Down 6-0 after the first set, Deso Borov of Talis Park and his partner Jerome Moenter found their footing. They took the second set 6-0 right back, forcing a ten-point match tiebreak under the lights at Pelican Bay's tennis complex. Arnas Sabonis, Pelican Bay's home pro, and his partner for the night, Quail West's Diego Motivar, held on until the tiebreak slipped away 10-8. It was April 2026, the finals of the Germain BMW of Naples Pro Tennis League, and Pelican Bay was hosting the event for the first time in its history.
"Having it for the first time and having our pro play for the title for members to root for is incredible," Maury Bozman, Pelican Bay's director of community center and racquets, told the crowd that gathered courtside. The turnout mattered as much as the tennis. Fans from inside and outside the community showed up to watch a mixed bill of local club pros, including Gabby Mateus of Bay Colony Tennis Club, compete on Pelican Bay's own courts.
If you've lived in Pelican Bay for a while, that scene might not have surprised you. What might surprise you is the timeline behind it. Pelican Bay's tennis program had already been named the best in the country eight months before those courts hosted their first pro league final, and the recognition arrived while the neighborhood's newest tennis project was still walled off behind construction fencing.
A National Award for a Program Still Mid-Renovation
In August 2025, Bozman stood on the grounds of the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in New York, during the U.S. Open, to accept the 2025 U.S. Tennis Association National Outstanding Facility Award on Pelican Bay's behalf. It was the second time in his career he'd led an organization to that recognition. Standing alongside him were Neal Lewis, chair of Pelican Bay's Racquets Advisory Group, and Todd Carlson, USTA's Director of Tennis Venue Services.
The award wasn't for a building. Pelican Bay's private, member-facing racquets program runs across two complexes, North Tennis and South Tennis, totaling 18 Har-Tru clay courts and serving more than 4,500 active tennis members. The judging criteria rewarded what the program had built over years: a four-pillar structure of Learn, Practice, Connect, and Compete, more than 200 new players welcomed through instructional programs since 2020, and one of the largest Cardio Tennis programs in the region, running up to eight weekly classes in season. A coaching staff that includes former touring pro Toni Novack, doubles specialist Todd Watkins, tennis professional Mike Kopp, and FGCU men's tennis head coach Josh Molino runs the clinics and leagues that keep members fielding USTA and CTA traveling teams year-round.
"We are proud to be recognized on a national stage for our commitment to tennis," Bozman said at the time. "From our robust instructional programs to our professional coaching staff and the incredible support of our 4,500 active tennis members, Pelican Bay continues to be a place where players of all ages and skill levels can thrive."
That was the private side of the story. The other half was still under construction.
The Park Nobody Had Touched Since 1994
A few miles from the beach club pavilions, on Vanderbilt Beach Road, sits Pelican Bay Community Park. Collier County has owned the 15-acre park since 1994, when developer WCI deeded it to the county as part of an agreement that let WCI build more densely inside the 6,500-home community. The park's tennis courts and racquetball courts hadn't been meaningfully updated since. Residents who wanted to play pickleball had been making do on converted racquetball courts, hard on the knees, or driving to Veterans Community Park or East Naples Community Park, the county facility that hosts the US Open Pickleball Championships.
Two residents, Edie Verbesky and Chris O'Sullivan, had been pushing for change for years before anyone listened. "We were the first ones to stand up in a meeting seven years ago and got booted out, but we persevered," Verbesky said. O'Sullivan put it more plainly: "We kept telling them every other community had pickleball and we didn't have it. We gave them everything they needed to progress."
The Pelican Bay Foundation first offered to buy the park outright eight years before construction started. The county said no. Around 2021, after nearby residents raised concerns about court noise, the Foundation went back to the drawing board with a different approach: keep the county as landowner, take over management and pay for the upgrades. In February 2024, the Foundation and the Collier County Board of County Commissioners approved an amendment guaranteeing that half of any new pickleball courts would stay open to the general public, not just Pelican Bay residents. Two months later the Foundation took over tennis court concessions and management from the prior vendor, a deal the commissioners formalized that August under a 30-year land lease.
Groundbreaking came on December 6, 2024. About 100 pickleball and tennis players showed up to watch officials from the Foundation and Collier County Parks & Recreation break ground alongside the project team: Owen Ames Kimball, Ritzman Courts, Peninsula Engineering, and Parker Mudgett Smith Architects. Foundation President Tony D'Errico called it a model the county was watching closely. "This wouldn't be possible without our partnership with Collier County, which enabled the foundation to use this land to build this facility in a unique and innovative partnership that really is a pioneer in the area," he said, adding that county officials were treating it as "a test case" for future public-private park deals elsewhere in Collier County.
The Foundation spent roughly $6 million of its own money on the work: refreshing six existing Har-Tru courts, adding two brand-new ones for a total of eight lighted, sub-irrigated HydroCourts, and building 20 Novacrylic pickleball courts split evenly between Foundation members and the public. Sound mitigation went in alongside the courts, including two new fountains in the pond between the park and the neighboring Breakwater condos and a 12-foot concrete wall shielding the Avalon condos from the softball field side. Parking expanded to 109 spaces. After a construction timeline that slipped from an original summer 2025 target, the courts opened to play in December 2025.
One Person, Two Wins
The connective tissue in both stories is the same. Bozman, the man who accepted a national award for the program's instructional depth, is also the person who spent 2024 and 2025 pushing the county park project across the finish line. Writing about the finished facility earlier this year, he described the transformation in blunt terms: the grant and improvements let the Foundation "modernize a tired facility from the 90's to a tennis destination for all ages, along with locals and tourists alike."
That framing matters if you live here and haven't set foot on the Community Park courts recently. What used to be a quietly aging county facility is now, by design, open to people who have never set foot inside Pelican Bay's gates. A Community Park pickleball membership runs $95 a year for Collier County residents and $125.40 for non-residents. A tennis membership runs $477 for county residents and $632 for others. Reservations go through the park's own booking system, and courts operate on a first-come basis when they're not already booked. It is one of the only pieces of Pelican Bay's amenity stack that a non-resident can use on the same footing as someone who lives here.
Meanwhile the private side keeps running on its own track. Membership at North and South Tennis remains tied to Foundation dues, the same 18 Har-Tru courts that produced the pairing of Sabonis and Motivar for that April final, and the same coaching staff that built the four-pillar program the USTA recognized last year.
What This Means Heading Into Season
Naples season typically ramps back up in November, and this will be the first full season with the Community Park's new courts in normal rotation rather than mid-construction. If this past April's finals match is any indication, Pelican Bay's private complex is now a venue other area clubs take seriously enough to send their own pros to play on, with Quail West's Diego Motivar sharing the court alongside Sabonis and Talis Park's Deso Borov competing for the title on the other side of the net. And the public park a few minutes down Vanderbilt Beach Road gives residents, and their guests who aren't Foundation members, a second place to play that didn't exist at all until last December.
None of this required a single new home to be built. It required a program that had already earned a national reputation, and a years-long fight by residents like Verbesky and O'Sullivan to get a forgotten public park rebuilt in the same neighborhood. Both landed in the same twelve-month window, which is the kind of coincidence that only looks obvious in hindsight.
If you're the kind of Pelican Bay resident who tracks court availability more closely than the school calendar, you already knew some of this. If you're weighing what Pelican Bay actually offers day to day, beyond the beach and the tram, this is the piece of the picture most retail-focused updates skip entirely.
For buyers and sellers who want a read on Pelican Bay that goes beyond what's happening at Waterside Shops, Taylor Stewart and the Luxury Links Team track this neighborhood at the level of detail that actually shapes daily life here. Reach out anytime for a free home valuation or a conversation about what's changing on the ground in Pelican Bay.
