Shattered nerves, sleepless nights: Pickleball noise drives everyone crazy

It sounded like popcorn heating up in a microwave: sporadic bursts that gradually accelerated to an arrhythmic clatter.

“There it is,” Mary McKee said, staring through the front door of her Arlington, Virginia, home one recent afternoon.

McKee, 43, a conference planner, moved to the neighborhood in 2005 and enjoyed a mostly quiet existence for the next year and a half. Then came the pickleball players.

She gestured across the street Walter Reed Community Center, less than 30 meters from her yard, where a group of players, the first of the day, had begun to gather on a repurposed tennis court. More arrived in a short time, spreading out until there were six games going on at once. Together they produced an hour-long cacophony that has become the unwanted soundtrack to the lives of McKee and her neighbors.

“I thought maybe I could live with it, maybe it would fade into the background,” she said of the hubbub, which started around the height of the coronavirus pandemic and now reverberates through her home even when her windows are closed. “But that never happened.”

Sports can produce all sorts of unpleasant noises: referee whistles, spiteful boos, vuvuzelas. But the most grating and disruptive sound in the entire athletic ecosystem right now may be the staccato pop-pop-pop from America’s rapidly multiplying pickleball fields.

The noise has sparked a nationwide plague of frayed nerves and neighborhood strife — which, in turn, have sparked petitions and calls to the police and last-ditch lawsuits against the local parks, private clubs and homeowners’ associations that rushed to open courts during the sport’s recent boom.

The buzz has given new meaning to the phrase racquet sport, which tests the sanity of anyone within earshot of a game.

“It’s like having a gun range in your backyard,” says John Mancini, 82, whose home in Wellesley, Massachusetts, borders a cluster of public courts.

“It’s a torture technique,” says Clint Ellis, 37, who lives across the street from a private club in York, Maine.

“Living here is hell,” says Debbie Nagle, 67, whose gated community in Scottsdale, Ariz., installed courts a few years ago.

Modern society is inherently inharmonious – think screaming children, barking dogs, roaring lawnmowers. So what makes the sound of pickleball, in particular, so hard to bear?

For answers, many turned to Bob Unetich, 77, a retired engineer and avid pickleball player, who became one of the foremost authorities on dampening the game after starting a consulting firm called Pickleball Sound Restriction. Unetich said pickleball whacks from 100 feet away can reach 70 dBA (a measure of decibels), similar to some vacuum cleaners, while everyday background noise outside usually ends at a “slightly annoying 55.”

But decibel measurements alone are insufficient to convey the true magnitude of any annoyance. Two factors – the high-pitched sound of a hard paddle slamming a plastic ball and the erratic, often frantic rhythm of the claps – also contribute to its uncanny ability to drive bystanders crazy.

“It creates vibrations in a range that can be extremely annoying to humans,” Unetich said.

These bad vibrations have created an unforeseen growing pain for pickleball, which has emerged from relative obscurity in recent years to become the fastest growing sport in the country.

The sounds were even dissected last month Noise Con 2023the annual conference of North American noise control professionals, with an opening night session called “Pickleball Noise”.

“Pickleball is the topic of the year,” said Jeanette Hesedahl, conference vice president.

The same story, the same shocking sound echoed like thunder through American communities.

Sue-Ellen Welfonder, 66, a bestselling novelist of Longboat Key, Florida, once enjoyed listening to the singing of birds and the gentle rustle of trees on her daily walks — her “soul balm time” — through a local park. The thumb thumb a tennis match never bothered her either. But the arrival of pickleball this spring, she said, shattered her idyll.

“Pickleball has replaced leaf blowers as my No. 1 noise nuisance,” said Welfonder, who has outlined a new novel set in the present with a few pickleball-loving characters: “I make them really nasty people.”

The complaints were equally dramatic in a February 6 city council meeting in West Linn, Oregon, where residents were annoyed by the constant clicking of Tanner Creek Park.

“One of our neighbors who lived directly across from the courts and was dying of cancer commented that the pickleball sound was worse than his cancer,” Dan Lavery, a West Linn resident, said at the meeting. “Unfortunately, he passed away recently.”

Dozens of similarly suffering Americans find their way to a rapidly growing Facebook groupalso started by Unetich, where more than 1,000 exhausted users exchange technical advice, blow off steam and participate in a kind of group therapy.

“We try to keep it civil,” Unetich said, “because it gets pretty emotional.”

A number of lessons have crystallized within the group. Soundproof barriers – a go-to solution for many in the beginning – can be expensive and are often not deployed properly. New paddles and balls designed to dampen noise are only marginally accepted among players. Moving pickleball far away from human life may be the only surefire solution — but many are slow to reach that conclusion, which comes with its own hurdles.

Irritated homeowners therefore often resort to fighting pickleball in court.

Last year, Rob Mastroianni, 58, and his neighbors in Falmouth, Mass., filed a lawsuit against their city claiming that the courts near their homes violated local noise ordinances. They won a temporary injunction, temporarily closing the facility. By then, Mastroianni had already sold his house and moved to another part of town to escape the noise.

“I was Google-mapping the new house, making sure there were no courts nearby,” Mastroianni said.

In Arlington, McKee and her neighbors wait around the community center to see what happens next. They shared their pain with the county, which for now appears to be moving forward with plans to spend nearly $2 million to make the pickleball fields permanent.

The players there sympathized with the plight of the residents – but only to an extent.

“If I had that house I’d be mad because it’s annoying — it’s unpleasant,” said Jordan Sawyer, 25, an Arlington dietitian and avid player, between games this month. “But I don’t feel bad because I want to play, and this is the best place to play. Honestly, I just think it’s a shame. It’s bad luck for these people.”

Sawyer described himself as a “rule follower.” But McKee and the others said they were awakened at 3 a.m. by pickleball games in the middle of the night. Another time, they listened to a player bang the field with a tambourine, apparently to taunt those who had complained.

Armand Ciccarelli, 51, who often walks his dog Winona at the community center, said anyone who downplays pickleball noise should try to hear it 12 hours a day.

“I know this seems like a small thing in the grand scheme of the world, where we’re dealing with big things, like climate change,” Ciccarelli said. “But as you can see, it’s a nationwide problem.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research.