Coast, and it happened without touching a single thing on the waterfront.
That's usually how the real texture of a neighborhood shows up. Not in the amenity everyone already talks about, but in the one that spent thirty years being ordinary until somebody decided to fix it properly.
If you're weighing what daily life actually looks like in a community like Pelican Bay, beyond the beach access and the tram schedule, the details that matter are often the ones like this: who's running the programs, what got rebuilt and why, and whether the place still works the way residents expect it to a decade after they moved in. Earls & Lappin spends its time paying attention to exactly that kind of detail across Naples' coastal neighborhoods. If you have questions about life in Pelican Bay or want a conversation grounded in how the community actually runs day to day, reach out any time.