FEATURE
Barnes Tennis Center Prepares to Take Center Stage for Nationals
Barnes has started preparations for the tournament, which takes place Nov. 15-23.
by DREW SILVERMAN
At its core, pickleball is all about relationships.
The competition and the exercise are definite draws, but millions of Americans play pickleball for the social element— the opportunity to spend time with buddies while also meeting new people and making new friends.
In a sense, the inner workings of the pickleball community are all about relationships as well. Take, for example, the scene in San Diego.
“ We work closely with Sports San Diego, which is the sports arm of the local tourism marketing district,” said Jesse Steinberg, the chief operating officer of Youth Tennis San Diego( YTSD), a nonprofit aimed at providing free access to tennis, pickleball and all racket sports for local youth.“ Our goal is to bring big sporting events to San Diego.”
YTSD owns and operates the Barnes Tennis Center, a sprawling 16.5-acre facility that, thanks to the hard work of Steinberg and many others, will host the 2025 USA Pickleball National Championships from Nov. 15-23.
“ There’ s been a lot of growth locally in the pickleball community,” said Steinberg, a San Diego native.“ As we wanted to further highlight San Diego as a pickleball destination and especially Barnes in how we’ ve grown from a tennis facility to a racket sport facility, this just made a lot of sense.”
The Barnes Tennis Center’ s journey to hosting Nationals began in mid-2024, when Sports San Diego committed to hosting a USA Pickleball Golden Ticket event— a qualifying tournament for Nationals— at the facility in January 2025. Barnes increased its pickleball presence from 19 permanently dedicated courts to 29 for that event— 25 competition courts and four practice courts. Steinberg considered the Golden Ticket tournament a rousing success.
However, perhaps just as important as the on-court competition that week were the relationships that formed. Sports San Diego and USA Pickleball held a meeting and agreed that Barnes Tennis Center should bid to host the 2025 Nationals as part of the upcoming request-for-proposal( RFP) process.
“ We were obviously interested,” Steinberg said, adding that“ USA Pickleball was incredibly easy and nice to work with” at the Golden Ticket event and that continuing to build the relationship at Nationals was basically a no-brainer.
“ To work with a fellow event producer in USA Pickleball was really, really nice. We speak the same language. It was a really good fit from the start.”
The Barnes Tennis Center team worked closely with that of Sports San Diego during the RFP process. In their proposal, they highlighted the benefits of San Diego as a whole, including the growth of the local pickleball
50 TO SUBSCRIBE, CALL 412.914.8294 OR GO TO PICKLEBALLMAGAZINE. COM