Sounding Off On Pickleball

Diving into one topic that’s been on our mind lately…pickleball’s sound problem

🔊 Sounding off on pickleball

Pickleball’s sound problem is probably little news to anyone who has played the game…or followed recent headlines about neighbors protesting new court construction…or read this well circulated NYT piece…or watched the city of Portland tell a private group to self-fund their pickleball courts, just to shut it down from neighbors complaining about noise after the pickleball group spent $20k to convert tennis courts to pickleball courts.

On one hand, we completely understand that pickleball, particularly in large groups, is not an inherently quiet sport. The carbon fiber paddle face hitting a plastic wiffleball creates its infamous whack, and it’s not going to even come close to the sound of a soft felt tennis ball hitting strings. Not to mention tennis is often played with 2 people to pickleball’s 4, and pickleball courts often draw excited crowds of people there to play and engage socially. But, per usual, they are fundamentally different games, despite everyone’s attempt to constantly compare the two. So, if you’ve lived your whole life next to a quiet park, and all of a sudden new courts were constructed 100 feet from you, we can see why the new noise and excitement from your local pickleball players will be seen as a nuisance and won’t bring you too much joy.

However, we think the negative press and sound complaints should be looked at from a few angles.

#1. The problem neighbors have with pickleball isn’t only a function of the noise it creates, but the fact that their quiet and undisturbed park is now occupied by a facility that disturbs their previously peaceful serenity.

These park-side residents would be similarly irritated if other loud sports or park amenities (e.g. children’s playgrounds, summer camps, etc.) drew crowds all day every weekend, as the core of the complaint is that something pleasant and accretive to their property value (peace & quiet) is now being taken from them. These types of complaints have existed around the country for as long as people have owned homes (e.g. new playgrounds, new malls going up, new offices, etc.), and it’s only making it onto the pages of the NYT because it’s an adversarial story that draws readers to watch the cage match between “distraught neighbors” taking on “the country’s fastest growing sport”.

The reality though is that parks are, by design, largely made for the congregation and interaction of large swaths of the community. From a public goods perspective, their goal is to provide an outlet to foster community through social interaction and physical exercise through sports and other activities. That empty park you drive by, while pretty to look at, reflects a misallocation of millions of dollars of taxpayer money (~60% of local park funding comes from taxes on local community members). Public parks are meant to be filled with people of all ages.

Unsurprisingly, the best way to get everyone to enjoy the park, foster community, and justify the huge taxpayer investment is to have activities that draw crowds for residents of any age to participate. The National Institute of Health conducted a study in 2009 to understand why some parks are used more than others, and they observed that the primary correlates to park usage were 1) the size of the park and 2) the number of organized activities observed. Pickleball’s age-agnostic, skill-agnostic, and social qualities make it one of the best organized activities to bring to public parks and are demonstrative of the impact it has on local community attendance.

#2. As we alluded to in #1, public policy should be aimed at implementing solutions that benefit the majority of a population, despite the fact that there will always be unintended consequences and edge cases that negatively impact some at worst, or provide little benefit at best.

Local policymakers are abdicating their responsibility to the community if they are prioritizing the concerns of the few over the outsized benefits to the entire community (within reason; See: debates around eminent domain). If the citizens of a city disagree with a proposed building plan, they can demonstrate their public disapproval through city meetings and/or voting those elected officials out of office. However, these are risks that any property owner faces, as cities and private entities can build value-dilutive projects adjacent to your home that you have little ability to influence. So, yes, it’s an absolute drag if the city decides to meet the insane demand for volleyball by building new courts in front of your beachfront home, but unfortunately, that is a risk in any growing, high-density town. Instead of pausing or killing new community developments, efforts should be made to improve the quality of life for those living adjacent to these new projects - which we’ll get into later.

#3. Lastly, we want to propose something as food for thought that we haven’t heard anyone discuss yet: Pickleball’s sound “problem” may actually be a feature of the game, rather than a bug.

We had one instance in the past week observing someone turn down the courtside music because they couldn’t “hear the ball come off the paddle”, and another firsthand experience of someone playing with a paddle that deadened the sound. In the latter experience, it was extremely hard for one of your authors to react to and track the ball until it had already traveled a decent distance across the court. This got us wondering how much sound in a sport can influence its playability.

Sure enough, we got to reading and found a pretty interesting study done out of Germany and Canada that sought to review the relationship between sound and movement. “Key Topic 1” is a fun read for sports junkies and nerds like your authors.

The relevant findings for pickleball:

1. The sound created by natural movement and acoustic information from the sport carries rich inputs that have a direct impact on a player’s ability to react to specific events.

2. Sound provides critical information that is used to inform or enhance spatial perception, response times, and positioning in a sport.

3. Experiments were run to manipulate the amount and frequency of auditory feedback to athletes, and suggested that audio deprivation hindered the performance of experienced tennis players by decreasing their ability to return serves.

4. Interestingly, it had little effect on a tennis player’s ability to serve the ball, suggesting that the role of sound directly impacts the ability to respond to an incoming shot.

5. Similar experiments were run in soccer which measured a goalie’s reaction times and ability to block penalty kicks when sound was depressed and amplified at the point of a player making contact with the ball - TL;DR: goalies struggled when the sound was removed at the point of contact.

6. Interestingly, while sound has an immediate impact on athletes’ performance, the greatest benefits were achieved over a 10-week training period where athletes performed in a modulated sound enviornment with noise both amplified and depressed during practice - improved their reaction times and ability to predict opponents’ movements.

What does all this mean to us in simple terms?

1. Sound may be a key feature that makes pickleball such a playable and inclusive sport. If the studies of tennis players returning balls and goalie reflexes being impacted by the sound of a foot making contact have merit, then it seems to suggest that in a quick reflex sport like pickleball, the ability to loudly and clearly hear the ball come off a paddle materially impacts your responsiveness and predictive ability to track where a ball is going.

2. We would strongly encourage and support research and development into more scalable and efficient sound mitigation ideas that don’t affect the actual paddles, balls, and noise on the court, but which mitigate noise as it dissipates outwards towards neighbors - that’s why this article in The Hustle was so interesting to us and we’d love to speak to anyone working in this domain.

3. Public policymakers should continue their investment in public pickleball courts to foster community, as they are one of the highest ROI activities to draw residents into parks and their responsibility is to make policy and investments that benefit the maximum number of residents (within reason).

4. With that said, we recognize that greater planning should be done to address the concerns and needs of the minority of park-side residents who objectively face the persistent and newfound noise generated by the game, which can materially decrease your quality of life depending on how close you live. More effective sound mitigation techniques should become standard in any city’s planning and RFP when constructing a project. Additionally, cities are often the largest owners of public land and should consider identifying locations for courts in areas that have slightly less population density, while still being within close enough proximity for residents to drive there.

This will no doubt engender some debate and disagreement, so we’d love to hear from you by replying to this email, or setting up a time to talk here.

Have a great weekend y’all!

- Ryan & Braxton