Del Webb Lake Oconee Lost the State's First Pickleball Trophy. Its Tennis Club Wants a Rematch.

"This has all the makings of a new annual tradition," said Delaine Newberry, the Lifestyle Director at Sun City Peachtree, after her community's pickleball team took home the trophy at the first-ever Georgia Del Webb Pickleball Championship this spring. She was talking about pickleball. She turned out to be right about something bigger.

Del Webb Lake Oconee didn't win that tournament. What happened afterward is the part worth paying attention to. Within weeks of the round robin wrapping up in Griffin, word of the event had reached Sun City Peachtree's tennis club, which reached out to the tennis club here at Lake Oconee to propose a matchup of their own. No pickleball trophy changes that. A second sport picked up a rivalry that was supposed to be a one-time exhibition, and it did it on its own, without PulteGroup or any lifestyle director having to ask twice.

What Actually Happened This Spring

The tournament brought together three of PulteGroup's Georgia communities: Sun City Peachtree in Griffin, Del Webb Chateau Elan near Braselton, and Del Webb Lake Oconee here in Greensboro. Each community sent 24 players, 72 total, for a round robin across men's doubles, women's doubles, and mixed doubles, hosted at Sun City Peachtree's courts. When the last point was played, Sun City Peachtree claimed the inaugural trophy.

The idea started with Jason Garrett, PulteGroup's Georgia Division VP of Land Planning and Development, who wanted something that would put the state's Del Webb communities in front of each other instead of just in front of their own clubhouses. Once he pitched it to Newberry and to Sun City Peachtree's pickleball club, the club took the logistics off her plate entirely, handling registration and scoring themselves. "The club really owned the event," Newberry said. "That's what our clubs do."

That kind of ownership is the detail that matters for anyone trying to understand what club life actually looks like inside a gate like Del Webb's. The tournament wasn't run top-down. It was residents organizing residents, then residents recruiting the next rivalry once the first one ended.

The Rematch Nobody Had to Plan

The tennis matchup is still being organized as of this writing, with no date set. That's worth sitting with rather than rushing past. A pickleball loss usually stays a pickleball loss. Here, it became the opening move in a second competition entirely, initiated by a different club, in a different sport, because residents who heard about the trophy wanted their own shot at a rivalry.

If you play tennis at the Del Webb courts, or you know someone who does, this is the thing to ask your club board about this fall. Nothing has been formally scheduled, but the interest has already crossed community lines once. It's reasonable to expect it will again.

Why Del Webb Could Field a Team in the First Place

None of this works without a pickleball culture that already existed before the tournament was ever proposed. When Lakelife Magazine profiled the local pickleball scene in 2023, pickleball was already Del Webb Lake Oconee's largest club by membership, with more than 200 players on the rolls, according to Nikki Howard, a sales counselor at the community who described it as "our largest club" at the time. That's not a club that formed to meet a tournament invitation. That's a club a tournament invitation found already built.

The community's six outdoor pickleball courts put it in the same range as its golf-anchored neighbors on the lake, despite Del Webb being the one community here built around age-restricted, amenity-first living rather than a golf membership structure.

Reynolds and Harbor Club built their courts inside golf-membership ecosystems. Del Webb built six courts as a stand-alone amenity for an active-adult community, and the club that plays on them turned out deep enough to send a two dozen-player roster to a statewide event on short notice. That's the part a drive-by tour of the clubhouse won't show you. It shows up in a scoreboard from Griffin.

The Local Players Who Were Already Playing at This Level

The competitive streak on these courts predates the tournament by years. Greensboro residents Victor and Sara Betancourt had been playing pickleball for about seven years when they entered the mixed doubles division at the U.S. Open Pickleball Championships in Naples, Florida, in April 2022. They beat a field of 22 teams and came home with gold medals.

That result belongs to the county, not to any single gated community, but it says something about the baseline level of play in this part of Lake Oconee. A first-time state tournament between three Del Webb communities wasn't introducing pickleball to a sleepy retirement crowd. It was formalizing a rivalry among players who, in some cases, had already tested themselves at a national level.

What to Watch For This Fall

A few things are worth keeping an eye on if you're part of club life here, or thinking about becoming part of it:

• Whether the tennis matchup between Sun City Peachtree and Del Webb Lake Oconee gets a date. It's been proposed, not scheduled.
• Whether the pickleball championship returns as an annual event, which is what Newberry predicted when the first one wrapped. If it does, Del Webb gets a shot at the trophy Sun City Peachtree is currently holding.
• Whether Del Webb Chateau Elan, the third community in this spring's round robin, ends up folded into whatever the tennis clubs organize, the way it was for pickleball.

None of that is settled yet, which is exactly the point. A community's real character often shows up less in its finished amenities and more in what its residents decide to build once nobody's told them to. Del Webb Lake Oconee had the club depth to compete on pickleball courts against two other Georgia communities this spring. What its residents are doing with that momentum on the tennis courts now is still being written.

If you're weighing what daily life actually looks like behind Del Webb's gates, beyond the floor plans and the HOA line items, this is a fair sample of it: friendly rivalries that residents pick up and run with on their own, and neighbors who take a pickleball scoreboard seriously enough to want it back. For a closer look at Del Webb Lake Oconee, its neighboring communities, or what life on the water looks like day to day, reach out to Lacie Groeninger. Let's Connect.