Name: The pickleball craze, explained
Uploaded: 2026-03-03T09:55:32.000Z
Duration: 5 min 37 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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By now, surely you've heard of pickleball.

The so called fastest growing sport in the country.

Pickleball's popularity skyrocketed during the pandemic, bringing it out of retirement communities and into the mainstream.

I discovered pickleball and the light went off in my head.

Where would you be without pickleball right now?

Now there are fancy new Instagram ads selling trendy paddles and balls, a professional league backed by Kevin Durant and LeBron James, and

a Facebook group for pretty much every town in America.

Why don't you take that pickleball and shove it up your.

So how did pickleball take over and where can it go from here?

It's not hard to understand pickleball's appeal.

It's sort of like a giant adult playground game that's easy to pick up and find people to play with whenever we come out.

The entire ground is covered with pickleball courts.

I live literally like right next door here and I just saw scores of people on the weekends and kind of just jumped in.

played on a much smaller court, which means less running and quicker games.

The nets are advertised as being portable and easy to assemble.

And there's plenty of resources online that show you how to carve up a tennis court into one, two, or up to four pickleball courts.

In some places, the impromptu nature of the sport has caused some friction and so called turf wars for public space.

Like at the Peninsula Tennis Club in San Diego, where a group of pickleball players staged a dramatic takeover demanding its tennis courts be converted for pickleball.

In Santa Rosa, public courts dual lined for pickleball and tennis were vandalized with motor oil to send the message that the new craze was no longer welcome there.

But it's not just the fight for court space that has some people fed up with pickleball.

It measures sound pressure levels in decibels.

A decibel is one unit of loudness, and it's measured logarithmically rather than linearly.

Basically, that means that steadily increasing sound level by 10 decibels doesn't look like this, but

more like this, where each increase of 10db sounds twice as loud.

So a motorcycle at 100db, sounds twice as loud as a hairdryer at 90db, which is twice as loud as a vacuum cleaner at 80 decibels.

He produces vox atlas, and he's gonna help me with a little experiment.

Bouncing a tennis ball on a tennis racket averaged around 70 decibels, which is comparable to the noise level of a busy office.

When we measured the sound of a pickleball against a paddle, it clocked in around 80 decibels.

That's right where sound becomes loud enough to be irritating.

Now, obviously, this isn't the most scientific experiment, and of course, tennis matches make sound.

But the point is pickleball's equipment, rigid paddles against hollow plastic balls, makes a lot of noise.

Clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack.

Mounting noise complaints have forced cities and towns from Victoria, British Columbia, to Newport, Rhode island, to come up with temporary solutions like limited hours for pickleball and in some places, banning the sport altogether.

Both sides of this conflict agree pickleball has to go somewhere.

Expanding or creating dedicated space for the sport would help alleviate the strain on shared spaces and help isolate the noise issue.

Developers have already cashed in on the demand, opening state of the art private pickleball clubs across the country.

So far, underfunded parks and recs departments have been moving slower, but progress is being made.

Cincinnati recently opened this free to the public pickleball facility.

A collaboration between community fundraisers, the Cincinnati parks department, and

the philanthropic Cincinnati parks Foundation converted eight dilapidated tennis courts into 18 pickleball courts, plus three dual line courts for pickleball and tennis.

What was formerly a mostly ignored space drew over 13,000 pickleball players in 2022.

There's plans like this in the works all over the country.

This one was shared with me by the Peninsula Tennis Club.

That's where that angry pickleball takeover took place in April 2022.

Their proposal would convert this unused space away from the tennis courts for pickleball courts.

These projects need funding, but where pickleball goes, other facilities benefit.

Efforts to invest in public pickleball courts are resulting in new volleyball courts, basketball courts, and

But until more courts become available, and

maybe even after they do, pickleball will likely maintain its DIY spirit.

There are pickleball courts around the city, but we could just come in here and play.

Like, not really plan anything in advance and just find a spot.

Being able to just, like, grab that little bag here and come out and text my friends and have people show up and meet new people is very appealing, I think.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

The pickleball craze, explained

phenomenon

pandemic

average

experiment