The vote was 47 to 11. The society committee had put a single motion before their general body: decommission the swimming pool and build sports courts in its place. The 11 who voted against were not opposed to sports courts. They were opposed to what felt, on paper, like giving up a community asset. It took nearly an hour of discussion before the motion passed.
The pool had been empty for eight years. It was last operational when the society was newer. Over the years, leaks in the shell had been patched twice, the filtration system replaced once, and annual professional maintenance had continued even during years when nobody was using it. The RWA treasurer's spreadsheet was plain: ₹3.5 lakh per year to maintain something that had probably hosted fifteen swims in the past eight years.
The thing is, the numbers were not what made the debate difficult. Everyone agreed on the numbers. What made it hard was the idea. A society's swimming pool means something beyond its square footage. The 11 who voted against were mourning what the pool represented — not what it actually was. The committee chairperson was clear about this distinction. The motion she brought to the vote was not "demolish the pool." It was: "build something better in its place."
The Challenge
Pool-to-sports-court conversions are not a common brief, and there is a reason for that. An empty swimming pool is not simply a hole in the ground with flat edges. It has sloped walls, a deep end, drainage recesses, and a shell designed to hold water from the inside — which means it is engineered to resist pressure in one direction only. Converting it into a flat sports surface requires solving specific structural problems before any tile goes down.
The first task was a structural assessment. We worked with a Bangalore-based civil engineer to check the pool shell's condition after eight years of disuse. The verdict: structurally sound, but drainage rerouting was needed before the fill could begin. The pool's original drain was connected to a separate system from the society's main storm drain. If filled without rerouting, any groundwater ingress could create hydrostatic pressure under the finished surface.
The fill itself was the second major challenge.
A standard residential pool runs 1.8m to 2.2m depth at the deep end. Filling that volume with material compact enough to support a sports surface — without settling over time — meant using lean concrete fill in stages with proper compaction between pours. The deep end was filled and compacted in three stages over five days before surface preparation could begin.
The third challenge was level assessment after the fill. Filled pools often settle unevenly, particularly at the deep-to-shallow transition zone. A surface that is not true to level will cause water pooling and uneven tile behaviour over time. Our team used a laser level across the full filled area before any surface work was cleared to start.
We were ready for the community politics of this decision — that was expected. What we were not prepared for was the technical complexity of the pool itself. ChampCourts was upfront with us from day one about what the conversion actually involved. They did not promise it would be simple. That honesty made us trust everything else they said.
— Chairperson, Bangalore residential society RWAThe Solution
The drainage was rerouted to the main storm drain in a single afternoon of civil work before the fill started. That removed any risk of hydrostatic pressure under the finished surface. The old filtration room — a 4 sqm enclosed space on the pool's northern edge — was repurposed as a lockable equipment storage room for court accessories: nets, paddles, shuttlecocks. A small decision that the society now considers one of the best calls of the whole project.
PP interlocking tiles were the obvious surface choice for a post-fill area. Unlike acrylic on PCC — which requires the base to have cured completely and shown zero settlement before the surface is applied — PP tiles are a forgiving system. The snap-fit design means that if minor settling happens over the first twelve months, individual tiles can be disengaged, the substrate adjusted locally, and the tiles re-snapped. No specialist resurfacing required. For a converted pool where long-term settlement behaviour was not fully predictable, that adaptability was genuinely valuable.
The colour scheme — Dark Blue for the badminton court, Red for the pickleball court — was chosen by the residents themselves. The RWA put up a short poll in the society's WhatsApp group. Over sixty residents voted within twenty-four hours. Dark Blue and Red won comfortably. The committee chairperson noted, with some amusement, that the colour vote got more engagement than any society general body notice had managed in three years.
Tile colours — resident-voted, community-chosen:
The Build
The Result
The courts opened on Day 14. The RWA held a small handover ceremony — tea and snacks from a nearby place — and forty-three residents showed up. Three of the eleven who had voted against the conversion were among them. One of those three — the society's longest-serving resident — played her first game of pickleball that afternoon. She had never played before. She won.
In the weeks that followed, something shifted in the society that is hard to put numbers on. The area around the courts became a gathering point in a way the empty pool never had been. Evening sessions drew spectators as well as players. A WhatsApp group just for court bookings was created and filled up fast. Residents who had barely spoken to each other were suddenly having conversations by the sideline.
The maintenance numbers, twelve months later, told the other part of the story. Annual maintenance cost had dropped from ₹3.5 lakh to approximately ₹12,000 — mostly net replacements and occasional court tape touch-ups. The RWA treasurer presented this at the next AGM. The motion had already been vindicated by courts that were full every evening. The numbers simply confirmed it.
Two residents who listed their apartments in the year after the courts opened mentioned the courts explicitly in their property listings. Neither ChampCourts nor the RWA can formally claim that as a causal link. But the RWA chairperson brought it up, and it is the kind of thing people notice.
Maintenance Cost Comparison
I voted against this. I will say that openly. I thought we were giving something up. What I did not expect was that we were getting something far more valuable — a space that actually brings people together. The pool never did that. Not in eight years.
— A dissenting vote, now a weekly pickleball playerAll project photographs shown are representative illustrations. The residential society's name, location details, and individuals' identities have been withheld to protect client privacy. Maintenance cost data is drawn from the RWA's records, shared with permission. Settlement assessment data reflects ChampCourts' on-site measurements. Property value commentary is anecdotal and has not been independently verified. Resident participation figures are based on weekly court booking data shared by the RWA.