Walk behind the Cohen Eastern Greenwich Civic Center on a weekday evening this September and you will find four brand-new courts filling with players before the sun sets, paddles clacking against the wiffle-style ball in that unmistakable pickleball rhythm. The courts opened June 25, 2026, and if you are wondering why a set of four courts on Harding Road felt like such a big deal to the people who play there, the answer has nothing to do with the game itself. It has to do with how long Old Greenwich and Riverside residents waited for them.

The project sat in the town budget for more than five years before the Board of Estimate and Taxation approved the funding, according to the local pickleball community's own tracking of the process. The final construction cost came in at $625,000. That is not a small line item for four courts, and the wait explains something the courts themselves cannot: this corner of eastern Greenwich has been chronically short on dedicated play space for one of the fastest-growing sports in town, even as demand for it kept climbing every season.

What Actually Changed on Harding Road

Before this summer, the tennis courts at the Cohen Eastern Greenwich Civic Center did double duty. Pickleball players taped their own lines, dragged out portable nets, and shared space that was never built with their sport in mind. What opened in June is different. These are four fully dedicated pickleball courts built to a new design with 7-foot sidelines, not tennis courts wearing pickleball paint. The Town's Parks and Recreation department called the addition a complement to the hybrid courts already on site, and said it positions the Cohen center to become the premier facility in town for both tennis and pickleball.

That last claim is worth testing against what else exists in Greenwich. Christiano Park, near the Hub in Cos Cob, has the only two courts in town built as dedicated pickleball courts from the start, back in 2014. Everywhere else, players have been working around tennis infrastructure: four courts lined over two tennis courts at Loughlin Avenue Park, six lined over three tennis courts at Western Middle School, two at Byram Shore Park. Cohen's four new courts take the town's dedicated pickleball inventory from two courts to six in a single project, and they do it on the eastern side of Greenwich, where until this year the closest fully dedicated courts meant a drive across town to Cos Cob.

The Detail That Tells You How Fast This Grew

Here is the part that says more about the sport's trajectory than any court count. The town has had to roll out a formal Pickleball Code of Etiquette for its courts, a response to rising friction between players jockeying for limited time slots. That is not a policy you write for a sport still finding its footing. It is a policy you write for a sport that outgrew its infrastructure faster than a municipal budget process could keep up.

If you have played at Loughlin on a Saturday morning during peak season, this will not surprise you. If you haven't, it is worth knowing before you show up at Cohen expecting an empty court and open time.

How to Actually Reserve a Court Here

The mechanics matter more than they might seem to at first, because the rules at Cohen are slightly different from the rest of the town's court network.

• You need a OnePass with an active Tennis/Pickleball Pass to reserve. This is separate from a general park pass.
• Reservations can be made online through the town's WebTrac system up to five days in advance, for one hour per day per pass holder.
• Cohen's courts are bookable from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., two hours later into the evening than most other town courts, which cut off reservations at 7 p.m.
• If you have a OnePass but skipped the Tennis/Pickleball Pass, you can still play using a single-use ticket for $15, though it cannot be applied toward a season pass later.
• Residents who want to bring a guest can add a seasonal Tennis/Pickleball Guest Pass for $85, though it has to stay in the resident's possession and the guest still needs to play alongside them.

None of this is complicated once you have done it once. But it is worth doing before your first visit, because in past seasons the reservation window for outdoor courts across town closed for the winter in the first week of December, with nets removed shortly after. Cohen has historically been an exception. Its nets stay up and its lights stay scheduled for evening play into the colder months, weather permitting, which makes it one of the few outdoor options in Greenwich that does not fully shut down when temperatures drop.

The Part Most Players Never Think About

Every time you book a court through the town's online system and select pickleball rather than tennis, you are doing something beyond scheduling your own game. The town uses that reservation data to measure demand and decide where future funding goes. It is one of the more direct feedback loops in Greenwich's parks system: the courts that show consistent reservation activity are the courts that make the case for expansion next.

That has real implications for a neighborhood that just spent five years waiting for this project to clear the budget. If Cohen's courts stay busy through the fall and into next spring, the reservation numbers become the argument for whatever comes next, whether that is more courts here or elsewhere in town. If bookings taper off, that data tells a different story to whoever reviews the budget next time. For a sport whose entire local history in Greenwich runs back only to 2010, when USA Pickleball Association ambassador Betsy Underhill first brought it to town, the numbers from this specific set of courts carry more weight than most players realize when they tap "reserve."

Where to Play When the Season Ends

If you are new to pickleball in this corner of town, it helps to know the full picture before winter arrives. When outdoor reservations close, indoor drop-in pickleball continues at Cohen across what the town describes as three lined courts in the gym space, though these are reserved for town-run drop-in programs rather than individual bookings. The Bendheim Western Greenwich Civic Center offers a similar setup on the west side of town, with two indoor courts running on a comparable schedule. Neither is a substitute for reserving your own hour outdoors, but both keep the sport playable through a Connecticut winter, which matters if you started playing in June and do not want to stop just because the temperature drops.

The Cohen center itself is worth knowing beyond its courts. The building had its soft opening in April 2025 after a full rebuild, funded in part by a $5 million launch gift from the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Foundation, and now houses multipurpose gyms, activity rooms, and the offices of the Old Greenwich-Riverside Community Center. Pickleball is one piece of a larger civic space that this end of town went years without.

For residents weighing what daily life actually looks like in Old Greenwich beyond the neighborhood's more familiar landmarks, this is a fair example of how it works. Amenities here do not arrive quickly, but when they land, they tend to land well. The wait for these courts mirrors the wait behind other community projects on this side of town, the kind covered in what happened with Binney Park's summer concert series, where the amenities residents now take for granted only exist because someone pushed a slow-moving budget process across the finish line.

If you already have a OnePass, the courts are there and open. If you don't, the sign-up takes less time than a single match, and the fall season is exactly the right window to book your first hour before the reservation system closes for winter. For anything else you're curious about in Old Greenwich, from the market to the neighborhood itself, Barbara Zaccagnini is always glad to talk. Let's Connect.