Walk the loop through Highlands on a September evening and you will eventually pass the same stretch of asphalt you have passed a hundred times before, the two tennis courts on the south side of Highlands Park at 5200 Doncaster Way. Except now there is a second set of lines painted inside the old ones, smaller boxes nested in the bigger rectangle, and the net posts sit a little lower than they used to. Nobody built anything new. The city just gave the same forty acres a second job.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, and it tells you something about how this particular neighborhood grows.
What Actually Got Painted On
Highlands Park has always carried a lot on its 40 acres: a baseball diamond, a playground ringed by benches, a pond that catches the afternoon light, and those two tennis courts tucked on the far side with what the city's own facility listing calls "beautiful flowers" running along the edge. As of this year, the city's facility page lists the courts simply as "Tennis Court (Striped for Pickleball)," a small edit that reflects a citywide decision rather than anything unique to this park. Edina's own newsletter put it plainly this past spring: all tennis courts in Edina parks are now striped for pickleball, Highlands included.
So the courts you have always known are still tennis courts. They just do double duty now, the way a garage does double duty as a workshop.
"This is a creative solution to get full use of that space," City Council Member James Pierce said of the city's broader pickleball push during a March 2026 council meeting.
That quote was about the Braemar Golf Dome parking lot, not Highlands specifically, but it explains the logic that reached this park too. Edina is not building its way into the pickleball boom. It is layering it onto ground that already exists.
Why Highlands Got Lines, Not a Rebuild
Compare what happened here to what Edina is doing at its other parks and the pattern gets sharper.
- Rosland Park, at 4300 W. 66th St., had its former tennis courts fully converted into six dedicated pickleball courts, now known as the Mooty Pickleball Courts. No shared striping, no compromise. Six courts, one sport.
- Braemar Golf Dome is getting four new tournament-style mat courts in its parking lot starting in 2027, part of $8.1 million in Braemar Park improvements funded by a voter-approved sales and use tax. Those courts will roll out fresh each spring after the Dome closes, built specifically for beginners and lessons.
- Highlands Park got two lines added to two existing courts. That's the entire capital investment.
The difference isn't neglect. It's geometry. Rosland and Braemar had room, or budget, to build something dedicated. Highlands is a built-out residential park bordered by a pond on one side and a playground on the other, with exactly two courts and nowhere obvious to put a third. When a neighborhood is this fully used already, growth here does not look like new construction. It looks like existing space learning to hold two sports instead of one.
If you have lived in Highlands for a while, this will feel familiar. The park has never expanded. It has just gotten better at using what it has.
The Park's Other Season
Pickleball is a warm-weather addition, but Highlands Park's real identity has always been seasonal in a way that most Edina parks aren't. It is one of twelve neighborhood parks the city floods for outdoor skating each winter, complete with a warming house. Last season the rink ran from December 20 through February 16, weather permitting, with the kind of hours that make it a genuine after-school and after-work option rather than a weekend-only novelty:
- Weekdays: 4 to 9:30 p.m.
- Saturdays: 9 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.
- Sundays: 1 to 8 p.m.
The city has not yet posted this winter's exact opening date, but the pattern holds year to year, and the warming house has become as much a fixture of the neighborhood's calendar as the pond is in July.
A short walk from the rink, the slope behind Highlands Elementary on Doncaster Way turns into the neighborhood's sledding hill the moment there's enough snow to hold a sled line. Between the rink, the hill, and the pond that anchors the park in warmer months, Highlands has always had a rhythm that changes with the season rather than staying static. The pickleball lines are just the newest verse in a pattern the park has been running for years.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
Here is the part that matters if you're the one showing up to play. Two courts serving both tennis and pickleball means peak hours are about to get more contested, not less. A city with dedicated pickleball courts at Rosland can absorb overflow demand somewhere else. Highlands can't. If tennis league play or a group lesson has the courts booked on a Tuesday evening, that's also the evening pickleball doesn't happen, and vice versa.
Practically, that pushes both sports toward the edges of the day. Early mornings before work, or the stretch right after the farmers market crowd clears out on a Thursday, are likely to be your best bet for open court time without a wait. Weekend mornings, before the baseball diamond and playground fill up with families, will probably become the informal pickleball window the way early evenings have long belonged to tennis regulars.
None of this is a complaint about the change itself. Two sports on one court beats no pickleball at all, and the flowers along the fence line are apparently staying put regardless of which game is being played inside them. It's simply the tradeoff that comes with adding capacity to a neighborhood that was already fully built rather than one with room to spare.
That tradeoff is, in a small way, the whole story of Highlands. This is a neighborhood defined by its formal entrances off Ayreshire Boulevard and Mirror Lakes Boulevard, its lake-and-lowland topography, and its proximity to Interlachen Country Club across Interlachen Boulevard. It was largely finished decades ago. The lots were set, the streets curved where the land told them to curve, and the park was carved out at 40 acres and never expanded. When a neighborhood reaches that kind of maturity, the interesting changes aren't the ones that reshape the map. They're the ones that make the existing map work a little harder, whether that's a pond that hosts a pickup hockey game in January or a tennis court that becomes two sports for the price of some paint.
Keep an eye on those courts this fall. The lines are new. The rest of the park, and the rhythm that comes with it, is exactly what it has always been.
Highlands doesn't turn over often, and the homes that do change hands here rarely sit on the open market long enough to notice. If you want a heads up before the next one does, Josh Sprague keeps a standing list for exactly that. Get Access to Off-Market Listings.
