Hinsdale's Paddle Boom: Why 800 Members Now Play Where 300 Did in 2019

Pickleball gets the national headlines. In Hinsdale, the sport that actually filled up the parks department's calendar this decade is platform tennis, and the numbers say something the pickleball story doesn't: this wasn't a fad that arrived with a portable net and a hashtag. It was built, court by court, donor by donor, over almost forty years.

The Hinsdale Platform Tennis Association counted roughly 300 members in 2019. Today that number sits at 800, according to a Hinsdalean report from January 2026. Half of those members live in Hinsdale. The other half drive in from surrounding towns to play on courts the village still classifies, officially, as public.

How Two Courts Became Ten

Paddle first showed up in Hinsdale in the 1970s, and only at a private golf club. A donation in the late 1980s brought two courts to a public park, and for a while that was enough. It stopped being enough once participation crossed 200 players. Court time had to be rationed. A group of regulars started showing up at village meetings to make the case for more space.

By 2004 that advocacy turned into construction. A local architect who didn't even play paddle volunteered to design the expansion pro bono. The chair of the village's parks commission organized more than 90 donors who contributed a combined $180,000, enough to fund four new courts. The project needed sign-off at three levels of village government, and it passed each vote in large part because players packed the meeting rooms to testify.

That pattern repeated itself twenty years later. In 2024, HPTA board member Kevin Parks told the Hinsdale Village Board the group wanted to add two more courts at Katherine Legge Memorial Park, on top of the six it already had. Trustees approved the proposal, construction started the following year, and Courts 7 and 8 at the Bill O'Brien Platform Tennis Center opened on September 5, 2025. HPTA president Rick Larson later confirmed the club covered the full cost itself.

"We also collected enough money to pay for the two new courts without an assessment to the members," Larson said.

That's the detail that separates Hinsdale's paddle growth from a typical recreation trend story. The courts didn't get built because a grant came through or because the village budgeted for them outright. They got built because members kept fundraising for four decades, the same volunteer instinct that funded the 2004 expansion showing up again in 2025.

Ten Courts, One Public Program

The math now works out to eight courts at KLM Park and two at Burns Field Park, all managed by the Hinsdale Platform Tennis Association rather than the village directly. That handoff happened in 2019, when HPTA took over day-to-day operations under a new agreement that includes a $30,000 annual subsidy from the village, split between general support and facility maintenance, with HPTA matching part of that upkeep cost itself.

The KLM hub also includes the Bill O'Brien Platform Tennis Center, renamed for the man widely credited as the sport's local founding figure. Longtime HPTA leader Marty Brennan called O'Brien "the founding father of paddle in this part of Chicago" when the center was dedicated, crediting his leadership with getting the local program off the ground in the first place.

None of that infrastructure comes with country-club pricing. Hinsdale residents pay $250 a year for an individual membership and $300 for a family membership, rates Larson describes as the lowest around. Non-residents pay more, but the courts stay open to the public regardless of membership status.

"We can say that we have the finest public facility in Chicagoland and one of the finest in the country," Larson said. "It's really nice to have this public alternative to the country club."

What's Actually Happening on the Courts This Fall

Paddle traditionally runs as a fall-through-spring sport, built around the cold months when platform courts, heated by the players' own movement and insulated less by wind, stay playable long after outdoor tennis shuts down. Hinsdale's program has pushed that further, with members now playing straight through summer as well.

The fall calendar is already set. Women's Local beginner and advanced-beginner drills, taught by head pro Mary Doten's staff, start September 17, running Tuesday afternoons with Thursday morning match play against local clubs. No membership is required to join a beginner drill, only a willingness to show up. Doten's own credentials carry weight here. She's a six-time Women's National Champion, and she's the same coach who organized the club's first beginner clinics back when the program had barely 100 players.

For members ready to compete, HPTA sponsors seven women's teams and eighteen men's travel teams in the Chicago Platform Tennis League, spanning skill levels from total beginners to advanced players. Head pro Matt Lemery runs additional clinics and academy sessions for players of any age looking to pick up the sport for the first time.

HPTA board member Kelly Kelly picked up paddle during COVID after years of playing tennis socially, and she hasn't gone back.

"I gave up tennis. I love paddle so much," Kelly said.

She's also quick to push back on the idea that the sport requires any particular athletic pedigree.

"You don't have to be a D-I athlete to come out and play," Kelly said. "We get a lot of people who come out and it's addicting, and they get the bug and they are there for as long as their body holds up."

Why the Comparison to Pickleball Doesn't Quite Hold

National pickleball coverage tends to center on speed: a sport that spread fast because it required almost nothing, a repainted tennis court and a folding net. Hinsdale's paddle boom moved on a different timeline entirely. It took a decade of volunteer coaches bringing beginners out each September before the two original courts became a bottleneck. It took another push, and ninety donors, to fund four more courts in 2004. It took a full renegotiation of the village agreement in 2019 to hand daily management to the people who actually run the leagues. And it took one more fundraising cycle to open Courts 7 and 8 without asking existing members to cover the bill.

That's not the profile of a fad. It's the profile of a public amenity that a community kept choosing to reinvest in, long before it had ten courts or 800 members to show for it.

If you're curious what that looks like in person, here's where to start:

• Katherine Legge Memorial Park, 5901 S. County Line Road, has eight courts and the Bill O'Brien Platform Tennis Center
• Burns Field Park, 304 N. Vine Street, has two additional courts
• Women's Local beginner drills begin September 17 and don't require membership
• Resident memberships run $250 individual, $300 family, through Hinsdale Paddle's online registration
• League play, travel teams, and lessons are managed through the Village of Hinsdale's platform tennis page

Whether you end up on Court 3 at KLM this winter or not, it's worth knowing that the courts your neighbors are playing on didn't appear because a trend arrived. They're there because people who lived here decided, more than once, to build something and keep paying for it themselves.

If you're weighing a move to a town where residents show up to fund their own recreation courts twice over, Second City Agents knows Hinsdale's neighborhoods block by block. Schedule a free market consultation and let's talk about what life here actually looks like, on and off the court.