From Pickleball Paradise to Investor Nightmare: Inside the 'Bell Bank Park' Fraud Scandal

Legacy Park, formerly Bell Bank Park, in Mesa, Arizona was supposed to be a utopia for the sport-obsessed, notably hosting multiple APP Tour, PPA Tour and Major League Pickleball events. A mega-complex built on dreams, debt, and allegedly doctored documents.

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It had pickleball courts—plenty of them—but it also had soccer fields, baseball diamonds, volleyball courts, e-sports lounges, gymnastics space, fitness centers, restaurants, and even medical offices. Think of it as the Costco of sports: sprawling, ambitious, overlit, and capable of giving you shin splints just from walking the perimeter.

But that dream is now buried under a federal indictment. This week, the SEC and Department of Justice announced charges against Randy Miller, Chad Miller, and Jeffrey De Laveaga, the executives behind Legacy Cares and its for-profit affiliate, Legacy Sports. They’re accused of defrauding investors out of more than $280 million by using forged documents, inflated revenue projections, and fictitious commitments from sports organizations—including some from the pickleball world—to sell municipal bonds funding the project.

Let’s pause here and zoom in on pickleball. Legacy Park—briefly branded as Bell Bank Park and now operating under the name Arizona Athletic Grounds—wasn’t just another venue with a few token courts. It was pitched as a premier destination for professional, amateur, and youth pickleball. It hosted some of the sport’s most prestigious and memorable events:

• APP Mesa Open (March 29 – April 2, 2023): A marquee stop on the Association of Pickleball Players tour, drawing pros and spectators nationwide.
• MLP Mesa Event (January 26–29, 2023): Major League Pickleball brought its elite team competition to the facility, further cementing its reputation as a big-league venue.
• PPA Carvana Mesa Arizona Cup (February 20–25, 2024): The Professional Pickleball Association used the venue to kick off one of its premier tour events.
• The Dink’s own Minor League Pickleball event (August 17–18, 2024): A critical moment in the MiLP calendar, showcasing amateur talent with aspirations to go pro.

All of this added credibility to the idea that this wasn’t just a sports complex—it was the future of pickleball. At least on paper.

But, according to federal prosecutors, those papers were often forged. The SEC alleges that the defendants faked letters of intent and contracts from sports organizations, some of which didn’t even know they were being included in investor decks. In certain cases, the Millers allegedly forged actual signatures or directed others to copy them from unsuspecting organizations—including one that promotes athletics for disabled individuals. That's a moral foul so egregious it deserves a technical.

They claimed the park would be booked solid from Day 1, projecting $100 million in first-year revenue—enough to make municipal bond investors rich and comfortable. Instead, Legacy Park opened in early 2022, struggled with attendance, failed to meet its revenue goals, defaulted on its bonds in October of that year, and filed for bankruptcy by May 2023. The facility, which cost nearly $300 million to build, sold for less than $26 million. Less than $2.5 million was returned to investors.

And yet, in spite of its shady foundations, the place did host real events and real games. Kids played. Pros competed. Fans cheered. And pickleball, somehow, flourished—for a while. It’s an uncomfortable contradiction: the courts were real, the gameplay was electric, but the financial scaffolding holding it all together was allegedly a well-constructed lie.

The SEC and DOJ are now pursuing civil and criminal charges. The Millers and De Laveaga face decades in prison if convicted. And the pickleball community is left trying to process what this all means. Is this a singular scandal or a symptom of the pickleball gold rush? How many other developers are making too-good-to-be-true projections to cash in on the sport’s explosive growth?

It’s not the first time pickleball has brushed up against shady business (see our earlier coverage of Rodney Grubbs and the Pickleball Rocks fraud), but this is different. This wasn’t a few thousand dollars from gullible Facebook followers. This was a nine-figure municipal bond scheme that turned one of the largest pickleball venues in the country into a financial graveyard.

Legacy Park’s story is a parable for the pickleball era—one part triumph, one part tragedy, all parts chaotic. It represents the exhilarating promise and potential of America’s fastest-growing sport, but also the risks of unchecked ambition and hype.

We’ll keep playing. We always do. But next time someone pitches a “world-class pickleball campus,” maybe we ask to see the signatures.