About 130 people attend project milestone

By Sam Richards

Staff writer

Monday, November 24 (2:00 p.m.): It was a gathering Bill Dougherty never would have predicted he would attend.

On Friday morning, just south of the Event Center, Dougherty ‒ the founder in 2010 of the Rossmoor Pickleball Club, and its first president ‒ wielded a traditional gold shovel at the groundbreaking ceremony for Rossmoor’s pickleball building.

“The way the club grew so fast, it’s really something,” said Dougherty, who moved to Lincoln about four years ago, in an interview. “Everything is so socialized now, which makes it fun for everyone.”

Doughtery was one of approximately 130 people who attended the 25-minute ceremony,  many of them former or current members of the Rossmoor Pickleball Club.

“I never thought it would happen!” club member Katie Fox shouted to a friend.

Friday’s groundbreaking was the latest, and perhaps most important thus far, milestone for the pickleball building, its earliest planning stages beginning almost seven years ago. The RWC Board in August approved spending almost $4.5 million for this “hybrid” indoor-outdoor pickleball courts building, which will be home to six courts plus spectator bleachers.

Plans are for the building’s roof to support solar panels that will generate electricity, formally “Phase 3” of Rossmoor’s ongoing program to curtail the need to buy outside-generated electricity.

Although several individuals ‒ “pioneers” Doughtery, Dick and Lynne Hildebrand and Addie Mattox, and latter-day champions Frank Reynolds and Carol Cerioni, among them ‒ were lauded by name on Friday, most of Friday’s speakers emphasized that it was Rossmoor’s collective will that got the building project this far.

“It takes a village, the Rossmoor community, to get to this point,” current RWC Board President Leanne Hamaji told the gathering. “It was staying calm, professional, courteous in the face of opposition.”

Much of that opposition was from people who live near the building site who contended that noise from the thwack of paddles striking balls would be disruptive enough to negatively affect quality of life.

In response, RWC sponsored sound studies that indicated the noise could be largely abated, especially if the courts were mostly enclosed.

Rossmoor General Manager Jeff Matheson told the crowd that the RWC Board was intent on the pickleball structure being a “good neighbor.”

“You will hear the voices, hear the paddles,” and motioning with his hand toward houses across the 18th fairway from construction, “but they won’t hear it.”

When the structure is completed ‒ expected in April or May 2026, weather permitting ‒ Rossmoor will have another amenity to be proud of, Matheson said.

“Pickleball has just kept growing and growing, and clearly there was demand for more courts in Rossmoor,” he said. “The old courts (at Creekside) were meant to be temporary ‒ eight years is temporary, right?”

The new building is considered by Rossmoor leaders and residents to be not only an amenity but a marketing asset. A number of people, Fox included, have said they know people drawn to buy a home in Rossmoor specifically because of pickleball.

“My friends who were on the fence about moving to Rossmoor, now I can tell them this is really happening,” Fox said.