4.8 million Americans play pickleball. It’s America’s fastest-growing sport. There are pro tournaments and professional pickleball teams, and sports celebrities are buying franchises. Every luxury real estate development now needs to offer pickleball courts. Municipal rec departments love the sport, since they can fit 4 pickleball courts into the same space as one tennis court and serve more players.
What’s not to like? Noise.
Pickleball is played with hollow plastic balls and hard wooden or composite paddles, and impacts bring loud pops, higher in frequency than the thud of felt tennis balls against racket strings. If you live near public pickleball courts, you’ve got four times the density of noise generation you’d get from tennis courts. Pickleball sounds are typically about 70 dBa at about 100 feet away from the strike of the ball.
About 60 percent of core pickleball players are over 55 years old, and 33 percent are over 65. You might ungenerously say their high frequency hearing is bad anyway, but the pickleball pop sound is in the 1,000 to 2,000 Hz range, not in higher ranges where that would make a difference.
While some pickleball paddles advertise low-noise qualities, it’s only relative. There are also low-noise balls, but they’re foam rubber and behave nothing like the plastic ones, so who’d bother?
Pickleball courts are trying noise-reducing curtains on their fences, and they’ll probably try those highway noise walls as the neighborhood lawsuits grow as rapidly as the sport.
Related:
“Pickleball Is Expanding. Tennis Is Mad.” Steven Kurutz, New York Times
“Tom Brady, Kim Clijsters latest to invest in pickleball team”, D’Arcy Maine, ESPN.com
Updates:
“Major League Pickleball finalizes 2023 expansion plans,” Kendall Baker, Axios
“ESPN Takes Swing at Pickleball With New TV Rights Pact,” Brian Steinberg, Variety
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