One man’s quest to make pickleball quiet


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America’s fastest-growing sport has a noise problem. Can the solution be found in a makeshift lab outside Pittsburgh?

The new sound of summer in America is pwock — the collision of a plastic ball and fiberglass-covered paddle repeated hundreds of times an hour at city parks, country clubs, and retirement communities.


For pickleball players, pwock is glorious. It’s the sound of a solid hit, an auditory cue that means you’re having fun, competing, and maybe even getting revenge on that pompous high school P.E. teacher who once tormented your class with his crafty pickleball skills (although that last part might just be me).


Once a niche sport for retirees (and oddball P.E. teachers), pickleball has exploded over the last decade. Last year, 8.9m Americans played pickleball regularly, while another ~27m played at least once, making the sport nearly as popular as running.

But many people living near the pickleball courts, however, have a knock with the pwock. Enter Bob Unetich, a retired engineer and Carnegie Mellon University professor and founder of Pickleball Sound Mitigation LLC.
He’s become a go-to source for information (and diplomacy) in the pickleball wars, studying everything from paddles to the placement of courts.

If America starts hearing fainter pwock sounds, it might just be because the sport started listening to Unetich.

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https://thehustle.co/one-mans-quest-...kleball-quiet/