Basketball players who frequent a South Florida park feel like they’re being run off in favor of wealthy residents of a new luxury development.

The city of Fort Lauderdale is planning to replace the decades-old, beachside basketball courts with pickleball courts, part of a deal with developers for a massive condo and hotel project.

Local basketball players have generated a groundswell of support online, but city officials and developers have said the changes are part of larger improvement plan for the park that now includes building new basketball courts several hundred yards away.

Ozzie McRea said most people who use the basketball courts only found out about the changes to Fort Lauderdale Beach Park in April. He helped organize a group called Fort Lauderdale Beach Ballers to preserve the courts, located just a few dozen steps from the Atlantic Ocean.

“We saw a sign put up that says that there was going to be a conversion from a basketball court to a pickleball court,” McRea said. “And that raised a lot of flags, and it was a very surreal moment, because everybody that’s seen that sign, you see that their heart just dropped like out of nowhere.”

McRea said the message is clear: developers want to change the demographics of the area, allowing condo residents to use the public park across the street as a private club where working-class and diverse people aren’t welcome.

“It’s a very multicultural atmosphere out here. We have people from all ages, every ethnicity,” McRea said. “And it’s a beautiful thing because we all come in harmony over here. We all play basketball.”

Some advocates have linked the old basketball courts to the Civil Rights Movement and the push to desegregate the beaches. Photographs show basketball courts on Fort Lauderdale beach in the 1960s, but local historians believe those courts were in a different location. The current courts were likely installed at least a decade or so later.

“Many people don't understand or realize that the beaches were segregated back then, and these courts have come to represent the freedom and the openness that the city has now for all the people, especially in the minority community,” said Leo Lorenz, another co-organizer of the Fort Lauderdale Beach Ballers.