Pickleball Courts in North Carolina

North Carolina has a hundred counties. This page covers two.

Twenty-four sites, 106 courts, four municipalities, two kinds of operator. Wake County holds nineteen of those sites and 77 of the courts, split between three town parks departments: Raleigh with eleven parks and 44 courts, Apex with five facilities and 21, and Cary with three parks and 12. Mecklenburg County holds the other five sites and 29 courts, all inside Charlotte and all run by a single county-level department rather than by the city.

Each operator publishes differently. Raleigh states each location's count on one pickleball page and then states the citywide total in prose, and the parts add up to the whole. Apex publishes a table with a column each for indoor or outdoor, lights and court count. Cary states nothing centrally and everything locally, in the features list of each facility's page. Mecklenburg County states no count at all. It lists individual numbered courts, split between the ones you can reserve and the ones that are always open play, so Charlotte's counts are the number of distinct court numbers the county names at each park.

Five other towns were assessed and declined. Durham publishes a tennis and pickleball page with two tables. The second, headed Pickleball Court Information, contains exactly one row: Piney Wood Park, twelve courts, twelve lighted. The first gives four more parks a Yes for pickleball lines and no count at all. Winston-Salem is the mirror image: seven court locations, a full street address and postcode for every one, and not a single court count. Greensboro names three parks with outdoor courts open dawn until dusk, plus indoor courts at the Greensboro Sportsplex at $5 a drop-in, with no counts and no addresses. Holly Springs states four outdoor courts at the North Main Athletic Complex, and indoor open play at the W.E. Hunt Center with "up to three nets", which is one countable venue where three are needed. Wake Forest reconciles at 18 active courts, but three of its four entries are at Flaherty Park.

Fayetteville, Wilmington, Asheville, Chapel Hill, Concord and Gastonia have not been looked at. Their absence carries no information about their courts.

No North Carolina operator publishes a weather closure policy for a pickleball court, so this page says nothing about summer heat, humidity or storms. What operators do state is the two things that decide whether a court is usable outside a summer afternoon: whether it is lit, and whether there is anywhere indoors to go.

Raleigh and Apex state lighting for every location. Nine of Raleigh's eleven are lit, on a timer to 10 p.m. Fred Fletcher Park and Southgate Park are marked unlit and are daylight only. Four of Apex's five are lit, three of them running 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. year round. Cary states it for one of its three. Mecklenburg County states it for none of its five, so all 29 Charlotte courts read "not stated". That is a gap in publishing rather than evidence of darkness, but it leaves more than a quarter of the courts in this state without an answer to the most seasonal question there is.

Where lighting is stated, the most useful fact is an inversion. The largest pickleball site in Apex is Pleasant Park, with six courts, and it is the one unlit site in that town. Its published court hours are "Sunrise to 30 minutes after Sunset". From November to February the biggest concentration of courts in Apex shuts in mid afternoon while the smaller lit sites run for another six hours.

Indoors, the published picture is close to bare and the real one is not. There are four indoor pickleball courts in North Carolina, all at the John M. Brown Community Center in Apex, restricted to players aged 55 and over during designated open gym hours. That is not because indoor pickleball is rare here. It is because indoor programmes are published as programmes rather than as facilities. Raleigh Parks runs indoor open play at thirteen community centres at $3 a session or $15 for a four-month pass, with nets and balls provided, and publishes no court count for any of the thirteen gyms. Cary rents three indoor courts at Middle Creek Community Center at $10 an hour, on a timetable that shortens from November to February, and publishes no street address for the building. Greensboro runs indoor drop-in at its Sportsplex, Monday to Friday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., at $5 or $30 for a ten-visit card.

Sanderford Road Park in south-east Raleigh is the largest pickleball site in the state: ten permanent courts, all lit. That is nearly a quarter of Raleigh's 44 courts on one site, and more than the whole of Cary's provision. It is one of only three Raleigh locations the city describes as permanent pickleball courts rather than lines painted over tennis.

Clarks Creek Park in north Charlotte is the second largest at eight, and it is the best place in the state to turn up without a booking. Three of its eight courts are permanently open play, more than any other park in Mecklenburg County keeps back.

The John M. Brown Community Center in Apex holds the only indoor pickleball courts in North Carolina. Four of them, marked Indoor and lit in the town's own table, available only for ages 55 and over during designated open gym hours. If you are under 55 this is not a venue, it is a fact about the state.

Pleasant Park in Apex publishes live court occupancy, so you can see whether its six courts are busy before you get in the car. The same park has no lights and closes thirty minutes after sunset.

Freedom Park in Charlotte numbers its pickleball courts 11 to 16, because courts 1 to 10 at the same park are tennis, listed separately on the same page. Mecklenburg runs one series across both sports at that site rather than restarting it, so you can read the conversion straight out of the court numbers.

Baileywick Park in north Raleigh is the only place in the set with covered courts. Its page lists Court A as covered and Court B as covered centre, and schedules pickleball on both. Two cautions travel with that. Court A was closed for repairs when the page was last checked, with no reopening date. And Baileywick is the venue where Raleigh's own two inventories disagree, the pickleball page saying six courts and the city's GIS layer four.

Then the notable absence. The Town of Cary states that Cary Tennis Park has four lighted pickleball courts. It is the best-known racquet facility in the region, it has 32 championship tennis courts including seven covered, and it hosts the Professional Pickleball Association tour. It appears nowhere on this site, because across its facility page, its pickleball page and its court reservations page the Town prints no street address for it.

Wake Forest has published a dated timeline, and it is the clearest account of how this happened anywhere in the state. Pickleball began there in 2009 on one chalked tennis court. In 2013 a group of citizens approached the town asking for space, initially only that lines be taped on a gym floor. In 2014 the town resurfaced the Flaherty Park tennis courts and added eight pickleball courts to them for shared use, and installed four at Wake Forest Middle School. In 2015 it resurfaced the tennis courts at Heritage High School and installed six shared-use courts. In 2016 it replaced the gym floor at Flaherty Park Community Center and added three courts to it. In 2017 it opened the Flaherty Park Pickleball Courts, four outdoor, lighted and dedicated. In 2019 it added three more at the new Joyner Park Community Center. In 2022 a $24.4 million parks and recreation bond passed, including a Multipurpose Sports Complex to house dedicated pickleball courts.

The more valuable part of that timeline is the subtraction. The four courts at Wake Forest Middle School are, in the town's own words, no longer in use. The six at Heritage High School were removed once the dedicated courts were installed. The town states it has installed 32 courts since 2013 and currently offers 18 active ones. Listing sites only ever count upwards, because nobody edits a listing to remove something.

The same conversion shows in the towns published here. In Raleigh, 22 of the 44 outdoor courts are permanent pickleball courts at three sites, and the other 22 are lines painted over tennis at six parks, over basketball at Southgate and over shared hard courts at Baileywick. In Cary, Ed Yerha Park is the town's designated home of outdoor pickleball and was formerly White Oak Park, renamed for a councilmember who served from 2012 to 2022, and the town's open data still carries the old name on the same map point.

What is under way right now is smaller and more concrete. Raleigh began a lighting upgrade at North Hills Park on 24 August 2026, closing the courts; daytime play reopened on 2 September with completion targeted for 8 September. Baileywick Park's Pavilion-Court A was closed for repairs on 24 August 2026 with no reopening date. And twelve courts in Charlotte are waiting on a definition rather than on construction: Mecklenburg County lists six "hybrid" courts each at Latta Park and Tuckaseegee Park under a heading it never explains.

So North Carolina's public pickleball is roughly half converted tennis and basketball surfaces and half purpose-built courts, the purpose-built share is growing, and at least one town has a bond-funded complex coming. The true statewide count is a moving number nobody publishes.