SHATTERED NERVES, SLEEPLESS NIGHTS: PICKLEBALL NOISE IS DRIVING EVERYONE NUTS

I figured, if the New York Times writes about a problem, WE HAVE A PROBLEM!

Andrew Keh writes, "The incessant pop-pop-pop of the fast-growing sport has brought on a nationwide scourge of unneighborly clashes, petitions, calls to the police and lawsuits, with no solution in sight."

Keh writes about Mary McKee, 43, a conference planner, who moved to the neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia in 2005 and for the next decade and a half enjoyed a mostly tranquil existence. Then came the pickleball players. It sounded like popcorn warming in a microwave: sporadic bursts that quickened, gradually, to an arrhythmic clatter.

“There it is,” Mary McKee said, staring out the front door of her home in Arlington, Va., on a recent afternoon. She gestured across the street to the?Walter Reed Community Center, less than 100 feet from her yard, where a group of players, the first of the day, had started rallying on a repurposed tennis court. More arrived in short order, spreading out until there were six games going at once. Together they produced an hourslong ticktock cacophony that has become the unwanted soundtrack of the lives of McKee and her neighbors.

The sound has brought on a nationwide scourge of frayed nerves and unneighborly clashes — and those, in turn, have elicited petitions and calls to the police and last-ditch lawsuits aimed at the local parks, private clubs and homeowners associations that rushed to open courts during the sport’s recent boom.

There are more examples of people whose lives had been made miserable by the sounds of pickleball action. Like, said John Mancini, 82, in Wellesley, Mass. (“It’s like having a pistol range in your backyard.) Or, Clint Ellis, 37, who lives across the street from a private club in York, Maine. (“It’s a torture technique.") Or, Debbie Nagle, 67, whose gated community in Scottsdale, Ariz., installed courts a few years ago. (“Living here is hell.") Many more voiced their concerns.?

The sounds were even dissected last month at?Noise-Con 2023, the annual conference of North American noise control professionals, which featured an opening-night session called “Pickleball Noise.” “Pickleball is the topic of the year,” said Jeanette Hesedahl, vice chair for the conference. The same story, the same jarring sound, has echoed across American communities like rolling thunder.

Read the entire article here.