Noise From Pickleball Courts Is Driving People Nuts, but There May Be a Solution
The news for pickleball aficionados keeps getting worse. After it was recently reported that pickleball-related medical costs could reach $400 in 2023, reports are surfacing that the noise of the game could drive people mad.
The descent of fervent pickleball fans onto courts of America’s public parks has begun to unravel the lives of adjacent residents across the country. “It’s like having a pistol range in your backyard,” 82-year-old John Mancini told The New York Times of the racket emitting from the courts near his home in Massachusetts.
“Pickleball has replaced leaf blowers as my number one noise nuisance,” revealed Sue-Ellen Welfonder, a romance novelist based in Florida.
“Pickleball is the topic of the year,” said Jeanette Hesedahl, vice chair for Noise-Con 2023, an annual conference organized and run by the Institute of Noise Control Engineering. Indeed, it’s been such a topic that the opening night of Noise-Con was dedicated to a session on the irritating noise created by the sport.
One man who is determined to stop the aural madness is Bob Unetich, an ardent pickleball player and former engineer who started the company Pickleball Sound Mitigation.
“Pickleball sound exists right in that most sensitive range,” Unetich told NPR earlier this month. “An interesting thing I learned along the way is that garbage truck backup beepers are right in the same pitch of pickleball. Why did they pick that sound for beepers? Because it's the most annoying frequency.”
Unetich has found that constructing pickleball equipment with new materials, as well as inserting sound barriers within, would help to mitigate the issue. Yet ultimately, he admits it’s an issue of how close one lives to a pickleball court.
So far, the noise doesn’t seem to be diminishing the flame of the fastest growing sport in America. In what seems like a perfect solution to the noise issue, courts have begun taking over empty malls—far from the weary ears of residents.
However, Welfonder is hard at work on her next novel and plans to take revenge on the page. In a flourish worthy of John Waters, her upcoming work will include a dastardly pair of pickleball players who she promises will be "really nasty people."
