There’s a sour side to pickleball.
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.
“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.
He never anticipated his job might include lecturing senior citizens about how to play nicely. But nothing has been off limits since the picklers — short for pickleball players — began showing up in earnest in the Denver enclave.
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.
In September, the Glendale city council ended up passing a first of its kind — according to USA Pickleball’s managing director of facilities development and equipment standards, Carl Schmits — ordinance after community tennis players grumbled that picklers had taken over the courts from dawn to dark. It is now a misdemeanor for people to bring pickleball nets onto outdoor tennis courts, to draw pickleball lines on them, shovel snow off them, or place chairs on their surfaces. Cameras will be trained on the repaired tennis courts to catch violators, who could face up to a $1,000 fine.
“It’s the scarcity [with pickleball venues],” sighed Line. “People never feel like there’s a lack of basketball courts.”
In New York City, picklers have tussled with parents after setting up courts in children’s play areas in parks such as Corporal John A. Seravalli Playground in the West Village. 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.
“If pickleball is that popular let them build their own courts:),” tennis great Martina Navratilova wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, last year.
The United States Tennis Association maintains that the sport of kings is “booming” and that “the number of people playing tennis is more than the combined number of people playing pickleball, badminton, racquetball, and squash.” A 2023 National Tennis Participation Report found that nearly 24 million people played at least once in 2022.
But, the SFIA report noted that “pickleball continued to be the fastest growing sport in America. Participation almost doubled in 2022, increasing by 85.7% year-over-year and by an astonishing 158.6% over three years.”
By comparison, tennis participation only increased about 4% in 2022.
Mike Tarvin, a northeast U.S. sales manager for SportMaster, which produces coatings used for sports surfaces, including official pickleball courts, has been in sales for the company for 25 years. He remembers mostly fielding tennis court-related requests until roughly a decade ago.
“In the last three years, every phone call I get is, ‘I want to convert my tennis court into pickleball’ or ‘I’m looking at putting in new pickleball courts at my location, can you help me?’” Tarvin said.
A pickler himself, he anticipates the courts eventually becoming as ever-present in certain communities as backyard pools.
In March, the Association of Pickleball Professionals reported that an estimated 48 million adult Americans had played pickleball at least once in the past year. The sport was originally viewed as mostly a game played among seniors, but the average age for a player is now 35 years old, according to the SFIA.
But, pickleball causes more of a racket than other racquet sports.
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.
On Cape Cod, an injunction barring pickleball is in place at certain outdoor courts in the town of Falmouth, Massachusetts, because of noise complaints from neighbors.
Dustin Fauth, who lives with his wife and two children a couple hundred feet from the pickleball courts, said in an affidavit that the constant “pop, pop-pop” of the game “comes through the windows and walls” of his home and forces his family to “play loud music, wear noise-canceling headphones, close windows (or) leave our home to go elsewhere when we just can’t take it anymore.”
Falmouth officials have tackled ongoing pickleball concerns at their meetings for years. And, despite the injunction that was in place over the summer, pickleball players (some say, primarily from out of town) still riled up neighbors — and concerned town officials — by climbing the fence to try to play.
Lance Willis, principal acoustical engineer for Spendiarian & Willis Acoustics & Noise Control, which handles noise studies, used to do two or three jobs a year primarily around Arizona at 55-and-older communities. Now, he typically has four or five pickleball-related jobs at any one time and they are across the United States in places such as Minnesota, Vermont, Massachusetts, as well as in Canada.
“I’ve been involved in several legal actions [as an expert witness] where neighbors are trying to get an injunction against another neighbor’s pickleball court that they have in their backyard,” he said.
Willis spoke to The Post by phone while in Centennial, Colorado, where he was helping city officials draw up an ordinance that would guide pickleball court permitting. In March, the city put in place a six-month moratorium on constructing new outdoor pickleball courts.
In San Francisco, socialite Holly Peterson, who is married to Hotwire.com co-founder Karl Peterson, headed up a campaign in August petitioning the city to immediately shut down the courts in her upscale neighborhood.
“As a Presidio Heights resident, the relentless pickleball games on Presidio Wall Courts are damaging our peace and quiet. The noise isn’t just grating — it’s altering our way of life and the wildlife of our cherished Presidio,” she wrote in a petition on Change.org, “The endless racket threatens the fragile ecosystem and our community’s prestige. This isn’t just about us — it’s about preserving nature for future generations. Beyond that, home values within a 500-foot radius are sinking, deterred by the unyielding noise. This isn’t just a hit to homeowners; it’s a blow to our local economy.”
But, Peterson was called out on social media for hypocrisy days after the petition went live, when Reddit users discovered that she and her husband have been trying to sell their $36-million mansion — which features a karaoke-room that opens onto its own outdoor pickleball court.
Still, controversies and complaints aren’t putting a damper on the game’s appeal.
USA Pickleball, the sport’s national governing body, is involved in more than $200 million in construction projects for pickleball facilities around the country, from those at public parks to municipalities, private communities and small and large-scale sites, according to spokesperson Melissa Zhang.
For Jay Granieri, a broker with ONE Sotheby’s International Realty in Fort Lauderdale who gave up tennis for pickleball, neighborhood courts have become a hot real estate amenity.
“I’ve been selling real estate for over a decade,” Granieri said. “ I’ve never had anyone ask me about tennis, but I have had people ask me about pickleball. So that’s got to say something.”
Read more
