On June 19, 2025, a crowd gathered on Doubletree Road to watch Oak Park Pickleball Ambassador Steven Hoffman take an overhead shot on one of six brand-new courts. It was the kind of moment that gets a write-up in The Acorn and then gets forgotten within a season, except this one had been more than seven years in the making. What opened that day wasn't just a recreational upgrade. It was the end of a fight that split the neighborhood over shared court time, decibel levels, and whose sport actually belonged at Deerhill Park.
The headline most residents remember is simple: tennis lost, pickleball won. The more useful story, and the one that actually matters if you live near a park in Oak Park or you're trying to figure out where to play this weekend, is what happened to the tennis players who used to have a claim on those two courts, and how the district decided who got what.
The Five-Hour Vote That Started It
Deerhill Park's two tennis courts had been operating as a shared tennis-pickleball facility for years, with a rotating system of colored lines and portable nets that worked about as well as that setup usually does anywhere in the country. By the fall of 2023, the Rancho Simi Recreation and Park District board was ready to settle it. After a five-hour meeting, the board voted 4-1 to convert the courts into a dedicated six-court pickleball complex, with board vice chair Elaine Freeman casting the lone dissenting vote. The debate had gotten personal enough by then that board member Ed Abele felt the need to say out loud that "tennis and pickleball are sports and recreational activities and it shouldn't come to a point where there's this tension."
That vote wasn't the end of it. A Municipal Advisory Council request for further review pushed a second confirming vote to November, and it wasn't until a February 2024 MAC meeting that residents saw an actual design. Community members had been asking for this for five years by that point, according to district staff.
What the Two-Week Study Actually Found
The strongest argument for full conversion wasn't noise or popularity in the abstract. It was a usage study the district ran over two weeks, tracking court activity at Deerhill alongside tennis-specific counts at Mae Boyar and Indian Springs parks. The results were lopsided: only 12 of 220 recorded instances at Deerhill involved tennis players. Indian Springs, by contrast, showed the heaviest tennis demand, with players waiting for a court in only two instances. Mae Boyar had the most open tennis availability of the three.
That study is the reason a resident who still wants to play tennis in Oak Park should think of Mae Boyar and Indian Springs, not Deerhill, as the default courts now. The conversion didn't eliminate tennis from the neighborhood. It relocated the sport to where the data showed people were actually playing it, and left the busiest, most contested courts to the sport that was already dominating them.
The Engineering Behind 43 Decibels
The design phase surfaced a number that tells you how seriously the district treated the noise complaints from neighbors on Heatherview Drive and nearby streets. The finished complex uses 12-foot chain link fencing lined with sound panels approved by USA Pickleball, engineered to cut the average noise level from the courts from 75 decibels down to 43. For comparison, tennis on the same courts registers around 45 decibels, and ordinary traffic on Deerhill Road runs between 60 and 70 decibels. As district engineer Nakaoka put it during the design unveiling, the cars driving past will be louder than the pickleball games once the panels went in.
The project also grew in cost as it moved from proposal to completion. The board's original 2023 estimate was $200,000 for converting the existing shared courts. By the June 2025 opening, the final price tag, which included landscaping upgrades, a second entrance for safety, and the sound mitigation work, came in at $370,000. For a neighborhood where recreation projects rarely make headlines, that's a meaningful jump, and it's worth knowing if you're wondering why a two-court conversion took the better part of a decade.
Six Courts Later, Where Everyone Actually Plays
Deerhill didn't open in a vacuum. The same year saw a four-court complex open at Westlake Village Community Park next to the YMCA on Thousand Oaks Boulevard, along with a new large private pickleball club in Newbury Park. Add in the existing public courts at Rancho Conejo Playfields in Thousand Oaks and De Anza Park in Calabasas, and the Rancho Simi Recreation and Park District now counts 32 public pickleball courts across its service area, including the six new Oak Park courts and 26 more in Simi Valley.
The growth in demand that justified all of this isn't hypothetical. Hoffman himself organized a Cinco de Mayo evening event in 2023, two years before the new courts opened, that drew 96 players, roughly double the group's normal turnout. That kind of jump is what pushed a shared, low-stakes recreational amenity into a $370,000 capital project with its own advisory council debate.
If You're Heading Over
The new complex sits at 6700 Doubletree Road, on the same 14-acre parcel as Deerhill's soccer field, softball field, and playground. The district considers the existing 76 parking stalls adequate for the added pickleball traffic, though anyone who has tried to find a spot on a Saturday morning at a popular local park knows "adequate" can still mean circling the lot once or twice.
Court hours run 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily, with lessons offered on a set schedule that includes Thursday mornings, Thursday evenings, and Saturday mornings. Prime open-play windows tend to run 8 to 11 a.m. and 4 to 8 p.m., which lines up with what regular players report elsewhere: weekday mornings and mid-afternoons are the best bet if you want a court without much of a wait. Courts are free, lit for evening play, and don't take reservations, so it's first-come for open play outside of scheduled lesson blocks.
If competitive tennis is more your speed, Indian Springs and Mae Boyar are the two courts in the neighborhood that never got pulled into the pickleball conversation, and based on the district's own usage data, Mae Boyar is currently the easier place to find an open court.
The real change at Deerhill Park wasn't more recreation capacity showing up out of nowhere. It was seven years of a genuinely divided community landing on an answer: pickleball gets the dedicated courts it had already claimed by usage, tennis moves to the two parks where it was already thriving, and everyone gets sound engineering good enough that the traffic on Deerhill Road is now the louder neighbor.
Curious what it's actually like to live within earshot of a place like Deerhill Park, or which streets in Oak Park sit closest to courts, trails, and the handful of shops at Kanan and Lindero Canyon? Shari Schiff Team spends as much time walking these parks as showing homes near them, and we're glad to talk through what a given block actually sounds and feels like on a Saturday.
