The trophy went to Griffin. On a Saturday this spring, 72 players split into 24-player squads from three Georgia Del Webb communities took over Sun City Peachtree's courts for a round robin nobody had run before. Men's doubles, women's doubles, mixed doubles, all day. When the last point landed, Sun City Peachtree walked off with the first-ever Georgia Del Webb Pickleball Championship trophy. Del Webb Lake Oconee sent two dozen of its own players north to Griffin to compete for it, and came home without the trophy this time.
That result matters less than the fact that Del Webb Lake Oconee had 24 players ready to travel and compete at all. This isn't a hobby group that meets to knock a ball around on a Tuesday morning. It's a club large enough, and organized enough, to field a traveling roster on short notice, which tells you something the standard amenity list on every Del Webb marketing page doesn't: pickleball here has outgrown the category of "activity" and become something closer to a program.
The First Georgia Del Webb Pickleball Championship
The idea started with Jason Garrett, PulteGroup's Georgia Division VP of Land Planning and Development, who wanted a reason to put three of the state's Del Webb communities in the same building. PulteGroup's own recap of the event describes a round-robin format hosted at Sun City Peachtree's facility in Griffin, with 24 players apiece from Sun City Peachtree, Del Webb Lake Oconee, and Del Webb Chateau Elan.
Delaine Newberry, Sun City Peachtree's Lifestyle Director and one of the organizers, called it something that could stick around. "This has all the makings of a new annual tradition," she said after the final match. If that holds, this spring's bracket becomes the first line of a rivalry that gets renewed every year, and Del Webb Lake Oconee's club now has a defending champion to chase.
Three Communities, One Bracket
A quick look at who showed up:
- Sun City Peachtree (Griffin, GA) hosted the event, won the inaugural trophy, and already runs more than 60 clubs and interest groups outside of pickleball.
- Del Webb Lake Oconee (Greensboro, GA) sent a full 24-player squad across men's, women's, and mixed doubles.
- Del Webb Chateau Elan rounded out the field with its own 24 competitors.
Three communities, one shared builder, and now one shared scoreboard. Nobody organized this from a corporate calendar. It grew out of a single tournament that word of mouth turned into a talking point across three separate HOAs.
The Club Behind the Roster
Fielding 24 competitive players on a weekend's notice doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't happen in a club that's an afterthought. According to a Lakelife Magazine profile of the Lake Country pickleball scene, Nikki Howard, a sales counselor at Del Webb, described pickleball as the community's biggest club by a wide margin. "We have more than 200 members, so it's a very avid club," she said at the time. That number, reported in 2024, would already have made pickleball larger than most of the specialty clubs that fill out the rest of Del Webb Lake Oconee's calendar, groups like Oconee Gardeners, Theater on the Lake, and the community's Book Club and Supper Club, several of which run in the dozens rather than the hundreds.
The club plays on six dedicated outdoor courts inside the community, permanent lines, permanent nets, no shared scheduling with tennis or any other sport. That kind of standalone footprint is usually reserved for a community's marquee amenity, not one club among many.
The Rematch Nobody Announced Yet
The most interesting part of this story hasn't happened yet. Word of the tournament's success reached Sun City Peachtree's tennis club, which has since reached out directly to Del Webb Lake Oconee's tennis club to put together their own cross-community matchup. No date, no format, no official confirmation beyond the outreach itself. But the pattern is the point: one club competes across community lines, and within weeks a second club at the same three communities starts asking why they haven't done the same thing.
That momentum is consistent with what residents at Sun City Peachtree describe about their own club culture. Cheryl Brown, a Sun City Peachtree resident of two and a half years who moved to Georgia without knowing anyone in the state, credits pickleball specifically with changing that. "The friends I've made here in the past few years feel like the same friends I've had for 40 years," she said. Whether or not Del Webb Lake Oconee's tennis club ends up on a Griffin court this year, the fact that a matchup is even being discussed says the tournament did what Garrett hoped it would: turn separate communities into rivals who actually know each other's names.
Bigger Than One Bracket
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Greene County's own recreation department had already flagged the sport's growth locally before this year's tournament made headlines. Pete O'Neal, director of the Greene County Recreation Department, told Lakelife Magazine the county was home to "hundreds of pickleball players" and called it the fastest-growing sport in the country. That was in 2024, and Del Webb Lake Oconee's club, sitting at more than 200 members even then, was already ahead of that curve rather than trailing it.
The rest of daily life at Del Webb Lake Oconee moves at a slower pace than a tournament bracket. Neighborhood chatter on Nextdoor is just as likely to be about a pair of osprey chicks nesting near the lake, or which coffee shop deserves the vote for best in the area, as it is about court reservations. Downtown Greensboro's Moonlight on Main summer concert series draws its own crowd on a Saturday night. That mix, a club that travels and competes alongside a community that still gathers for sunset walks and live music downtown, is closer to what actually living here looks like than any amenity list can capture.
The club that sent 24 players to Griffin this spring will have another shot at that trophy, and possibly a tennis rematch to go with it. Either way, it's worth watching what a single community's most competitive group does next.
For more on what's happening around Lake Oconee's neighborhoods, from Del Webb to Harbor Club to Reynolds, check in with Boatright Realty Group. We keep an eye on the lake so you don't have to.
