If you said "the public," congratulations — you understand how parks work. Unfortunately, not everyone got the memo.

A growing pattern of organized groups essentially commandeering public courts across the city — particularly near Golden Gate Park — has residents fuming. The playbook is simple: show up in numbers, monopolize walk-on courts for hours, freeze out anyone who isn't part of the crew, and in some cases, even collect donations through websites with event rules and scheduled sessions. In other words, running a private club on public land without a permit or a care in the world.

One local put it bluntly: "Because of this exact cult, we can never get on and we get told the same thing when we wait. Ridiculous." Another SF resident recalled the pre-COVID version of this grift: "Instead of handing over the courts to people waiting, they would shuffle up who was playing with whom in their foursome and claim they now counted as a new group and keep playing."

And the entitlement doesn't stop at the court lines. One neighbor noted that "these same entitled idiots yelled at parents for cheering too loud at the nearby baseball field. Come on, the kids just won the game."

Let's be clear about what's happening here: public resources, maintained with public dollars, are being functionally privatized by groups too cheap or too brazen to get the permits that SF Parks and Rec actually requires for organized activities. The city literally has a group tennis rental program. There's a process. These groups are just skipping it.

This is a microcosm of a larger San Francisco disease — rules that exist on paper but go unenforced because nobody at City Hall wants the headache. We pay for parks. We pay for courts. We pay for a Rec and Park Department with a budget north of $260 million. And yet a handful of aggressive regulars can effectively seize public property through sheer audacity.

The fix isn't complicated. Enforce existing permit requirements. Post clear signage about court rotation rules. And when groups violate those rules, fine them. Public spaces only work when they're actually public. The moment we let self-appointed gatekeepers run the show, we've surrendered the commons to whoever has the loudest voice and the least shame.

Your tax dollars built those courts. Act like it, San Francisco.