"Our goal was to get to 300 members within our first year," Thomas Wagner said of The Courts, the indoor pickleball club he co-founded in Summerlin. "We got to that within our first month."
That single sentence tells you more about pickleball in Summerlin than any court count ever could. The sport didn't need a whole year to prove demand here. It needed thirty days.
If you've picked up a paddle in the past year, you already know Summerlin has embraced pickleball the way it embraced trails and golf before it. What you may not know is that the community's pickleball infrastructure has quietly split into two separate systems that don't overlap much: a free, lighted, first-come public network clustered in just two parts of the community, and a paid, climate-controlled indoor club that filled up faster than its own founders expected. Which one you end up using has less to do with how good you are and more to do with which village you live in and what time of day you want to play.
What Filled Up in Thirty Days
The Courts opened May 1, 2026, at 10000 Covington Cross Drive, an 24,000-square-foot facility with eight regulation, climate-controlled courts and 24/7 access. It's the first indoor pickleball club in Summerlin, co-founded by Wagner, a retired Metropolitan Police Department sergeant, alongside Wesley Carroll and Sue Ellen Arroyo. All three live in Summerlin, and the idea came from a very specific frustration. Arroyo, postpartum at the time, wanted to play at 3 a.m. and had nowhere to go. Wagner built the 24-hour model partly with her in mind, and partly for a different kind of Las Vegas schedule: casino shift workers and nightclub staff who are free to play pickleball at hours no outdoor park could ever accommodate.
By that summer, the club had 390 members against a self-imposed cap of 640, a ceiling Wagner set deliberately so existing members wouldn't lose access to court time as the roster grew. Before The Courts existed, players in Summerlin without a private club to belong to sometimes made the drive to The Picklr in Henderson, an hour round trip, just to play indoors. Now a Summerlin resident named John Hunnicutt shows up with his 11-year-old daughter Lexi and plays doubles against members three and four times their age, a detail he mentioned as one of the things he likes most about the sport. That's not a coincidence of scheduling. It's what happens when a facility removes the two constraints, heat and darkness, that had been quietly rationing court time on the outdoor side for years.
The Public Map Underneath It
Here's the part that doesn't show up in the headlines about The Courts: Summerlin's entire public outdoor pickleball network amounts to 18 lighted courts, spread across exactly four parks. That's the whole system, not a subset of it.
- Oak Leaf Park, in The Cliffs Village in Summerlin South, a five-acre park with 4 dedicated lighted courts and skyline views from its elevated position.
- Stonebridge Park, in Stonebridge Village in Summerlin West, a 12-acre park with 4 lighted courts set against Red Rock Canyon as a backdrop.
- Grand Park, also in Summerlin West, planned to eventually reach roughly 90 acres and become the largest park in the community. Its first phase includes 6 lighted courts.
- Terrace Park, inside Grand Park Village, a smaller 2.6-acre park that opened in late 2025 with 4 lighted courts of its own.
Look at where those four parks sit and the pattern is obvious: every public court in Summerlin lives in one of two places, The Cliffs in Summerlin South or the Stonebridge and Grand Park corridor in Summerlin West. If your daily walk doesn't already pass through one of those villages, the nearest free public court probably isn't close. Beyond the public network, private courts exist inside communities like Reverence and Ascension, and within Summerlin's five 55-plus communities, but those are amenities tied to specific HOAs, not something any Summerlin resident can walk up and use.
Why the Paid Option Filled Up First
This is the part worth sitting with. Eighteen free, lighted, unlimited-access public courts exist right now in Summerlin. And still, a single paid facility with eight courts hit its first-year membership goal in one month and is on pace to cap out at 640 members, a ratio of 80 members per court once it's full.
That's not a story about pickleball being popular. Everyone already knows that. It's a story about what a free court can't solve. A public court in The Cliffs or Stonebridge is genuinely excellent if you live nearby, don't mind summer heat during daylight hours, and can work around whoever else showed up first. What it can't offer is climate control in July, guaranteed court time without a wait, or access at 3 a.m. if that's when your schedule happens to be free. The Courts solved for exactly those three gaps, and residents who'd never had a local answer to them showed up immediately.
What This Actually Means If You Already Have a Paddle
If home is in The Cliffs or somewhere in the Stonebridge and Grand Park stretch of Summerlin West, you're sitting on a real advantage: free, lighted courts within your own village, no membership required. Oak Leaf Park's elevated setting and Stonebridge's Red Rock backdrop make either one worth the short walk even on a casual evening.
If you live somewhere else in Summerlin, the math looks different. Your options are a longer drive to one of those four public parks, whatever private court your own HOA happens to include if you live in a community like Reverence or Ascension or one of the 55-plus villages, or a membership at The Courts, understanding that it's approaching its 640-person cap and won't stay open-ended forever. None of those is a wrong answer. But they're not the same answer, and the difference matters more the closer that membership cap gets.
Summerlin has spent three decades building an amenity system that residents consistently rank as their favorite thing about living here, long before pickleball entered the picture. What's happening on the courts right now is that same pattern playing out in miniature: demand outrunning the parts of the system that take longest to build, and a private operator stepping in to close the gap faster than a public park department ever could. Whether that gap gets filled with more public courts down the line or more clubs like The Courts is the question worth watching, not because it changes anyone's address, but because it changes where you'll actually be playing a year from now.
If you're weighing a move to Summerlin for reasons well beyond pickleball, from schools to golf to the kind of custom estate that comes with its own court, Avi Dan-Goor and the team know this community from the inside out. Reach out anytime to talk through what life here actually looks like, court access included.
