We here at the Kingston Wire Editorial Team have been avid followers of popular culture and fads since the days of the Pet Rock. But after we heard pickleball come up at last week’s Common Council meeting, we wanted to know more.

In case you have been living under your Pet Rock for the past few years, pickleball combines elements of doubles tennis, ping pong and wiffleball to make a sport that millions have fallen in love with. Like many Hudson Valley communities, Kingston responded to the demand by setting up a permanent outdoor pickleball court at Loughran Park, as well as making a popup court at Field Court last summer and holding winter indoor games at the Rondout Community Center.

We looked into just how popular it is … we were shocked. We knew it was big, but according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association’s “The State of Pickleball” report last month, it’s way bigger. Check out these eye-opening stats:

At least 19.8 million and perhaps as many as 48.3 million Americans played pickleball last year, representing an almost 50 percent increase from 2023. Over the past three years, the number of pickleballers has increased over 300 percent.
There are over 68,000 pickleball courts in the U.S., but that’s not nearly enough. According to the SFIA, an estimated $855 million investment is needed in court construction over the next five to seven years to meet demand.
While it has a rep as a sport for older folks, younger people are making up a larger percentage of enthusiasts: In 2023, players age 25-34 comprised the largest age bracket, accounting for 16.7 percent of total participants. Players over 65 were the second largest age bracket, making up 15.4 percent, while players aged 18-24 were third at 13.3 percent.

Popular as it is, in Kingston that popularity has led to a problem: noise. When the hard paddle meets the hard plastic ball, the sound has been described as “like a jackhammer.” Imagine that happening three times a second and you can understand why the neighbors are unhappy. Combined with the various hoots and hollers that come with competitive group play, the racket (pardon the pun) is serious enough to have come before the Common Council at its March 4 meeting. There, lawmakers approved spending $145,000 for a noise abatement study as part of a larger funding package for pickleball improvements to Loughran Park. (A total of eight new courts will be built where tennis courts once stood.)

The good news is that sum will be paid for from the recreation fund, powered by the various fees the city collects from facility users and developers. Like anything that’s really in demand, pickleball does not come cheaply in Kingston: fees for court use run anywhere from $65 to $150, depending on the day of the week and whether the player is a city resident or not. According to city officials, 60 to 80 people play on the city’s two courts on a typical Saturday.

The bad news? We live in a world where a local government has to pay the equivalent of what it would take to buy a pretty high-end performance car for answers to what cannot be a very difficult question. We agree with those on the council who brought up the same point, but it’s hard for your Editorial Team to work up too much of a lather on this as shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars to consultants and engineering firms for all manner of specialized knowledge has become routine in local governance, to a point where we even feel weird questioning it. Indeed, much of it is mandated by state law and it’s created an industry which reminds us of those fish that follow sharks around and live off the scraps created when the bigger fish takes a big bite out of something. While it’s easy to think that the State Environmental Quality Review process moves at the speed of frozen molasses, what it really does is move at the speed of the various engineering firms that charge a ton of money to provide the various reports the law says you have to have in order to move forward. What’s more, the names of these firms and their principles are commonly found on the lists of local pols’ campaign contributors, which makes for a cozy terrarium-like ecosystem of moving money from one point to the other and back again.

So what, you may ask, and that’s fair. It’s not reasonable to expect our elected officials to have the specialized knowledge to do any of this themselves, and good information costs money. Sure, but we’re in a phase of American history where the federal government, which for decades has been a reliable font of funding for local governments, can’t be counted on, which means our leaders could be very soon faced with some gut-wrenching choices about what vital programs might have to get cut. It seems to us that now is a time for being as parsimonious as possible with what we know we have, as we have no idea what we’re going to get later. We hope the $145,000 will prove to be money well spent, but even if it is, we think it would have been better saved lest the city find itself in a real fiscal pickle one day.