The sound has brought on a nationwide scourge of frayed nerves and unneighborly clashes — and those, in turn, have elicited petitions and calls to the police and last-ditch lawsuits aimed at the local parks, private clubs and homeowners associations that rushed to open courts during the sport’s recent boom.
The hubbub has given new meaning to the phrase racket sport, testing the sanity of anyone within earshot of a game.
“It’s like having a pistol range in your backyard,” said John Mancini, 82, whose Wellesley, Mass., home abuts a cluster of public courts.
“It’s a torture technique,” said Clint Ellis, 37, who lives across the street from a private club in York, Maine.
“Living here is hell,” said Debbie Nagle, 67, whose gated community in Scottsdale, Ariz., installed courts a few years ago.
Modern society is inherently inharmonious — think of children shouting, dogs barking, lawn mowers roaring. So what makes the sound of pickleball, specifically, so hard to tolerate?
For answers, many have turned to Bob Unetich, 77, a retired engineer and avid pickleball player, who became one of the foremost authorities on muffling the game after starting a consulting firm called Pickleball Sound Mitigation. Unetich said that pickleball whacks from 100 feet away could reach 70 dBA (a measure of decibels), similar to some vacuum cleaners, while everyday background noise outside typically tops off at a “somewhat annoying 55.”
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