Four New Rules Just Hit WaterColor This Year. They're Really the Same Rule.
August 27, 2026
August 27, 2026
Where do you park for tennis now that half of Western Lake Drive is gravel? Where does the cart lot move when the golf cart you were about to buy suddenly makes less sense than leasing one? And why does the Beach Club keep a stopwatch on your lounge chair now?
None of these questions has anything to do with buying a house. They're the questions people who already live here have been asking each other since February, when construction crews started mobilizing on the WaterColor Tennis Center. Four separate notices have gone up on the community's own bulletin board this year: the tennis redevelopment, a new long-term cart leasing option through the Electric Cart Company, a new trolley app, and a revised lounge chair policy at the Beach Club. Read them side by side and they stop looking like four unrelated updates. They start looking like one decision, applied four times: WaterColor is no longer letting residents claim a fixed resource and hold it. You reserve your spot now. You don't own it for the day.
Site prep on the Tennis Center at 976 Western Lake Drive began in February 2026. The pickleball courts closed first and haven't reopened. If you've walked past since spring, you've seen the temporary Pro Shop trailer standing in for the clubhouse, and you've probably noticed the gravel parking pads that appeared on Western Lake Drive and Dandelion Drive to absorb the overflow from the main lot.
The five Har-Tru clay courts are still open. Three have LED lighting for night play, and one has stadium seating, so drills, lessons, and reservations haven't stopped. What's gone temporarily is pickleball, and what's coming back is more of it. The plan calls for six pickleball courts when the rebuilt center reopens, alongside a new fitness center with its own pro shop and the same five tennis courts that never closed. Director of Tennis Drew Machholz and the rest of the tennis staff have been running the program out of the trailer all season, which tells you the courts that stayed open were never really the story. The story is that WaterColor is trading two pickleball courts for six, and asking residents to tolerate a gravel lot for a few months to get there.
If the fall timeline holds, that trade closes soon. Here's the shape of it right now:
That's an expansion, not a cutback. But an expansion still means fewer courts today than there were a year ago, which is exactly the kind of short-term scarcity the other three notices are also managing.
The HOA's second move this year addressed a resource nobody expected to become scarce: the golf cart. WaterColor partnered with the Electric Cart Company, the community's exclusive cart vendor, to launch a long-term leasing program for owners. The listing went live in August 2025 and was updated again in February 2026, which suggests the HOA has been refining it as demand became clearer.
The program gives owners an alternative to buying an individual LSV outright. Instead of purchasing a cart, insuring it, storing it, and maintaining it yourself, you lease one through ECC on a long-term basis, and the company handles the mechanical side, including how the cart interacts with your rental guests if you rent your home out. ECC's pickup lot sits behind the Publix on Pine Grove Circle, the same lot vacation renters use for short-term LSV rentals, but the long-term lease is a separate arrangement built specifically for owners who want cart access without cart ownership.
This matters because WaterColor has long limited each address to one cart or LSV, and condos in the community aren't permitted to rent one at all. In a community where a golf cart is close to a daily necessity, not owning one used to mean either buying your own or doing without. The leasing program adds a middle option: access without the asset.
The third notice landed at the Beach Club, and it's the smallest change on paper with the clearest logic behind it. For years, the informal norm at pools like the Beach Club's three-pool deck was that a towel on a lounger held it, sometimes for hours, whether or not anyone was using it. The new policy puts a number on that. Loungers left unattended for more than 60 minutes, with no sign that the guest is coming back, will have their towels and personal items removed by the Amenities Team and taken to secure storage, where you can retrieve them from a concierge.
The tagline the community used to announce it, encouraging "less saving and more lounging," makes the intent plain. A lounger held all day by a towel is a lounger nobody else can use, and on a deck with three pools and a fixed number of chairs, that adds up fast during peak weeks. The rule doesn't add capacity. It just makes the existing capacity turn over instead of sitting claimed.
The fourth change is the WaterColor Trolley app, which lets residents and guests request a ride to the Beach Club, the BoatHouse, or Camp WaterColor instead of waiting curbside for the next pass. Trolley service runs daily from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., with the last ride request accepted at 6:45 p.m.
On its own, that's a convenience upgrade. Paired with the Tennis Center construction, it's something more specific. The community has actively encouraged carpooling or trolley use to reach the Tennis Center this fall, precisely because the temporary gravel pads on Western Lake Drive and Dandelion Drive can't absorb full parking demand. The app turns the trolley from a schedule you hope to catch into a resource you can actually plan around, which is exactly what you need when the parking lot you're used to using has shrunk for six months.
Line the four notices up and the pattern holds. A cart you lease instead of buy. A lounger you can hold for an hour, not a day. A trolley ride you request instead of wait for. Pickleball courts you'll get back doubled, but only after tolerating fewer of them for a season. None of these are cutbacks in the sense of less for residents overall. Three of the four are the community expanding or refining something it already had. But every one of them replaces an old model, where the resource was yours to claim and hold as long as you liked, with a new one, where you reserve access for a defined window and then it moves on to someone else.
That's not a complaint about WaterColor getting more crowded. It's a description of a community old enough now to have real wear on its shared spaces, making four separate, fairly small adjustments in the same direction within about a year of each other. If you live here, the practical upshot is straightforward. Check the ECC leasing terms before you buy a cart outright. Don't leave your towel on a lounger and walk off for the afternoon. Download the trolley app before the fall construction crunch, not during it. And give the Tennis Center through the fall before judging it, because the version coming back has three times the pickleball courts it's losing right now.
None of this required a vote or a fight. It just required the HOA to notice, four times over, that the old habit of claiming a resource and holding it doesn't scale the way it used to, and to write a small rule that fixes it each time.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home here, whether it's the cart storage a listing does or doesn't have, or how amenity access factors into a purchase decision on Western Lake Drive or anywhere else in the community, Enslen Coastal Group knows this neighborhood at the level of detail that actually matters. Get in touch with our team when you're ready to talk specifics.
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