(Seguin) — The city of Seguin wants you to help come up with a name for its new pickleball courts. The city took over the old tennis courts at the Joe F. Saegert campus and is converting them into pickleball courts. If you’re not familiar with pickleball, you might want to check it out. City officials say it’s one of the fastest growing recreational activities in the country.
Parks and Recreation Director Jack Jones says they are spending a lot of money to make this new facility right. He says this pickleball facility, much like the Disc Golf Course in Starcke Park, will bring visitors to Seguin who are looking for a nice place to play. He says choosing the right name is just another part of making sure that this project is done right.
“It’s going to be a huge game changer for the folks who play pickleball and the folks will be coming here to play pickleball as opposed to going to San Antonio and playing at Chicken N Pickle in San Antonio, but we do need to name this new park facility. The park board has talked about it a little bit. We have some ideas and stuff but before, we did anything really more, is there a particular process that council would want to go through?” said Jones.
The city created a massive public campaign to come up with the name for Park West, which is the city’s second community park. Jones says they may not need as big an effort for the naming of the pickleball courts, but he says they do want input from the public.
“Park West came about in 2014 and that was really more a public process, to get people to give us some suggestions. Council narrowed it down to like five or so and then we went out for a public vote on the five and then Park West came about. It just seems like if we want to go through that process, maybe we don’t go back to the public to vote on the five because Park West was a huge impact to the community. A lot of people were involved. This is almost more of a narrower niche of the community for pickleball but we have some ideas for names, but do we want to go through that similar process of getting some public input, reducing to four or five and getting back to you with some recommendations and then you can choose one of the four of five or come up with something else entirely,” said Jones.
The council agreed to allow staff to conduct a small community survey on possible names. Those names will be added to the list that’s already been put together by the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board. As Jones mentioned, they’ll take all of those nominations and whittle the list down to a handful of options for the city council to choose a final name.
Pickleball is a combination of tennis, ping pong and badminton. It’s played with a pickleball paddle and a more durable whiffle-ball. It can be played using a singles or doubles format. The sport’s growing popularity is one of the reasons why the city purchased the unused courts from the Seguin ISD. The major upgrades being made to the facility are largely being funded using federal stimulus money that the city received.