Cape Coral’s Courts become major pickleball hub with 32 courts

The Courts Cape Coral has become one of southwest Florida’s busiest amateur pickleball addresses, and the scale explains why: 32 pickleball courts, 12 tennis courts and enough room to absorb daily traffic that now reaches the mid-100s.

Lake Kennedy Racquet Center, now known as The Courts Cape Coral, opened on Aug. 28, 2024, after the city invested $11,243,030 in the project. That figure included a $10,707,648 construction contract with Charles Perry Partners, Inc., plus a 5% contingency, placing the center among the early moves in Cape Coral’s broader parks and recreation buildout.

This is what a high-capacity pickleball venue looks like in Cape Coral. The site is built with a pro shop, concessions, a pavilion and restrooms, and the city approved a facility management contract with Sports Facilities Management to help run it. Instead of functioning like a few isolated neighborhood courts, it operates as a public racquet campus with enough space to host clinics, leagues, open play and larger events without immediately running into bottlenecks.

The programming has widened the draw. Cape Coral Parks & Recreation has already used the facility for youth pickleball clinics, leagues and a summer camp scheduled from June 8 through July 24, 2026. That mix matters because it keeps courts active from morning through evening, while giving beginners, families and stronger players different reasons to come back.

The demand shows up in the city’s numbers. Cape Coral’s FY26 Q2 parks report said The Courts averaged 175 to 225 players per day, had more than 1,631 memberships and logged more than 6,248 non-member drop-in plays. The strongest proof of its reach came during a February 2026 PPA Tournament, when 1,151 players came through the gates, more than 7,000 visits were recorded and the event generated about $130,000 in revenue.

Cape Coral’s investment sits inside a bigger local and national trend. Voters approved the city’s 15-year, $60 million parks and recreation GO bond in 2018 by 53.59% of the vote, and the city estimates the typical homeowner will pay about $55.50 in additional property taxes over the life of the bond. Across the sport, SFIA said pickleball participation grew 51.8% from 2022 to 2023 and 223.5% over the prior three years, with the South Atlantic region reaching 2.8 million players in 2023, up 50% from 2022.

In Cape Coral, that surge has been converted into infrastructure. With 32 dedicated courts, daily play, memberships and tournament traffic all under one public umbrella, The Courts has become less a novelty than a benchmark for what a major amateur pickleball hub can be.