Are any of you pickleball players, or familiar with it? Can you help me understand why the players shout so much? So Much Shouting!
I gather that the popularity of pickleball is spreading, but it’s certainly a big thing here. And that doesn’t bother me, except that people play on the tennis courts of the building across the street from us, and they’re so loud!
Let me set the scene. The courts are in their parking area, so coming this way, there are parking spaces, then a strip of landscaping around the fence, then the driveway, then more landscaping. The sidewalk, the swale, two lanes of traffic, wide landscaped median, two lanes of traffic, swale and sidewalk again. Our pool is at the front of our building, and then I’m on the sixth floor. Like this:
The court is mostly blocked by trees, which you might think would cut the noise, but not so much.
What I’m saying is, we’re not really close to the game. And if the plonk-plonk-plonk of the racquet noise was the extent of it, with indistinct conversation, I wouldn’t be writing about it. But instead, I hear lots of OHHHH! and HEYYYY! and YAYYYY! and OOOOHHH! and WOOOO! Just, why?
My immediate reaction, with no idea whether there's any merit to it, is inversion layers. We're less than two miles from a big outdoor auditorium by the San Francisco Bay that books big name musical acts. We get the nighttime ocean fog interacting with the air warmed up during the day. Every now and then there'll be--I'm trying to remember here which temperature which layers of air would be--where the sound bounces off it and back to the ground at random angles, such that when one act set off fireworks-type sounds in their show our 911 got overwhelmed with people calling in gunshots in the neighborhood that weren't at all. It was the inversion layer.
ReplyDelete(The point being that it makes the sounds go to weird places at times.)
ReplyDeleteMy FIL plays HOURS of pickleball every day. I hypothesize that most pickleball players are old and their hearing is going. (Kind of mean, but...)
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