In December 2021, a Seven Bridges resident named Matt Pentofel sent an email inviting neighbors to meet him at Rick Macci Tennis Academy for a game of pickleball. Maria Kania, who had taken a clinic once back when she lived in Virginia Beach, was the only woman who showed up. The men on the court, she has said, were far better players than she was and let her play anyway.
That single email is now a WhatsApp thread with 40 regulars and a public Facebook page, Seven Bridges Pickleball, with close to 100 members. The group started with one Tuesday morning session and added Thursdays once demand outgrew the schedule. During peak season they kept four or more courts running at once, hired a certified instructor most weeks, and used the WhatsApp chat to flag wet courts or traffic on Lyons Road before anyone wasted a drive to the club.
For most of that stretch, they were doing it without dedicated pickleball courts. The community's tennis facility was built for tennis. Pickleball got squeezed in wherever lines could be taped over clay, organized by residents rather than staff, running on a Facebook group instead of a booking app. The courts arrived in 2025, four years after the group that would fill them.
The Racquet Club Adds Staff and Dedicated Courts
Seven Bridges' clubhouse has always been the community's built-in argument for never leaving the gate: a roughly 30,000-square-foot building with a full-service restaurant and bar known as Prime 7, a Starbucks café, and 13 Har-Tru tennis courts lit for night play. What it didn't have, until recently, was a pickleball infrastructure that matched the demand residents had already proven existed on their own.
That changed with the addition of four dedicated pickleball courts and the formalization of what's now called the Seven Bridges Racquet Club, run out of the same building at 16701 Cabernet Drive. The club now carries a Tennis Director, an Assistant Tennis Director, and a Pickleball Director serving as head pro, plus a rotating bench of tennis pros. The booking system lists Ladies Clinics, pickleball clinics, and organized pickleball events as standing programs, the kind of structured, staffed offering that didn't exist when Pentofel's group was self-organizing around a single volunteer instructor.
The practical shift for a resident is scheduling. What used to require joining a Facebook group and hoping four courts were free can now be booked through the club directly, with a pro available rather than a neighbor donating their Tuesday morning. The clinics, especially the Ladies Clinics, formalize something the original group was already doing informally, since Kania's crew was, by her own account, mostly women who welcomed anyone willing to get beaten on the court.
A Few Gates Over, The Bridges Runs Its Own Program
Seven Bridges shares its stretch of Lyons Road with a sister community simply called The Bridges, and the two get confused often enough that it's worth being precise about where one ends and the other begins. The Bridges has its own separate Racquet Center at 8576 Golden Gate Avenue, not the Cabernet Drive clubhouse, with six clay courts and four pickleball courts, all lit for night play, plus shaded pavilions and elevated spectator seating at each court. It's led by Racquet Center Director Alessio Iannozzi, whose team runs competitive league play, clinics, private lessons, and Pro-Am exhibitions throughout the year.
The two programs aren't competing with each other so much as running in parallel a short drive apart, each with its own director, its own court count, and its own membership culture. A resident who plays at Seven Bridges and has friends in The Bridges will find familiar sports on unfamiliar courts, run by a different staff with a different booking calendar. Knowing which clubhouse belongs to which gate saves a wasted trip and clears up a mix-up that even some longtime residents still make.
What This Looks Like Heading Into Season
South Florida's club calendars pick up as the weather cools, and the Seven Bridges Racquet Club's clinic schedule reflects that rhythm, with Ladies Clinics and pickleball sessions filling in as the fall crowd returns. The original resident-run group hasn't disappeared into the official program. It's simply gained a second option: the Tuesday and Thursday morning sessions that Pentofel and Kania built from scratch still exist alongside the club's own booked clinics, giving residents a choice between the informal WhatsApp version and the staffed, scheduled version now available at the same address.
What changed isn't the appetite for pickleball at Seven Bridges. That was proven years before a single dedicated court existed, by a group that kept four courts full through word of mouth alone. What changed is that the clubhouse finally built the courts and the staff to match a demand its own residents had already spent years demonstrating.
If you're weighing a move to Seven Bridges, The Bridges, or another gated community along Lyons Road and want a clearer read on how each one's amenities and culture actually compare, Noah J. Heller can walk you through the differences that don't show up on a floor plan.
