Twenty new pickleball courts. Eight Har-Tru clay tennis courts, six of them refurbished and two of them new. A pro shop, a shaded waiting area, and a roster of teaching professionals with national-tour resumes. That's what opened at Pelican Bay Community Park on Vanderbilt Beach Road after a $6 million buildout funded entirely by the Pelican Bay Foundation. It's also, notably, not what happened to the park's playground, which sat through the entire fourteen-month project in the same condition it was in before construction crews arrived, and only got its own improvement announcement from Collier County in July of this year.
Two different budgets built two different timelines on the same fifteen acres. If you use this park, or you're weighing how a Pelican Bay address fits your own routine, the split matters more than it looks.
What the Foundation Actually Bought
The racquets project broke ground on December 6, 2024, with a ceremony that drew about 100 pickleball and tennis players and officials from the Pelican Bay Foundation, Collier County Parks & Recreation, and the project team, including Owen Ames Kimball, Ritzman Courts, Peninsula Engineering, and Parker Mudgett Smith Architects. Construction started three days later. The county closed the park to the public starting January 20, 2025, and the courts reopened to players in December 2025, roughly eleven months after the site went dark.
The Foundation covered the full cost under a public-private partnership with the county, which owns the property. In exchange, the Foundation signed a 30-year land lease giving it management authority over the courts, lighting, resurfacing, and reservations, while the county retained responsibility for the playground and the rest of the green space. That division of labor, spelled out in the original agreement, is the reason one half of the park moved fast and the other didn't move at all.
The finished facility uses only 22 percent of the park's total green space, a detail that matters if you've assumed a $6 million project reshaped the whole property. It didn't. It reshaped one corner of it, decisively.
Who Runs the Program Now
Pelican Bay Foundation Director Maury Bozman oversaw construction and told the county's Parks & Recreation Advisory Committee that management would include Ben and Collin Johns of Johns Design & Consulting, who built the teaching curriculum. Ben Johns brings more than 150 PPA Tour titles to that role, which is the kind of credential that shows up in a grand opening press release for a reason. The Foundation held that grand opening on February 16, 2026, with pickleball demonstrations and professional exhibition matches running from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Day-to-day instruction now runs through a small staff of certified pros. Tatiana Batalla, a former collegiate tennis player from Spain who holds both USTA and USPTA certification, leads much of the programming. Evan "Dino" Dinopoulos, who played college tennis at Wittenberg University before moving into pickleball, holds ITPTA, PPR, RPO, and DUPR coaching credentials and has competed in pro-level main draws. Bozman described the plan as more than 40 different programs, from tournaments to clinics to open events, which is a meaningfully larger footprint than the four lighted racquetball courts residents had been using as a pickleball substitute for years.
What a Reservation Costs, and Who Gets One
Courts book through the Chelsea app or the reservation link the Foundation publishes, and access splits along a line worth understanding before you assume this is simply "the neighborhood courts." Of the 20 pickleball courts, 10 are reserved for Pelican Bay residents and their guests, and 10 are open to the general public. That's a meaningful concession for a facility the Foundation paid for outright, and it reflects the county ownership underneath the arrangement.
Annual membership dues proposed at groundbreaking ran $95 for county residents and $125.40 for non-residents on the pickleball side, with tennis dues set at $477 for county residents and $632 for non-residents. Daily, afternoon, and evening fee options exist alongside the annual memberships, along with junior player rates. None of that pricing is unusual for a public-private racquets facility in Naples, but it's worth knowing before you show up expecting either a free county court or a private club.
The Half That Didn't Move
Here's where the timeline gets interesting. While the racquets side went from groundbreaking to grand opening in fourteen months, the playground never entered the plan. One frequent visitor posted a review in early February 2026 noting that the playground remained in its original, pre-project form and had not been brought up to ADA compliance, a detail that lines up with what the original 2024 agreement actually promised: the county keeps the playground and green space, the Foundation manages the courts.
Collier County Parks & Recreation didn't announce a playground replacement project until July 13, 2026, roughly eighteen months after the park first closed for the racquets build and five months after the racquets grand opening drew a crowd with a professional pickleball champion. As of this writing, no completion timeline for that playground project has been published. If you're a parent who uses this park, that's the piece to watch, not the courts, which are already open and already booked through an app.
The gap makes more sense once you separate the two funding sources. The Foundation is a private homeowners association with a direct financial interest in amenities its members use and pay dues toward. The county's parks budget runs on a different cycle, with different priorities competing for the same capital dollars across dozens of properties. Pelican Bay Community Park happens to sit at the intersection of both, which is why one corner of it modernized on a fourteen-month clock and the other is still working through a public announcement.
Why This Is Worth Knowing Before You Visit
Pelican Bay Community Park serves roughly 40,000 people annually within a four-mile radius and remains the largest green space in Collier County west of U.S. 41. That reach is part of why the county agreed to the original 1994 deed from developer WCI, which handed over the fifteen acres in exchange for allowing denser development across the broader 6,500-home Pelican Bay community. The park has always carried public obligations layered on top of neighborhood use, and the current split between a fast-moving private buildout and a slower public one is a fairly direct expression of that history.
If you're headed to the courts this fall, book ahead through the app, since 10 of the 20 pickleball courts and the tennis lineup fill quickly during peak morning and evening hours. If you're headed there with kids, the honest answer right now is that the playground looks the same as it did before any of this started, and the county hasn't said yet when that changes.
The Whitcomb Group tracks these kinds of operational details across Pelican Bay and the surrounding North Naples communities because they shape daily life here in ways a listing description never will. If you want the current word on what's open, what's booked, or what's still in the pipeline at Pelican Bay Community Park, The Whitcomb Group is a good place to ask.
