Pickleball is Terrorizing Local Communities and People Are Sick of It

NY Post - The game’s rapid rise — between 2020 and 2022, it saw a 113% increase in participation, according to a 2023 Sports & Fitness Industry Association (SFIA) report — has made for ugly turf wars, furious noise complaints, violence, lawsuits and even potential criminal charges.

Pickleball is ugly business. It's taken over America from coast to coast. Wherever there are retirement communities, wherever there are people who don't quite have the endurance to play tennis, wherever there are hard surfaces, pickleball has taken over. Pickleball is growing faster than our infrastructure can keep up with. There aren't enough tennis courts in the world to steal in order to keep up with the demand for pickleball. 

You just know that every day, thousands of husbands across America return from the store with their very first pickleball set.

"Babe, they just so happened to have these paddles on display at at Wal-Mart. They were only $20. Now that our youngest son has moved out I thought we could do this incessantly for the rest of our lives."

"But I'm not very athletic at all"

"Me neither. But we can still make it our entire personality."

Next thing you know, an old married couple is spending their Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday nights taking over public areas, and assaulting park employees with their paddles. 

“I’ve had to go over to our recreational sports center and tell 70-year-old men: ‘If you threaten to hit our sports center director with the paddle again, I’m going kick you out,’ ” said Chuck Line, the city manager in Glendale, Colorado.

It's hard to not feel bad for tennis. They used to be the sport of kings. Everybody in America loved tennis. John McEnroe, Pete Sampras, meth addict Andre Agassi, they were American heroes. But American tennis has had a brutal 20 year run. All the top players are now European. I suspect it's partly because rich American athletes across the country traded in their rackets for lacrosse poles. Who wants to play an individual sport when you can be a long stick mid and slug pops with your hot pussy slaying teammates. Then to make matters worse, some asshole invents a version of your sport that's slightly less hard on the knees, and tennis is getting bullied off their own courts. 

But, it’s mostly tennis players who are having their territory encroached upon. 

Roughly 35% of the nearly 45,000 pickleball courts in the U.S. and Canada were converted from tennis courts, leading some to cry foul. 

From what I'm reading, it sounds like pickleballers are an entitled bunch. If a pickleball couple is jonesing for a round of pickleball, they're going to make it happen by any means possible. They do NOT like to be told no. "Oh you've paid thousands of dollars for a concrete company to resurface the local tennis courts? Well too bad, Mr. & Mrs. Sandberg are in the midst of fierce best of the 7 with the Rodriguez's. Your court resurfacing will have to wait"

A couple months ago, a group of fierce competitors, all over the age of 60, refused to leave the city’s outdoor tennis courts when asked by maintenance staff.

The courts were scheduled to be resurfaced, but the players stood their ground and yelled “you can’t make us” until cops finally arrived.

But worst of all, think about the poor souls who's family homes are within ear shot of a pickleball court. Have you ever heard a pickleball ball hit a pickleball paddle? It's like a firework going off. God forbid somebody within 1000 yards of a court suffers from PTSD. Close your eyes and a pickleball rally sounds exactly like you're in the midst of crossfire in Beirut. Or so I'm told.

The hard paddle and perforated plastic ball used to play the game make for louder “impulsive” noises, as acoustical engineers call them, which can travel over longer distances than noises from tennis balls and racquets.

Dozens of lawsuits have been filed across the country against homeowner associations and municipalities because of noise concerns.

You help but feel bad for the families trying to sell their homes with a pickleball court across the street. People come over for your open house, a couple potential buyers fall in love with your granite countertops, then all of the sudden a deafening pickleball match breaks out. You try to explain to the couple that this only happens once in a while, but that's a lie. The sound of ball on paddle is constant. The only time the paddling stops is when the competitors take a break to beat the shit out of each other over a serve that may or may not have hit the line. Might as well just tear down your property, turn your lot into a pickleball facility, and rent out the courts. You'll have a better chance of recuperating your investment that way.