Turf War

Jason Koebler has a big-time job these days as the founder of the news site 404 Media. But in his heart, he is a reporter. He digs into stories. He describes himself in his bio as someone who loves “Freedom of information Act requests … and surfing.” Recently, he’s been FOIA-ing on a new topic: pickleball.

“For pickleball, I filed in 25 different cities or towns,” Koebler said.

At this point, you might have a few questions. First off: Why pickleball? The answer to that has to do with this growing sport’s aggressive lobbyists, who are tying local governments up in knots. But when he started his research, honestly, Koebler didn’t know too much about that. He just knew what was happening down the block.

“I live near a paddle tennis court, which is basically tennis but on a small court. And at these courts, I saw this big sign that said, ‘Pickleball players, go home’ or ‘Pickleball was not welcome here.’ And I was like, What is going on? What happened was that pickleball players were sneaking onto the courts when they were open and playing pickleball when this was supposed to be a court for paddle tennis only,” Koebler said. “When I saw that sign, I was like, I bet these people are complaining to the government about the pickleball people.”

It turns out that these people were complaining. A lot. And not just in Koebler’s neighborhood. The city of Dallas told him that it had more than 100,000 emails mentioning the word pickleball. They couldn’t even begin to forward them all. The city of Fort Lauderdale said it would need $10,000 to produce all of its pickleball discourse.

These emails are about who can take up public space, and whether pickleballers are taking up too much of it. And if you’re thinking, Who cares?, Koebler says that the fight over who can take up space in this country—it’s kind of at the heart of the whole American project.

“I think that in exploring the absurd, we can learn more about how government works and you can take larger lessons from it.”

On a recent episode of What Next, we spoke with Jason Koebler about what his overflowing inbox can tell you about how the government’s working right now—and who it’s working for. Oh! And pickleball. We’ve got a lot to say about pickleball. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Mary Harris: On the off chance you do not yet know what pickleball is, Koebler says, Just imagine a Diet Coke version of tennis. It’s slower and smaller. Uses paddles instead of rackets. 

Jason Koebler: It’s honestly like a mix between ping-pong and tennis but played on a small court. You’re running around, but you don’t have to run that far.

One Washington Post columnist, a guy who hates pickleball, said that players have to defend “an area the size of a rug,” which is a little side-eye from the tennis community.

I don’t play tennis or pickleball. I have played, but I’m not a “player.”

That’s how you avoid bias in a story like this.

Exactly! I’m an impartial person here. But over Thanksgiving, I was about to publish this story and I went to a family Thanksgiving and I started talking to people who I know who played tennis. And I was like, Do you know about the pickleball drama? And every single tennis player that I’ve told this story knew exactly what I was talking about immediately. There’s this huge rivalry between tennis players and pickleball players. The tennis players have this huge sense of superiority because they see their game as a real sport where you have to be physically fit. Whereas one of the appeals of pickleball is that you don’t have to run that much.

Pickleball has been around since 1965, which kind of surprised me because I’d only heard about it in the last few years. How did this surge start?

During the pandemic, people were looking for things to do outside, and pickleball really, really surged in popularity during that. There’s a lot of word of mouth and then there’s a lot of evangelism from pickleball players. If you play pickleball, you want to get your friends involved in it.

And communities are spending real money to invest in pickleball. Washington, D.C., just set aside three-quarters of a million dollars in their budget for new courts.

There’s very few dedicated facilities for pickleball only. And one of the goals of USA Pickleball is to have communities build new courts, and they’re pushing all over the country to get these courts made. At the same time, local budgets for public space are very low. And so I was very interested in how this was going to work. Because it seems like we build very few things in the United States anymore for the public good. And yet there’s this really politically engaged community of pickleball players who want new facilities.

I want to talk about pickleball haters. What do the pickleball haters hate so much about this sweet little sport?

There’s multiple groups of people who hate pickleball. I would say that the original pickleball haters are homeowners and homeowner associations because they say that the noise associated with pickleball—the plastic ball hitting the hard racket on a small court, back and forth all day—is driving them crazy. And there’s been multiple lawsuits from homeowners and homeowners associations against specific cities where they say that one, they’re being driven insane and two, they’re worried that their property values are going down.

People get really dramatic about this. There’s a New York Times article about these lawsuits. Someone described it as like having a pistol range in your backyard. Then there’s the question of land use. You’ve talked about how tennis enthusiasts basically are just not having it from the pickleball people. They feel like their courts have been usurped by this sport.

This is actually what I found a lot more of when I was filing my public records requests. In Boston, for example, there’s these courts called the South Street courts and you could reserve them. And pickleball players had figured out how to book all of the slots for months on end. And so, there were all of these tennis players saying, “We simply cannot play tennis because pickleball players are here at all times.”

After I published the story, I saw this tweet and someone said, “How can you tell whether something is a tennis court or a pickleball court?” And the joke is that a pickleball court has people on it. So the idea is that they’re spreading throughout these cities, taking up any blacktop, any concrete area, basketball court, tennis court, roller hockey court.

Pickleball, pickleball, pickleball.

And the people who use the these things to play basketball or tennis or roller hockey are very upset because they were used to playing basketball after school and now they can’t.

Those people who figured out how to book all the courts, is that because they were especially organized or smart? I assume that the tennis people could also just go in and be like, I’m booking this until the end of time.

I’m going to generalize here and stereotype. But pickleball players are far more organized than other players of other sports, based on thousands of emails that I read. There are these people in city after city who are “pickleball ambassadors.” And they are given a tool kit from this group called USA Pickleball about how to talk to local government to gain access to more public spaces. And USA Pickleball’s strategy is to try to convince city council or the parks department or your local politician to build new pickleball courts. But because of this NIMBY aspect where homeowners don’t want pickleball in their backyard, it’s really hard to build new pickleball courts in certain places. And so what is happening is pickleball players have to use already-existing public infrastructure. This means basketball courts, hockey courts, tennis courts, of course. And if there’s a permitting system, they’re organized and they make sure to book out all of the permits. If there is not a permitting system, I saw emails where it’s like, I will bring my net for crack of dawn to the tennis court and set up my pickleball net. And then we will play in shifts all day so that we keep the court and the tennis players can’t get on here.

That’s crazy!

Compare the USA Pickleball tool kit and these ambassadors with the teenager playing pickup basketball after school: He doesn’t know how to lobby the government for a permit or whatever.

And he’s not expecting to have to. He’s played at that basketball court for years.

Exactly. I saw a lot of emails from parents of teenagers who were like, “My kid came home crying because he couldn’t even play basketball, and he was expecting to.” There was a lot of “please fix this immediately” emails.

Can we break down one specific pickleball war and what you learned from it? I’m wondering if it makes sense to start in New York City because I know people were especially organized there.

There was one specific pickleball ambassador in New York City who—it’s a volunteer job—but this is what her job was: She would walk around town and look for any uninhabited concrete space. Take photos of that space, and then email the Parks Department and say, “You could put a pickleball court here.” And it was just picture after picture after picture of random stretches of concrete.

And this person really cared about pickleball?

This person was a USA Pickleball ambassador, so a pickleball superfan.

That’s not an official term. This person is not like going to the U.N.!

It’s an official term in that USA Pickleball calls them ambassadors. It has a pickleball ambassador program. But no, they are not foreign dignitaries. But it is an official title from the USA Pickleball organization, and if you are a USA pickleball ambassador, you get a USA Pickleball email address. So, it’s like you are quasi-officially a member of the national governing body for the sport of pickleball. I’m not going to name the woman because she’s just a citizen, but she is a pickleball instructor in New York City. So she wanted to find places that she could both play pickleball and then teach students. It was her job.

Oh, so she had a financial interest.

She did have a financial interest, yes. So, she put together a PowerPoint presentation that was just called “Pickleball.” And it had a slide that was history of pickleball, benefits of pickleball, pickleball court specs, stuff like this. And she had photoshopped a giant pickleball court on top of an existing basketball court with dimensions on it. It looked like an architectural drawing, but it also looked like it was done in MS Paint.

Get some clip art in there.

It was clip art. It really was. She sent this to the Parks Department and was emailing the Parks Department pretty regularly, and the Parks Department was responding and saying, “We’re going to try to solve this for you. You’re a constituent. This seems like a good thing. We’re going to try to find a place for you to play.” And eventually, they were given space to play that was next to a blacktop and next to a basketball court. And if anyone has ever played any sport in New York City, there’s a lot of stuff going on usually.

Yeah, you don’t have a lot of elbow room.

There’s this one email where the Parks Department is like, “Hey. We got a complaint that you took up more space than you were allotted. You were supposed to only play in this one section, but you were also playing in this other section. Please stop doing that.” And this woman responded and said, “Well, there was a kickball game happening, and there was a dog with no leash on, and there was a woman running with a stroller, and a kickball flew past my head, and there was a basketball player who was really rude to us. And I cannot believe that you are saying that we are the problem. We are not the problem.” And then there was like a back-and-forth between her and this Parks and Recreation employee. And eventually she says, “Can I have your phone number to talk about this?”

Oof! Elevating!

The next email from that guy was like, “You gave my phone number to everyone who plays pickleball. My office is getting flooded with calls.” And he said that the pickleball woman told them that they were going to take away the pickleball court. And he was, like, “I didn’t say that. It was inappropriate for you to say that. I’ve tried to help you, and now you’re flooding my office with angry calls. Please, please stop.”

This is aggressive advocacy! One thought I had when I was reading your reporting about this ambassador program was that it sounds like a lot of work. You would need to have time to be a pickleball ambassador, and you’d also want to know how to pull the levers of power in government.

I’m going to paint with a broad brush again. But this is again based on reading real emails from real people all over the country. Many of the pickleball ambassadors are retired. Many of them are former lawyers, or they’re people who are politically involved in some way. They have time on their hands. And it’s generally true that older people are more politically involved. They go to more city council meetings. They have more time to do this sort of thing. And so it the case that the pickleball lobby is so organized in part because it has experienced people working on this issue. One thing that I found really interesting is that a lot of the NIMBYs who are arguing against pickleball are also older people.

Boomers are eating their own.

They are, they are!

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Your reporting on all this was just really fantastic, a great read, and the details were amazing. But I’m curious what you came away with from it. Because you’re not a pickleball player. Why does it matter?

I don’t know if this is too lofty, but this is honestly what I think: I think public spaces and recreation are very important. I think that pickleball players should be allowed to play pickleball, and I think that tennis players should be allowed to play tennis. And I think that we should have enough public space for people to play whatever sport they want.

I don’t have anything against pickleball, but I do think that if you extrapolate this out—there are documents that I got that it’s like, the average pickleball court costs about $10,000 to build.

That’s not nothing. 

It’s not nothing. But it’s also not that expensive. Often the pickleball players volunteer to raise that money and give it to the city in question. And even doing something as simple as putting a new patch of concrete on land that city’s already owned, it gets this resistance from homeowners where they’re demanding that cities do noise assessments and economic impact assessments and environmental assessments and traffic assessments and all of these things, and it becomes really difficult to build a patch of concrete.

It’s the easiest thing I can think of. Imagine trying to build a new train line. Imagine trying to build a new apartment complex. And I really do think that this is one of the reasons why it’s so expensive and so arduous and so difficult to build new things in the United States because there are all of these organized groups that are trying to protect what they believe are their own interests and prevent anything from being built anywhere. And when that happens, we’re all fighting over this smaller and smaller public space.