“Virtually all sports are, in essence, struggles over space, but space that has carefully defined limits.”
—John Bale, Sports Geography (2023)1
In the fall of 2024, I found myself winding through the narrow roads of Ojai, California, in a cream-colored VW Beetle with Perry, one of my closest friends and a local. Tucked in a Ventura County valley eighty miles northwest of Los Angeles, the town is known for its citrus orchards and eclectic creative community. As we made our way through the scenic terrain, we passed a hand-painted sign that read, “Vote YES on Measure O! Save our pickleball courts! Don’t let the game end!” Perry noted that in this Southern California enclave, the sport had become a prickly issue that divided folks like her mother Laurie, an avid pickleballer, and those in town who despised the sounds reverberating off the courts. Measure O sought to address the future of four pickleball courts near Ojai’s City Hall. A majority yes vote would open the courts to the public year-round without any additional permits required, while No on O would keep the courts closed, primarily due to noise complaints from nearby residents.
If you live where this sport has not (yet) taken hold, pickleball blends badminton, tennis, and ping pong on a small court (about twenty-five percent the size of a tennis one). It is played in singles or doubles using a paddle and a small plastic wiffle ball that provides its noticeable (or grating, depending on who you ask) popping sound. Its smaller playing surface, ease of play, and communal culture have made the sport popular across every demographic, drawing players and their paddles to courts far beyond its Bainbridge Island origins over fifty years ago. Today, pickleball is also a professional sport fueled by investments from the likes of LeBron James and Tom Brady, and even enthused amateurs can head to themed bars (think Topgolf but for pickleball) where you can take sips of beer between sets.
Across the broader sporting landscape, the proliferation of pickleball has also caused a clash with its racquet elder, tennis. The contrast between the two sports can be felt from the local to the global. While tennis players routinely complain about pickleball players taking over their courts at the recreational level, professional tennis player Novak Djokovic has weighed in on the cultural dominance of pickleball that threatens the future of his sport. In a Wimbledon press conference, he told media members, “Tennis is the king or queen of all the racquet sports, that’s true, but tennis is in danger, and if we don’t do something about it, Padel [another paddle-based sport], pickleball, they’re gonna convert all the tennis clubs into Padel or pickleball [clubs]…We don’t make it accessible, we don’t make it affordable.”2 While the elitist aesthetic of tennis made it a glamorous albeit elusive sport, pickleball seemingly represents a democratic approach to sport, one that seems to welcome a range of demographics to its courts around the globe. At the local level, Ojai journalist Andra Belknap told me that Tim Krout, credited with bringing pickleball to town, often tells the story of finding the sport this way: “He meets this group of pickleballers while he’s on vacation, and they say, ‘Hey, do you know how to play pickleball? Come play with us. We’ll give you a paddle. You can use our ball. We’ll teach you the rules.’ And Tim remarked that of the sixty years he has lived in Ojai and has walked through Libbey Park, which has eight tennis courts in it, no one has ever hollered at him to come play tennis. And I think that kind of says everything about the different cultures.”
However, not everyone is picking up a paddle these days. Amid the pickleball craze, I have found myself enthralled by the hyperlocal dynamics of places like Ojai, where embroiled Facebook rants, city council meetings, and passionate letters to the editor in the newspaper serve as sites of tension within communities over the sport. Measure O is but one example of pickleball’s hold on local politics across the United States. As real estate agent and resident Jessica McCrea told the Ventura County Star, “It’s not just an Ojai problem. It’s a national problem.”3
While the elitist aesthetic of tennis made it a glamorous albeit elusive sport, pickleball seemingly represents a democratic approach to sport, one that seems to welcome a range of demographics to its courts around the globe.
Battles over public space via sport are, of course, nothing new. Sport geographer John Bale details this history in the introduction of his book Landscapes of Modern Sport4 via the familiar refrains of constructing multi-million (now billion) dollar stadiums or shiny golf courses for the country club crowd. He writes, “Sport is a pervasive cultural form which is not only obvious in the vernacular landscape but also of importance economically and in terms of planning and land use change.”5 In Ojai, pickleball advocates frame this sporting battle as the people’s will against an “investor,” Karen Quimby, who owns a rental property near the courts. The players’ opponents organized together as “No on Measure O,” operated a website, and circulated flyers around town decrying the “special interest group” of pickleball enthusiasts they felt encroached on the space and sound of Ojai. Led by Quimby, they ran a campaign slogan asking Ojai residents to “Be a good neighbor. Vote No on O.”
Ojai-based journalist Andra Belknap followed the measure closely and reported on all things pickleball emerging from City Hall in 2024. She told me, “My big realization of my many years in political campaigns is that as much as I want them to be about policy, it’s emotional. It’s all emotional. It’s about how these issues make me feel about myself. It’s about tribalism…Everybody used political language on both sides in ways that I would say is inaccurate.” While Quimby’s role as “investor” contains the subtext of outside influence, she is indeed a resident of Ojai. And the positioning of pickleball players as “bad neighbors,” those deemed “selfish” for not considering others, obscures the neighborly vibes of Laurie and others who look out for one another in myriad ways, watering plants while someone close by is out of town or sharing produce or eggs from flora and fauna in their backyards. As a sport studies scholar, what I have found most interesting in the so-called “problem” of pickleball extends beyond noise complaints or another sport needing “saving.” Listening in, I hear more than a plastic pop; issues involving public space, the role of local government, and the limits of the appropriate reverberate off the courts as well.
A sign in support of Pickleball in Ojai (Photo courtesy of Dr. Perry B. Johnson)
The people behind the pop
The courts at the center of Measure O were borne out of a singular dilapidated tennis court near City Hall, one that pickleball players felt could be repurposed into a set of four pickleball courts. While other pickleball courts were eventually constructed in another part of town, in Soule Park, the City Hall courts were a matter of personal pride. In 2019, the city of Ojai repaved the old court, and instead of shelling out the $35,000-40,000 quoted to build the new courts, pickleball players chipped in their own money and labor and created the courts themselves (for around $7,000 total).6 Here, where the fuzzy bounce of tennis had not been heard on pavement for several years, there was now a renewed space for play, animated by community members who imagined a new space to convene for sport. Andra Belknap told me,
The dynamics of the arguments are really interesting because, on one side, you have these people who have a real emotional connection to their sport. They invested in refurbishing the space, and they worked together and contributed, like many hours of volunteer labor to getting the courts together…And so they created a really tightknit community, and then they hear on the other side of the street, “Oh, these people are offended by the sounds of your balls or the sounds of your laughing, screaming, etc.” And you know that causes some in the pickleball crew to kind of make fun of the arguments from the neighbors because there are some people framing it as “well, who doesn’t like the sound people laughing?”
Clandestine courts
The sound of laughter is hardly the most contested sonic residue of the pickleball courts near City Hall. The pops of pickleball’s small wiffle ball combined with the reverberations from the game’s colorful paddles (up to 1,000 times per second) have been described as “torture” by some residents.7 To understand why this phenomenon has resulted in closed courts, vandalism, and community clashes, we might consider how sports geographer John Bale describes individual sports as originating in geographic space and eventually spreading outward to a host of regions, nations, and, eventually, the globe. With this expansion, he writes, comes significant landscape changes.8 He describes these new iterations of sport as clandestine—“those of disorder in contrast to the normal world of ordered and planned sportscapes.”9 Bale argues that the “boom in self-generated sports participation” offers a subversive alternative to the top-down institutionalization of sports we often find in athletic spaces.10 The perceived “disorderly” nature of pickleball is seemingly due to both the communal grassroots nature of its development in local communities and the deviation from the “expected” sounds of play. Whereas the preconceived notions of what a playground (children’s shrieks, swinging chains, gravel crunching) or basketball court (dribbling, shoe squeaks, rubber-to-rim reverberation) sound like may alert a resident or passerby to what they may hear, pickleball as a newer sport introduces a distinct sonic landscape that nearby listeners may find particularly abrasive because of its sharp introduction into a previously understood soundscape. Ojai real estate agent Jessica McCrea told the Ventura County Star, “People aren’t just being driven out of their homes. They’re being driven insane because the noise is non-stop all day. It’s not just loud. It’s one of those grating-on-your-nerves type of sounds.”11 To understand this further, not one but two sound studies have been conducted to determine if Ojai pickleball causes noise pollution at a concerning rate. One, commissioned by the Citizens for Sound Pickleball Solutions, found that the noise from the courts near City Hall created pollution levels beyond the legal limit.12 The other, ordered by the city and conducted by Pickleball Sound Mitigation LLC, stated the opposite: “Sound level metering conducted by PSM does not suggest any violation of the City noise standards at the property line of the nearest neighbor to the City Hall courts.”13 However, the report acknowledges that sound could bother residences at decibels lower than the legal limits. This, they argue, is the case with pickleball.
Listening in, I hear more than a plastic pop; issues involving public space, the role of local government, and the limits of the appropriate reverberate off the courts as well.
Sound scholar Brandon LaBelle understands acoustics as “a politics through which struggles over recognition and rights, movement and access, belonging and participation are drawn out.”14 For him, acoustics are a political question, an issue driven by a population’s material and social norms and expectations. In his book Acoustic Justice: Listening, Performativity, and the Work of Reorientation, LaBelle offers the concept of acoustic justice and defines it through questions of “access, fairness, and ethical regard” in everyday encounters of hearing and being heard.15
Acoustic norms that define what types of sound are “good” or “fitting” for an environment are always subject to change (and often do) over time. These normative values and patterns, LaBelle argues, define space itself–who matters, who can speak, and what types of behavior are deemed appropriate.16 Given this, how should we listen to the pickleball battles happening here and across the country? What would acoustic justice look like for all the residents of Ojai?
The single (pickleball) issue voter
Ultimately, Ojai residents voted yes on Measure O, the Ojai Pickleball Act, with a slim defeat for the No on Measure O group by 23 votes. After the election, I asked Andra how she felt about the results and what they said about the state of the city. She told me, “I don’t believe for a second that we are like a perfect 50/50 split ideologically regarding the use of public space. I think that it’s very much tribalism, us/them. I think humans are comfortable with that dynamic, and we like that dynamic. That, to me, explains this result. Twenty-three more people in the community think that pickleball should be allowed to be played in a neighborhood. I’m not willing to believe that.”
Witnessing the incredible focus on recreational sport in a space directly adjacent to supportive housing (city and state-supported units and services that aim to address the housing crisis) brings a larger question into focus: Who is public space for?
What Andra is willing to accept: how this measure became a central part of this election cycle. While counting Ojai’s ballots, it was determined that about twenty folks weighed in on Measure O without voting in Ojai’s mayoral election. Here, it seems, pickleball can create a unique version of the single-issue voter. When I asked Andra about folks turning up at the polls to weigh in on this measure rather than elected positions at the local, state, or federal level, she told me, “Actually, that doesn’t surprise me because that was the ballot issue that had the most energy and conversation around it. And that to me was absurd/hilarious as well. I have to look at these things as funny, or I’ll lose my mind.” For a journalist who dedicates the majority of her time to reporting on homelessness and poverty, witnessing the incredible focus on recreational sport in a space directly adjacent to supportive housing (city and state-supported units and services that aim to address the housing crisis) brings a larger question into focus: Who is public space for? And how should we allocate resources and space at this moment? John Bale writes, “The modern sportscape with its rationality and its myths, its enclosed and segmented spaces, and its artifice and monoculture tell us a good deal about the character of sport itself; but, at the same time, it tells us that we live in an age of ambiguity. Perhaps it also reveals something about those who created it—and something about ourselves.”17 That residents have repeatedly rallied against supportive housing being located near their own homes signals what they do not want to see; the popular refrain against pickleball continues to be about what those in close proximity do not want to hear.18 In both cases, local politics reveal the cultural terrain not bound to a single town or ballot; instead, these questions of access, equity, and belonging frame our current understandings of the social topography around the country. Should we choose to listen in, ideas of what acoustic justice could sound like offer the potential to change more than how (or what) we play.
