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An nameless reader shares a report: In late September, an arsonist set hearth to a storage shed at Memorial Park utilized by the Santa Monica Pickleball Membership, torching hundreds of {dollars} price of nets, rackets, balls, and different pickleball gear. “Unknown suspect(s) brought about a hearth that broken metropolis property (Tennis Courtroom Gate),” a police report I obtained utilizing a public data request says. The report provides that there’s physique digital camera footage of the incident and police-shot pictures, however the metropolis refused to launch them to me as a result of there may be an ongoing investigation. The arsonist continues to be at giant.
We nonetheless do not know the motive behind the arson, however the information caught my consideration as a result of it occurred whereas I used to be within the midst of making an attempt to know what I have been calling the pickleball wars. For the previous couple of months I have been making an attempt to know what’s been taking place behind-the-scenes in cities giant and small by submitting public data requests aimed toward studying how frequent beefs about pickleball are, and what’s inflicting them.
In the event you do not already find out about “the quickest rising sport,” Pickleball is type of like tennis, however performed on a court docket 1 / 4 of the scale utilizing a plastic ball just like a wiffle ball and a tough racket. The smaller court docket, laborious ball, and laborious racket signifies that pickleball is louder than tennis, a truth that’s introduced up fairly often by owners and home-owner associations who declare, considerably dubiously, that the noise from pickleball drives down their house values. My speculation going into researching this text was that individuals who stay in cities are mad on the noise created in the course of the act of enjoying pickleball they usually have in all probability complained to the federal government about it. What I discovered was surprisingly extra complicated: Hundreds of pages of paperwork I’ve reviewed present that pickleball’s surging reputation is overwhelming under-resourced parks departments in metropolis governments everywhere in the nation.
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