Pickleball produces noise and some suburbanites across the country are not happy about it:

Sports can produce all kinds of unpleasant noises: referees’ whistles, rancorous boos, vuvuzelas. But the most grating and disruptive sound in the entire athletic ecosystem right now may be the staccato pop-pop-pop emanating from America’s rapidly multiplying pickleball courts.

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.

People from a number of communities are interviewed about the noise. The suburbs figure prominently in this list of the communities cited:

-Arlington, VA: suburb of Washington, D.C.

-Wellesley, MA: suburb of Boston

-York, ME: suburb of Portland

-Scottsdale, AZ: suburb of Phoenix

-Longboat Key, FL: suburb of Sarasota

-West Linn, OR: suburb of Portland

-Falmouth, MA: in the Barnstable Town MSA

Is this a primarily suburban problem? It may not be exclusive to suburbs – see this earlier post about noise complaints in Chicago – but pickleball is growing in popularity among suburbanites and suburbs have a lot of single-family homes whose owners do not appreciate noises or other threats to their private lives.

Will this continue to be a suburb-by-suburb problem, is there a solution that can be effective across suburbs, and/or will this problem spread to kinds of American communities?