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ARTICLE. From Rick Southern and the Coastside Pickleball group on March 3rd, 2026.
- Come Watch! PB tournament at Cunha Intermediate on Sunday, March 8th, 2026 at 8:30AM, with approximately 48 participants.
- Coastside Pickleball Tournament Donations: to help us maintain and improve our pickleball facilities, support community programs.
- Boys and Girls Club of the Coastside’s Donation portal is tax deductible. Choose: “Area of Greatest Need” and let Coastside Pickleball know you donated to BCGG: southernrick@yahoo.com.
The three Cunha tennis/pickleball (PB) courts are the only public outdoor PB courts in Half Moon Bay. They are not ideal in that they are striped for PB, tennis, basketball and volleyball. A little confusing! There are 2 indoor courts set up at Ted Adcock 4 days a week for 3 hour sessions which get unmercifully crowded.
The most westerly Cunha court used to be accessible by the public 24/7 by walking down a path between the Boys and Girls Club of the Coastside’s (BGCC) Event Center and Bike Works. It was closed during Covid and never reopened to the public.
During the period after Covid, until about a year ago, numerous pickleball players, including former Cabrillo Unified School District (CUSD) employees, a teacher and a school board member worked for several years meeting with CUSD and BGCC to get the courts re-opened without success.
Last April, Dave Houston and I took it upon ourselves to re-engage with CUSD and BGCC to reignite discussion. We were fortunate in that there was a new BGCC Director, Mark Newton and a new CUSD Superintendent, Dr. Ramon Ramirez who were both more receptive.
Last December, the locks were taken off the PB courts and they were reopened to the public any time, any day that school is not in session.
In exchange, we promised to upgrade the courts.
This includes professionally cleaning the courts (which we have done), replacing the damaged and missing windscreens before tennis season starts in March. After tennis season is over, we will repaint and resurface Court #1 so it will be transformed into four new PB courts (see below).
The cleaning of the PB courts cost $1,320, done and paid for with donations from the PB community.
The new windscreens (professional and similar to the ones going up at Stanford’s new professional tennis facility) cost $7,400. Through, mainly, $50-$100 donations from the PB community, and through the $60 admission fee to participate in the Sunday, March 8th, 2026 tournament, we have raised the $7,400. I will be presenting CUSD a check this week to pay for the new windscreen installation, $7400.
The last major endeavor is the splitting of the court, adding benches, new PB nets, paddle racks, vinyl court resurfacing, a new tennis net and replacing the in ground posts meant for volleyball.
This will cost will be 40,000 and will be needed in the Next Couple Months
(after tennis season)
Donations.
This can be offset if people would like to make a tax deductible donation to BGCC with notification that the funds will be used to pay for this project.
We have agreed to schedule the work on courts 1 and 2 as soon as school lets out for the summer.
The cost of resurfacing and repainting the courts and converting court 1 into 4 new PB courts will run about $40,000.
We welcome any large tax deductible donations of $1,000 or more made out to CUSD which should be sent to me to combine with our other funds to pay the bill. Yes, we need $40,000 in the next couple of months. Donations can be made through transferring stock, RMD checks etc but for tax deductible purposes, I promised they would be $1000 or greater to keep the admin burden low for the school.
Other people heavily involved in this effort are:
- Manolo Fernandez for creating and hosting the coastsidepickelball.org website.
- David Houston and Evan Campodonico, whose company DH Distributors is one of the premier tennis/PB facility companies in No. Cal, and is doing all of the work on the courts.
- Mark Hofmann who is in charge of organizing and running the March 8th, 2026 PB tournament.
- Michael Brown who is doing his best to corporate fundraise.
That’s it in a nutshell. Whatever funds we don’t raise, I’ll contribute to make this happen. The PB community is excited to have a public place to play. The school is excited to have some wonderfully upgraded facilities at 0 cost. And BGCC is pleased to have deferred maintenance handled at no cost to them. So win, win, win.
~ Rick Southern, Coastside Pickleball
Author: mdrag
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