- October 28, 2024
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At a series of three community meetings held by city staff in January about a proposed new Regional Racquet Center on the site of the Palm Coast Tennis Center, Palm Coast residents told city staff to focus on increasing the number of courts for tennis and pickleball and enlarging the building with showers and a coffee area.
Dozens of attendees at a Jan. 20 meeting agreed that the four pickleball courts wouldn't' be enough.
Attendance was highest at the Jan. 20 meeting on the pickleball aspect of the racquet center proposal, with about 40 attendees, while 15 people attended a Jan. 13 session on tennis and 27 attended a Jan. 27 general public input meeting on the facility.
The city has already started its initial bidding process for the proposed Regional Racquet Center, advertising on Feb. 3 for a "request for statement of qualifications," or RFSQ, for a construction management firm. As of Feb. 9, two dozen firms had replied.
The proposed Regional Racquet Center is intended to be a reinvigoration of Palm Coast's 63-acre Tennis Center, which opened in 2007 at 1290 Belle Terre Parkway, and to serve as a Community Center for the central area of the city.
The current 10-court center offers tennis lessons, summer camps and tournaments and has a following of dedicated users. It has for a decade hosted the United States Tennis Association's Palm Coast Open. But for many years, it ran at a significant deficit, pushing the city to take over its management from a private company in 2017.
The city hopes to use the increasing popularity of pickleball to bolster the new racquet center. Hundreds of local pickleball players have been using temporary courts at Belle Terre Park and Holland Park, where the city has been offering beginning lesson on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.
The city's proposal for reworking the tennis center into a Regional Racquet Center that could also accommodate pickleball involves adding at least several pickleball courts, plus new locker rooms, showers and common areas as well as more parking near Lehigh Trailhead, according to a city news release.
City staff hope that the Regional Racquet Center would also attract larger USTA events that would bring in visitors who'd spend money at local hotels and restaurants.
The construction would occur in phases and be funded by the city's capital projects fund, park impact fees and by sales tax dollars obtained from the city's "Be Local, Buy Local" initiative, according to the news release.
