Toronto opens new Woodbine public pickleball courts in East Toronto
East Toronto’s first purpose-built outdoor pickleball complex opened near Woodbine Park and was busy almost immediately. The 11-court site includes three wheelchair-accessible courts.
Toronto’s new public pickleball complex near Woodbine Park opened with immediate traffic, giving East Toronto its first purpose-built multi-court outdoor venue. The 11-court site on Embaadiimok Avenue, between Eastern Avenue and Lake Shore Boulevard East, began opening for play on June 1 and was quickly filling with players.
For visiting players, the appeal is straightforward: this is a true public facility, open during daylight hours, not a private club tucked behind a membership wall. The court count matters too. With 11 dedicated courts, including three larger wheelchair-accessible courts, Woodbine is the kind of site that can handle casual games, structured drop-in play and more organized event formats without feeling like a token add-on.
That mix was visible right away. A skills clinic led by ETPA pro Natalie Araya drew teens, young adults and families onto the courts at the same time, turning the opening into more than a ribbon-cutting moment. East Toronto Pickleball Association president Davi Ramjug said the project came together after four years of work with the city and local partners, and she called the opening historic for pickleball in Toronto. Ramjug also pointed to the venue’s tournament-ready design, a sign that the site was built to do more than absorb overflow.
The demand behind the opening has been building for years. By July 2025, the East Toronto Pickleball Association had spent about three years advocating for dedicated courts, with 700 paying members and only two purpose-built pickleball courts east of Yonge Street. Many east-end players were still making do with outdoor hockey rinks or dry pads with painted lines, a compromise that left some surfaces flooded, dusty, slippery or hard on joints.
Toronto’s broader court expansion helps explain why Woodbine landed with such force. City council endorsed continued pickleball expansion on June 14, 2023, after the city had grown from just one outdoor court five years earlier to 165 in 2023, including 30 more that year. The city later created a Pickleball Advisory Group to guide policy, programming, permitting and court provision as demand kept climbing.
ETPA’s summer schedule now runs seven days a week from early June through late September, with annual membership listed at $60 plus HST. That makes Woodbine look less like a novelty and more like a working public hub, the sort of place that can turn east-end demand into regular play rather than a one-day opening rush.
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