Pickleball in South Burlington prompts resident petition

This story by Liberty Darr was first published by The Other Paper on June 27.

For most of the 30 years Jovana Guarino has lived in South Burlington, she has considered the city a peaceful and enjoyable place to live.

That is until pickleball arrived.

Guarino says her quality of life has been drastically eroded by what she calls an “incessant and psychologically torturous ‘pop-pop-pop’” sound emanating from pickleball players at Szymanski Park at all hours of the day, or at least until 10 p.m. when the park lights shut off.

The back-and-forth racket has turned her world upside down in a way that she says keeps her from doing some of her favorite things — gardening, walking and biking the city, relaxing on her front porch and even keeping her windows open — because of the pervasive, “monotonous” sound.

For most of her time in the city, Guarino said she’s stayed far away from municipal mayhem and considers herself not to be an overly political person, but the pickleball problem has frayed nerves so intensely that it’s forced her to speak up at City Council and committee meetings for the first time since living in South Burlington.

But with no resolution in sight, Guarino is spearheading a petition that, as of Monday June 24, had garnered nearly 60 signatures, all from door-to-door campaigning that she has undertaken in her free time in the last month. The petition asks the city to remove pickleball from Szymanski Park and relocate it to Dorset Park, but Guarino said she is hopeful for any sort of compromise the city is willing to make.

“This is my first political adventure,” she said. “I have never done anything like this before. I’ve never even spoken publicly until I spoke at the City Council meeting.”

The sport, which began in the 1960s, has been dubbed the fastest-growing sport in America, primarily due to its accessibility, fast-paced matches and comradery between players, on and off the court.

Although the playful pastime in some ways mirrors popular sports like tennis — sans the padded balls and netted rackets — pickleball utilizes hard plastic paddles and a whiffle-like ball that is click-clacked back and forth between competing players.

“Fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, from March possibly until the end of November,” she said of the noise. “We cannot suffer this. This neighborhood has been turned on its head. I can tell you, it has made my life a living … I won’t say the word.”

The courts are relatively new to Szymanski Park, but the pickleball conversation really began ramping up in the city before the pandemic, said Adam Matth, the city’s director of recreation and parks.

“It was during 2018 and 2019 in the recreation committee. Through public feedback, there was the interest to look into doing pickleball courts,” he said. “Obviously, Szymanski is the only location where we have previously made tennis courts and the easy ability to adjust to pickleball courts. But then obviously Covid happened and stalled some of the projects.”

The city turned one tennis court into four pickleball courts in the fall of 2022, he said, which cost roughly $20,000 to build. The project was just one of roughly a dozen projects in the recreation department’s capital improvement plan, which also included repaving the basketball court and remaining tennis court that year.

But for Guarino, aside from just the noise, the lack of available parking, and the influx of those zooming into the city from surrounding towns to utilize the free service has created a massive safety hazard, especially for walkers and bikers.

“If the city had researched the available parking at the park, they would have realized putting four pickleball courts there was well beyond the parking capacity of the neighborhood infrastructure,” she said. “I have an autistic child who lives with me who is 10. It’s not safe walking to and from school because of cars being clocked at 40 miles an hour.”

Similarly, resident Mike Gratz, who has lived in the surrounding area for a decade, has similar first-hand accounts of the reckless drivers on Andrews Avenue, who along with their pickleball gear, oftentimes sport middle-finger hand gestures and aggressive language when asked to slow down by neighbors.

“I believe that by not advocating for or speaking up against the issue of the pickleball courts at Szymanski, it’ll continue to be at the expense and safety of my family, my neighbors and the dozen or so preschool to middle school-aged kids who live within a one block radius of the park,” he said at a city council meeting in April. “It’s unfortunate that in a few short years, the safety and serenity the neighborhood once provided has been completely destroyed. Following the city’s decision to modify one of the park’s tennis courts to pickleball courts, I don’t think anyone could have foreseen the issues, concerns and disruption they would have brought.”

What’s even more concerning for Guarino is that the implementation of the courts seems to have happened at a committee level, with influence from a small group of players, and without any input from residents.

“I have been to South Burlington City Council meetings and recreation department meetings. Both panels have encouraged me to write a petition and continue to attend meetings. I have done both, but I feel this is simply to stall their admission of a grave mistake,” she said. “An appointed committee by the city council is not the voice of all the taxpaying residents of South Burlington.”

Matth said that the recreation committee and department have certainly heard from the public over the past several months regarding the pickleball courts, and the conversations parlay into larger discussions the committee is currently having in drafting its parks master plan, which is set to roll out this summer.

“This will also look at how all of our parks are utilized, and the best fit for all of them,” he said, while emphasizing the need for the city to balance equitable access to all its public parks.

But for Guarino and perhaps some of the other 60 residents who signed the petition, pickleball at Szymanski Park has got to go.

“I will advocate for it to go,” Guarino said. “I’ll stand up legally for it to go.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Pickleball in South Burlington prompts resident petition .