Pickleball’s rise to popularity
Throughout the years, there have been many reasons why pickleball grew to become so popular in America compared to other racquet sports. For one, its accessibility to play as a sport makes it much easier for people to play.
“Pickleball is accessible because you don’t have to make plans for it; you just show up,” said Lisa Shaw, a pickleball instructor in San Francisco who also plays for tennis teams. “Tennis used to be like that in San Francisco, but it went away when they started doing a reservation system on all the public courts.”
In addition, the real estate that pickleball courts take up is significantly less than the space tennis courts take up.
“With a tennis court, you could have four people that maybe play for an hour and a half, whereas with one tennis court, you could have four pickleball courts on there and have four games going on,” Leigh said.
As a sport, pickleball is well known for being less physically demanding than other racquet sports while promoting greater social interaction, making it much more beginner-friendly.
“Honestly, it’s more fun than tennis,” said Gabriel Rui, the Carlmont Pickleball Club founder and player on the Carlmont boys varsity tennis team. “It’s so much easier and rewarding because of how beginner-friendly and social the nature of the game is.”
However, even though pickleball has become much more popular as a sport, it comes with conflicts.
One major problem the sport poses to communities is that pickleball is a very loud sport. The unpleasant, noisy, percussive popping sound the paddle makes when it contacts the ball annoys many residents who live near public pickleball courts.
From 100 feet away, the sound of a pickleball hit by a paddle is around 70 decibels according to a pickleball noise impact assessment done by Spendiarian and Willis Noise Control. A volume of 70 decibels is similar to that of a vacuum cleaner, being much louder compared to tennis, where games are only 40 decibels from 100 feet away.
In combination with the high-pitched noise that comes with the paddle hitting the pickleball, the sound can be so unbearable for residents that it escalates to them filing noise complaints and lawsuits in some cases.
One such incident was in 2023, when residents of Falmouth, Mass., who lived near pickleball courts, filed a lawsuit against their town, claiming that the courts violated local sound ordinances. Due to the lawsuit, the pickleball courts were temporarily shut down, preventing the unpleasant sound from ringing in the community.
“I mean, the sound can be annoying; I agree with that,” Leigh said.