Myrtle Beach's Pickleball Shortage Has a Fix. It's Not Free, and It's Not the City's.

Show up to Crabtree Memorial Gym in the Market Common on a Tuesday morning and you'll understand the problem before anyone explains it to you. Four indoor courts, permanent lines, no fee, and by 9 a.m. there's already a rotation going because more people showed up than the courts can hold. Drive fifteen minutes to the Clair Chapin Epps Family YMCA next to Del Webb Myrtle Beach and the story repeats itself in a two-hour window that closes whether your game is finished or not.

This has been the pattern for years, and it hasn't changed. What has changed is who's building the fix, and that distinction is going to matter to your wallet more than anyone's marketing copy is letting on.

The Free Courts Haven't Moved

Myrtle Beach's existing pickleball infrastructure is almost entirely public, almost entirely free, and almost entirely unchanged from what it looked like two or three years ago. Crabtree Memorial Gym in the Market Common still runs four free indoor courts, bring your own net. Midway Memorial Park at 19th Avenue South and Kings Highway still has its ten outdoor courts lit for night play, split between beginner-friendly courts and a more competitive intermediate-to-advanced side. The John T. Rhodes Myrtle Beach Sports Center still charges a one-time fee for four indoor hard courts with no reservations, which is a strange number to sit with once you know the building itself was designed with room to host up to 32 pickleball courts for tournaments and conventions. The demand exists. The daily-use supply is a fraction of what the building can technically hold.

A Myrtle Beach resident named Genie Leonard put the frustration plainly when the city was first weighing whether to do anything about it: she's part of the YMCA, she said, but the group only gets a two-hour window twice a week, and even then you sit and wait and maybe get through two games. Ricardo Orencia, 81, has been playing since around 2008, not long after he moved to the area, and even he described the demand as something that keeps building rather than leveling off.

None of that has been solved by adding more free courts. It's being solved, if it's solved at all, by someone else's business plan.

Two Cities, Two Very Different Bets

Here's the part that gets lost in every "pickleball is booming" post: Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach, sitting on the same stretch of coast dealing with the same overcrowded courts, chose opposite ways to expand.

North Myrtle Beach broke ground in October 2025 on the Central Park Pickleball Complex off Possum Trot Road, directly across from the J. Bryan Floyd Community Center. It's a $6.5 million project, city-funded, adding 15 courts including a covered championship court, a small clubhouse, restrooms, and lawn seating for spectators. Construction was still underway as of spring 2026. When it opens, it will sit alongside the city's existing four free outdoor courts at 1400 Outrigger Road, which have never charged non-members anything to walk on. North Myrtle Beach owns this asset outright. It's tax-funded infrastructure, and the city's own parks page still lists resident indoor session rates as low as two dollars a day.

Myrtle Beach took the other route. In January 2025, the city council authorized a letter of intent with a private company called The PicklePort, giving it up to 180 days to evaluate a six-acre site at 900 Harrelson Boulevard, next to Whispering Pines Golf Club and directly across from Myrtle Beach International Airport. Assistant City Manager Brian Tucker explained the arrangement simply at the time: the founder came to the city, not the other way around, and the city recognized it had a pickleball community large enough to justify the demand. The land itself has a longer backstory. The city picked it up in the mid-1990s as former golf course property tied to the old Air Force base, and it's been sitting mostly dormant since.

What's rising there now isn't public parks infrastructure. It's a private facility on a 20-year lease, renewable every five years, built around a membership model rather than a first-come, first-served one. The plan calls for 12 climate-controlled indoor courts, four covered outdoor courts, two tournament courts with grandstand seating, a pro shop, locker rooms, and a snack bar selling coffee and smoothies. Managing partner Dwight Hunsicker has called it a chance to finally satisfy the demand the free courts can't keep up with. The most recent target for opening sits in the third quarter of 2026, a window that closes at the end of this month. If that timeline holds, doors could open within weeks. If it slips, the wait carries into fall.

That's the gap most coverage skips past. One city built its own asset and kept it free. The other leased public land to a private operator, and whatever opens on Harrelson Boulevard is going to come with a price tag the Crabtree and Midway Park regulars have never had to think about.

What a Private Court Actually Costs Right Now

Nobody in Myrtle Beach has paid to play at The PicklePort yet, because it isn't open. But there's already a working preview of what a privately built, membership-driven facility on the Grand Strand actually charges, and it's useful to look at before assuming the new courts will feel like the old ones.

Pin Point Indoor Pickleball & Golf opened in Little River in early 2026, about a 47,000-square-foot building with nine professional courts on cushioned CushionX flooring, seven golf simulator bays, and a full bar and restaurant upstairs. Open play runs seven days a week at fifteen dollars for a two-hour non-member session. If you want a court to yourselves without sharing, a full reservation runs fifty dollars an hour. Pin Point already runs organized leagues, including one built around a bracket of Myrtle Beach firefighters, and it's become the reference point for what a well-funded private court in this market actually costs to use.

If The PicklePort follows anything close to that pricing structure, the math for a Myrtle Beach player changes noticeably. A weekly two-hour session that costs nothing at Crabtree could run fifteen dollars at a comparable private facility, and a reserved court that was never an option at Midway Park could cost fifty dollars an hour. That's not a criticism of the business model. Climate control, cushioned flooring, and a snack bar cost money to run. It's just the honest math nobody selling the "boom" story tends to walk through.

What This Actually Changes for Your Weekly Game

For now, nothing at Crabtree, Midway Park, or the YMCA changes. Those courts stay free, they stay crowded, and the wait culture Genie Leonard described is still the reality most mornings and evenings. If your game depends on getting a reliable court without paying for it, that's still the honest answer heading into fall.

What's worth watching is Harrelson Boulevard. If The PicklePort opens within its stated Q3 2026 window, Myrtle Beach gets its first large-scale indoor facility built specifically for the sport, sitting on public land but run as a private, fee-based operation. It will likely take pressure off the free courts simply by giving serious players somewhere else to go, the same way Pin Point has already pulled some northern Grand Strand traffic away from the J. Bryan Floyd courts. But it won't replace the free option. It sits alongside it, at a different price point, for a different kind of player.

Two cities, two different answers to the same overcrowded courts. One built and kept its expansion free. The other leased the land and let a private company set the price. If you've been waiting your turn at Crabtree or Midway Park, that difference is about to become very real, and very specific to which side of the county line you're standing on.

If you're weighing what any of this means for a home search near the courts you actually use, or just want a local's read on how the Grand Strand keeps changing, Nick Paolozzi at Life in Myrtle Beach is worth a call. Start Your Life at the Beach.