On a hot summer day in Sheffield Park near Central Avenue, the sun beats down on a father and his two sons as they shoot hoops on a small half-court near the street.
"Just practicing our catch and shoot, catch and shoot. That's all we're doing," Chris Shelton says, his shirt damp with sweat.
Shelton has been teaching basketball to his two sons, ages 10 and 11, for four years at this park. They live a few miles away off Shamrock Drive.
Until recently, they practiced on a more secluded full court that had trees and shade.
"It's probably about a hundred yards down," he says, gesturing down a sidewalk toward some woods.
But this month, workers began replacing that court with a pickleball court.
Shelton says at first, all he could think was, "Wow. Wow. Those were good basketball courts down here, and why take them down to put up pickleball, when there's not a lot of pickleball players?"
He's not the only one taken off guard. Two sweaty teens dribbling on the half-court next to him say they're also confused by the change. They don't even know what pickleball is.
"I've never heard of pickleball," one of the teens, Keeshon Ramsey, said.
'What we're doing is bulls—'
Down the sidewalk and into the woods, workers are busy hammering stakes into the dirt where a fence will go up surrounding the new court. Gone are the basketball hoops, replaced by pickleball nets.
There's a tennis court about 20 yards away, but that court wasn't picked for conversion.
One worker, Jarell Aocaraz, says he knows not everyone is happy.
"We have a lot of people that's not like — they're not OK with this," he says.
Some people have flat out told them, "that what we're doing is bulls—-. Yeah. Literally," he says.
Another neighbor, Matt Walsh, wrote an email to County Commissioner Mark Jerrell, highlighting the fast-changing community's racial diversity. A third of residents in surrounding neighborhoods are Black, another third are white.
In his email, Walsh called the basketball-turned-pickleball court one of the "craziest and most tone-deaf" things he'd seen.
"I run through the area every night. I have seen people playing basketball on that court almost every single day. It's a shame to see it go," he wrote.
Mecklenburg County Park and Rec officials declined an interview but said in a statement that Eastway Park / Sheffield Park neighborhood association requested the change.
A neighborhood association requested the change
The association's president, Carolyn Millen, confirmed this. She said for years, the secluded basketball court had been a hotspot for crime — witnessed by her and other neighbors.
"If you have people up on the courts doing drugs and selling guns and other things over the years, then you're not going to have people going and using the park," Millen said.
Some neighbors were scared, she said, and she kept hearing people were interested in pickleball. When she emailed plans to more than 300 neighbors in June, she said feedback was positive.
"I thought I had done something really pro and exciting for the neighbors and to get families back out," she said.
Jerrell, the county commissioner who represents the area, said the incident raises questions for him. Did Park and Rec evaluate criminal data? Are they sure a pickleball court will reduce crime? And how many people got to weigh in on the decision?
"Did the overwhelming majority of residents ask for pickleball courts, or did we just do that?" he asked.
He said he didn't know about the conversion until residents emailed him.
Park and Rec has struggled to keep up with demand for courts as pickleball explodes in popularity, but Jerrell said the parks department shouldn't get so caught up that it adds pickleball courts where they're not wanted — or displaces people.
"We want to make sure that we're not making decisions because certain groups are there that play basketball or whatever the case may be. We've got to make sure that our areas are diverse places where communities can gather whether it's for basketball, pickleball, tennis or just to recreate in any kind of way," he said.
In other words, pickles shouldn't be the only thing on the menu.
