Pickleball Vandal Strikes Riverside Park Courts 3 Times; Nets Destroyed, Equipment Scattered

By Gus Saltonstall

The Riverside Park pickleball courts were under attack this week.

The equipment at the courts on the cement area on West 110th Street within the lower level of the park were vandalized three different times over the past six days, players and police confirmed to West Side Rag.

The repeated vandalism and the method by which it was performed has left players within the community shaking their heads.

Early Saturday morning, players arrived at the courts and encountered a man who had dismantled all five of the nets, several ball barriers, and stacked the poles on the side of the court, multiple people told the Rag.

Several nets had also been stuffed into one of the trash cans on the court.

The players confronted the man, and he took off without taking any of the equipment.

“The nets are not easy or meant to be taken apart,” Elizabeth Shapiro, an organizer of the Riverside Park pickleball courts, said. “It must have taken him hours to take them apart and stack them all up.”

The players proceeded to re-set up the nets, thinking that was the end of it.

The next morning, though, on Sunday, Mark Hurst and two other players arrived at the courts to find the nets and poles completely gone.

Hurst and the other players began searching the surrounding park area for any of their equipment.

“I later discovered the poles all in a garbage bag on the middle (promenade) level of the park,” Hurst told the Rag. “The bag was dumped amidst 19 other garbage bags that were full of leaves, twigs, and dirt. Fortunately I was able to see the shape of the poles in the bag and retrieve it.”

Hurst found the bags under a tree near West 108th Street, multiple blocks and a level up from the pickleball courts.

“Other members of the community got on their bikes and traveled around the park looking to help find our equipment, and they ended up finding all of the parts, all of the nets, five of the semi-permanent nets and two portable nets, scattered all around the park,” Shapiro said.

In total, players found different parts of pickleball equipment scattered randomly from West 105th Street to 114th streets within the park.

The nets were cut up, damaged and everything found was “pretty much unusable,” according to players.

“The assumption on the first day was this guy was trying to steal the equipment and sell it, but the next day it became clear he’s just a vandal who is being really destructive and disruptive,” Shapiro said.

The pickleball vandalism didn’t stop on Sunday, either.

On Monday, players arrived in the morning to find that 10 of their metal-wire paddle baskets were missing. The baskets were eventually found dumped near the 103rd Street Dog Run, seven blocks away, according to Hurst.

“It is just really strange,” Shapiro said of the chain of events.

NYPD confirmed to West Side Rag that an unknown individual “did dismantle and damage pickleball nets in Riverside Park” on Saturday and Sunday. A report for criminal mischief was recorded, but no arrests have been made, police said.

The Riverside Pickleball community has replaced the damaged equipment with portable nets that they are now locking up and putting away at the site.

“People have been stepping up and showing up early to set things up and staying late to lock things up,” Shapiro said. ” People have been donating money to a fund that was used for the new equipment.”

No incidents have taken place since Monday morning.

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