You can control the sound of your own playing, and moreover tennis uses a different ball.
Sue-Ellen Welfonder, 66, a best-selling romance novelist from Longboat Key, Fla., once enjoyed listening to the singing birds and the gentle swish of trees during her daily walks — her “soul balm time” — through a local park. The thump-thump of a tennis match never bothered her, either. But the arrival of pickleball this spring, she said, shattered her idyll.
“Pickleball has replaced leaf blowers as my No. 1 noise nuisance,” said Welfonder, who has been sketching the outlines of a new novel, set in the present day, with a couple of pickleball-loving characters: “I’m making them really nasty people.”
