Sandy, Oregon Approves Two New Outdoor Pickleball Courts at Mount Hood Athletic Club

Mount Hood Athletic Club's outdoor pickleball situation was already trending in the right direction after the club secured city approval for its first outdoor court in 2025. Sandy's Planning Division just accelerated that trajectory by a factor of two.

The City's Development Services division formally approved two additional outdoor pickleball courts at MHAC in its March 2026 report, posted April 1. The new courts will occupy a landscaped area on the east side of the main building, joining the previously approved court to give MHAC three outdoor courts where it had none two years ago. That is not an incremental nudge; it is a 200 percent expansion of outdoor capacity delivered without a full parks overhaul, using exactly the kind of low-footprint, targeted planning work that cash-constrained municipalities increasingly favor when player demand outpaces available land.

The infrastructure built around the courts reflects serious attention to how players actually move through a facility. The approval includes a new stairwell providing access from the upper parking lot and a dedicated pathway connecting the two new courts to the existing one. For anyone who has hauled a bag of balls up an unmarked slope at a poorly designed facility, those additions are not minor cosmetic touches; they are what make a three-court cluster function like a coherent complex rather than three rectangles of asphalt scattered across a hillside.

What the March report leaves open matters as much as what it settles. The approval documents do not specify lighting plans, fencing details, noise mitigation measures, or any extension of operating hours for the outdoor courts specifically. MHAC runs Monday through Friday from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. and weekends from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.; whether outdoor court hours will track that full schedule or operate within a narrower window tied to noise considerations is not yet defined. Those details will shape how much of the club's daily calendar the new courts can realistically serve, and they are worth monitoring as building permits and site work move forward.

For players and organizers in the Sandy area, three outdoor courts open a realistic path to programming that one court simply cannot support: simultaneous drop-in play, structured lessons, and small round-robin tournaments become possible without any one group crowding out another. Clubs that reach that threshold tend to become regional anchors, drawing players from neighboring communities who find their own facilities oversubscribed on weekend mornings.

The construction timeline was not published in the March report, but formal planning approval is the first gate in a sequence that typically runs through building permits and site preparation before courts are playable. Players tracking the project can watch for permit filings through the City of Sandy's Development Services department as the next milestone on the path to a first serve.