About / Huntley Commons

The question that stops people is always the same one: will anybody be there. A list of dates never answers it. This site tries to.

Two names

Huntley Commons is the site. Huntley Pickleball is the first community on it. I run both, which is why there is one thing here so far.

Where this comes from

I coached kids' soccer here for years, and flag football for two seasons. Those have a roster, a schedule, a season and a whistle, and they are worth doing. Every one of them ends in October, and somebody has to sign your kid up in the first place.

The thing I miss had none of that. When my kids were younger I ran a summer park group. Anyone could come: kids from about five up through high school, and other adults too. At its peak more than twenty turned up every evening to play tag, capture the flag, football tag, whatever we could get going.

Nobody was in charge of what happened next. The kids voted on what to play, and whatever won, we played. I played too, rather than watching from the side, and I got to be a kid again for a few summers. It is the best thing I have been part of here and I miss it.

The Huntley summer park group organized by Aaron Holbrook, gathered on the playground at the end of an evening. About twenty children ranging from roughly five years old to high school age stand with several parents in front of a wooden play structure with a green slide, in a Huntley, Illinois neighborhood park backed by houses and open grass. — The park group at its peak. Nobody signed up and nobody was turned away.

Aaron Holbrook standing with the children of his Huntley summer park group while they vote on which game to play next, a loose circle of kids around him on the wood chips beside the playground, with a younger child on a spring rocker in the foreground. — Voting on what to play next.

Aaron Holbrook sitting on a playground slide in Huntley, Illinois, surrounded by children of the summer park group climbing over the green play structure above and around him, one holding a basketball. — Catching my breath.

A Huntley youth flag football team in green jerseys lined up on the field with their coaches, including Aaron Holbrook, under floodlights at a Huntley, Illinois sports park. — Coaching flag football.

My kids are teenagers now, and I am looking for that again, this time for myself. Huntley has plenty going on. Very little of it is the kind of thing you can turn up to on a Tuesday without arranging it a week ahead.

Why pickleball first

The town has courts and no way to know whether anyone will be at them. I went down to play and talked to two people mid-game. Neither of them played regularly, for the same reason: you drive over, and either there are six people waiting or there is nobody. After a few empty trips you stop going.

The demand is there. Coordination is the part that is missing. So the group exists, the sessions are real, and the page shows how many people have said they are coming before you get in the car.

What a community means here

A set of people who do a thing together. The dates are when they next do it.

Some meet the same night every week. Some move between places. Some are free public courts, some are a paid room with a door code. Huntley Pickleball is all of that at once: it runs its own open play, and it holds the smaller groups that have split off it.

Who runs it

Me. I live here, I check what goes on the site by hand, and there is nobody else to blame for what it says. This is one guy trying to put a little good back out into the world.

I pay for it, out of my own pocket. It is not expensive yet, and it is a labor of love rather than a business: nothing here is sponsored, there are no ads, and there is no list being sold.

Three things do reach somebody else, and you should know which. I use Google Analytics, so I can tell whether any of this is working: it counts which pages get opened and roughly where people arrived from. The maps on venue pages are Google's too, so opening one tells them you were here. And some photographs are still stock images served by Unsplash, which will go as I take real ones.