Spatwatch

'Noisy' Pickleball Takes Elderly Communities 'By Storm'

Erik Hayden 202 Views Oct 15, 2010
The grouchy, irascible Wall Street Journal hates a number of things. One thing they don't hate is the elderly sport Pickleball. A recent article breathlessly beholds how the hobby is "taking a growing number of 55-and over retirement communities by storm." The game, described as a hybrid of badminton, ping-pong and tennis, is ideally suited for older folks because it doesn't require a lot of quick, ligament-straining movements. But those 100,000+ pickleball devotees, many of whom duke it out in heated matches on retirement-home courts, have also faced hardship. Non-pickleball-playing residents resent them.

Journal Reporter Anne Tergeson lets some of these rankled seniors vent their frustrations: the sport is "noisy" and the "players do a lot of trash talking." In one community, a few pickleballers purchased a decibel meter to figure out how much louder the sport was than, say, tennis. Fortunately, "Tennis reached about 58 decibels while pickleball hit about 60," proving that the anti-pickleball community had little ammunition to hurl formal complaints.

Since you haven't already had enough, Tergeson also narrates a pickleball primer for your viewing pleasure.

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