Irvington Club vs. Lisa and Kevin Scott
I. If a tree falls in the forest and only two people hear it, does it really make a sound?
Lisa and Kevin Scott have lived in their relatively modest, Cape Cod-style home in Portland’s Irvington neighborhood home for over 45 years. Both retired, they spend the majority of their time there. In the spring and summer, Lisa, a performing pianist, plays and occasionally teaches in their living room. Kevin is home even more than Lisa; he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease a few years ago.
The couple had been on good terms with their nextdoor neighbor, the Irvington Tennis Club, since they moved into their house in 1980. In 2019, the 120-year-old club converted an alley-less, singles tennis court on the northern edge of its property—less than 15 feet from Lisa and Kevin’s home—into two pickleball courts. The relationship soon began to sour.
The Scotts’ living room, which doubles as their music room, is on the side of the house closest to the pickleball courts. So long as “the sun was out,” Lisa explained, “pickleball was being played.” In the summer, that meant up to ten hours a day. The sound made their outdoor spaces unusable. Inside, the combination of closed windows, white noise machines, and noise-canceling headphones couldn’t keep the steady staccato of pickleball from penetrating their ears.
The acrimony reached a fever pitch in early 2022. The tennis club accused Lisa of “not being a good neighbor.” That might’ve had something to do with the dubious claim that the Scotts sprayed pickleball players with their garden hose; it definitely had something to do with the huge vinyl banner Lisa hung in exasperated protest.
“There was nothing on there that was defamatory,” Lisa said of the banner, which had the phrases Irvington Club Pickleball and 11 feet from my home! sandwiching a custom image that her neighbor helped design. It featured a distressed-looking emoji with its fingers in its ears, surrounded by falling pickleballs.
II. Pickleball's ascension
In 1965, Joel Pritchard, a politician from Washington State who went on to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, returned to his vacation home on Bainbridge Island with his friend Bill Bell and found their families “sitting around with nothing to do.” This is the backstory to pickleball’s origin story; Pritchard is known as the inventor and “Father” of pickleball. The game resulted from the combination of boredom and a concoction of other games that had lost their luster: badminton, ping pong, and wiffle ball.
In 1975, the National Observer published what may have been the first article about pickleball. A year later, in 1976, an article about “America’s newest racquet sport” graced the pages of Tennis magazine.
For approximately 40 years, pickleball had little to no institutional support or momentum outside of middle school P.E. classes and correctional facilities. Then, about ten years ago, pickleball started gaining traction. No one knows how or why. In 2020, 50 years after it was invented, pickleball was hailed “the fastest growing sport in America” by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association.
Pickleball’s ascension has been thoroughly reported upon. A survey of New York Times headlines from recent years provides a reliable record of pickleball’s entry into the zeitgeist. “What is Pickleball?” wondered the Gray Lady in early 2022.
In February 2022, The New York Times declared, “Pickleball Is Ready for Prime Time.”
Two months later, in April, a headline asked, “Can Pickleball Save America?”
They continued wondering aloud, asking in September of that same year, “Why is Pickleball so popular?” On the very same day, they filed a story under the headline: “Game On: It’s Labor Day weekend, the perfect time to try—you guessed it—pickleball.”
One month later: “Move Over … Everything? Here Comes Major League Pickleball”
And that same October, the first hint of discontent: “Pickleball Is Expanding. Tennis Is Mad.”
Pickleball coverage appeared to go dormant in the winter of 2023. But a few months later, as the air warmed and playing surfaces dried, The New York Times reminded its readers: “In Spring, New Yorkers’ Thoughts Turn to Pickleball.”
Finally, after years of unequivocally positive press, the long-awaited upshot: A June 2023 headline read: “Shattered Nerves, Sleepless Nights: Pickleball Noise Is Driving Everyone Nuts”.
* * *
The vibe-shifting June 2023 story wasn’t actually the beginning of a new epoch; the pickleball backlash had been fermenting for some time. The noise issue didn’t appear, suddenly, as if by magic. The noise issue had been there from the very beginning.
In June 2022, about 12 months and a dozen positive pieces before The New York Times first suggested that, well, not everyone was enthusiastic about pickleball, The Los Angeles Times ran a story under the headline, “Pickleball noise is fueling neighborhood drama from coast to coast.”
Portland was no exception. In July of 2022, Oregonian columnist Steve Duin wrote of the “Pickleball crisis” in Lake Oswego.
That the wealthy Portland suburb was Ground Zero for a noise dispute should surprise exactly no one. Issues around noise, bus routes, swimming and boating access, and social services generally break along class lines. And when members of a wealthy bedroom community are aligned in what they want, they seem to have little trouble accessing the levers of power.
By January 2023, Lake Oswego City Council voted to shut down the city’s only pickleball courts: the ones at George Rogers Park, not far from Lake Oswego’s downtown area and just up the hill from the Willamette River. The George Rogers courts—once beloved, now maligned—took the place of tennis courts at the same site in 2015. Just eight years after it began, the party was already over. Still, the City Council committed to exploring a potential new pickleball facility in LO, approximately five miles to the west of George Rogers Park, on the site of Westlake Park’s tennis courts. Following a lengthy public process of neighborhood meetings, traffic and noise studies, and community feedback, the Council opted not to proceed with the tennis-to-pickleball conversion. Instead, they redirected the focus toward a long-term solution, incorporating pickleball into the broader Parks Plan 2040.
In Portland, a city with more socioeconomic diversity, where the right—and the power—to exercise one’s political will is far more diffuse, the pickleball crisis has proven thornier.
Five miles downstream from Lake Oswego, on the east side of the Willamette, is Portland’s Sellwood Park. For decades, the park has had two tennis courts down low, beside the Springwater Corridor riverside bike and foot trail, and two more tennis courts up high, on level with SE 7th Avenue. Between June and August 2021, a renegade group of neighborhood pickleball players took it upon themselves to refurbish the two upper tennis courts and turn them into pickleball courts. Members of the group claim they had permission from Portland Parks & Recreation, though who at the department gave them permission is unclear at best.
The rogue pickleball group, heavy on retirees, was rich in both financial resources and spare time. They hired a consultant to advise the group on resurfacing outdoor sport courts; that advice informed their purchase of tools and materials. Then, over the course of several months, they resurfaced the courts themselves— locking the publicly owned courts at night to keep trespassers from interfering with their self-declared construction site.
Henrik Bothe is a Portland pickleball player and world-famous plate spinner who was involved in the takeover. “We had gotten permission, but had we gotten permission from the highest ups in Portland Parks and Rec? That was in a gray area,” he recalls. “It was more the local park that had given us permission, the local management at Sellwood Park.” he explained. The distinction between permission coming from the “highest ups” at Parks & Rec and the “local management” is an important one. And Bothe clearly understands the nuances of overlapping terminologies. Speaking to his professional background, he volunteered: “What I do is a mix of juggling, comedy, magic, and plate spinning. In Europe, people would call what I do ‘clowning.’ What I do is circus and skill based. Getting out of a straight jacket, unicycling, juggling golf clubs, things like that.”
Not long after Bothe and his comrades completed their guerilla operation, complaints about the increased acoustic emissions reached those higher-ups in the Portland Building. They had—perhaps not shockingly—been in the dark about the whole situation.
According to Parks & Rec’s Public Information Officer, Mark Ross, the city issued a Non-Park Use Permit, through the bureau’s Property Department, but there was a “misunderstanding about expectations and scope.”
Unfortunately for Parks & Rec, local TV stations found out about the situation at the same time. Innocent neighbors were just a chainlink fence away from the incessant sound of all-day pickleball. Television news covered the growing dispute with relish and enthusiasm.
The City acted quickly. In late June of 2023, they began restoring Sellwood Park’s upper courts to their original “Tennis Only” designation, and designating the lower, riverside courts as pickleball courts. The pickleball courts are farther from neighbors’ homes, but close enough that they can still hear the steady popping sound of soft plastic balls against players’ hard plastic paddles.
Some neighbors, speaking anonymously out of fear of retribution from the local pickleball club, told me that they only stopped protesting the pickleball noise because, as renters, they were afraid that further protest might affect their housing security.
Home-owning neighbors are fearful to speak out, as well. They worry about direct retribution from the local pickleball players. One neighbor shared anonymously: “No one should have to dread rather than anticipate the joy of a nice day. But when they play in your personal space, at a distance recognized as dangerous to health, it means not opening a window. Not using [your] yard. All because a handful of people are too selfish and inhumane to avoid playing where it ruins lives. I would not call our issue resolved, but I don’t want to revisit the trauma.”
III. The local and national precedents
The Scotts’ neighbor, Martin Leima, now retired, worked for Cisco Systems for 15 years, managing the development of acoustics and digital sound-processing algorithms. In the summer of 2022, Leima measured 80 decibels of sound in the Scotts’ backyard. The site’s concrete walls effectively amplify the sound of a pickleball being struck, which produces an exceptionally loud noise, even by pickleball standards.
Although he lives just across the street, Leima wasn’t bothered by the noise. As he explained, sound decay over distance follows an inverse square law. For every doubling of the distance from the noise source, the sound level falls by 6 dB. Distance is key! he followed up in an email. Distance (or the lack of) is why the Scotts Situation is untenable.
At the core of this noise dispute, like so many other such disputes, is the issue of control. When we choose the sound, it can be pleasurable; when forced upon us, it’s intolerable. Sometimes the act is unconscious: people don’t realize how loud their speakers are, or they assume that everyone loves their music as much as they do. In that sense, noise is an imposition that often reveals underlying power dynamics. Whether intentional or not, projecting sound into someone else’s space can be an act of aggression. We tend to tolerate the sounds of those we like, but disputes over noise can expose deeper social divides—something “the fastest growing sport in America” has been demonstrating throughout its rapid ascent.
In September 2023, Centennial, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, passed what may have been the country’s first law specifically regulating pickleball noise. Centennial’s new ordinance forbids any permanent outdoor pickleball courts with play that exceeds 47 decibels within 250 feet of a residential property line.
After the debacle at Sellwood Park, Parks & Rec adopted a new policy to help quell disputes between neighbors: public, outdoor pickleball would courts would not be built or converted through a redesignation process within 300 feet of any residence; and courts that fall between 300 and 600 feet of a residence would only be considered after conducting sound studies and thorough public outreach. But this is just a policy, not legally binding city code. Unfortunately for the Scotts, the policy doesn’t apply to pickleball played on private property. The Irvington Club is not beholden.
Lisa Scott hoped to find an ally in the City’s Noise Review Board, which has established a 55-decibel limit for general noise in residential areas such as Irvington. But the City has repeatedly cited Title 18.14.010—an exemption to one of their noise ordinances, which allows “Athletic Events” to disregard the 55-Decibel limit. It’s the same exemption claimed by the Portland International Raceway. The raceway opened in 1961, to the chagrin of the Portlanders who lived within earshot. In 1989, after decades of back-and-forth, North Portland neighborhood associations agreed to stop issuing noise complaints, and in exchange the raceway limited its loudest races to four events a year, put a portion of ticket sales into a trust fund for the neighborhood associations, and promised to honor city noise limits the rest of the year.
But unlike the 75 decibels that affected the entire Kenton neighborhood, and beyond, the Scotts are basically alone in their predicament with the Irvington Club. Their house absorbs most of the sound that’s produced anytime someone plays pickleball on the club’s outdoor courts. Neighbors on the other side of the Scotts deal with only half as much sound. Beyond them, the harsh ping of the plastic ball becomes hard to detect at all.
All this was unacceptable to the Scotts, who had slowly lost trust in the Noise Review Board. They were incredulous that the City was allowing all-day, every-day pickleball games played by recreation-seeking adults under the same exemption used by events such as high school baseball games and the Portland Marathon. They saw this as a clear bad faith interpretation of city code, which is supposed to protect everyone equally, regardless of how powerful they are.
IV. Pickleball Mindset
Under the sheltered, lighted basketball court at Irving Park in NE Portland, a pickleball club group shuttles in temporary nets and chalks lines directly onto the basketball court’s surface, immediately adjacent to the uncovered basketball courts that are still the epicenter of the city’s outdoor pickup basketball scene. Slowly but steadily, the pickleball players—generally white, bearing upper-middle class markers such as flat-brim, five-panel hats—are claiming the covered court for themselves. After the sun sets, young basketball players shoot hoops in near darkness on the uncovered courts while adult pickleball players occupy the well-lit “vacant” court right next to them.
On public tennis and basketball courts throughout Portland, pickleball players reinforce social hierarchies. They might think or tell themselves that they are using unused space. But in reality, they often claim space that was designed, vetted and earmarked for existing sports communities. What enables this? Pickleball’s warm cultural reception goes hand in hand with its appeal to a demographic that holds significant cultural, economic and political capital. Tennis may have a reputation as “snooty,” but the realities of both park tennis in Portland and pro tennis on the world stage show how dated that stereotype is, and how much the sport is diversifying, changing for the better. Meanwhile, pickleball’s mindset remains stubbornly entitled: it’s always ‘Why can’t I play here?’ instead of, ‘Why did I assume I could play anywhere I wanted in the first place?’
* * *
After years of disagreement, and threats of a lawsuit, tensions between the Scotts and the Irvington Club finally came to a head in late March 2024. A club member forwarded a reporter at Willamette Week a letter that was sent out by club management to its members. In the letter, the club announced they were temporarily suspending outdoor pickleball after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Lisa Scott’s attorney, Leta Gorman, who demanded that the club stop all outdoor pickleball play until a noise mitigation plan was agreed upon. And if they refused? Then the Scotts would “request punitive damages.”
Three months after Willamette Week ran their resulting story (“Irvington Club Pauses Pickleball After Receiving Cease-And-Desist Letter From Neighbor”), Irvington Club Board President Jonathan Steinhoff still held out hope that outdoor pickleball would return to the surface next to the Scotts’ home. “We remain unable to open the courts back up for outdoor pickleball,” he wrote to members. “This does not mean that pickleball reservations are necessarily off the table for the entire outdoor season. It does mean that no one can say right now when or if that might happen.”
Many members have voiced their displeasure in their club’s acquiescence to the Scotts. Jamie Fenner and Janet Walker circulated a petition that they delivered to the club’s board, hoping it would help persuade the club to restart outdoor pickleball courts—nevermind that the courts are fifteen feet, at most, from the Scotts’ house.
* * *
On March 13, 2025, six years after the Irvington Club first introduced outdoor pickleball—and nearly a full year after suspending outdoor play—Irvington Club Board President Chris Kayser announced to members in a letter that the dispute between the club and its neighbors, the Scotts, had been settled. The agreement, arrived at via mediation, establishes new guidelines for outdoor pickleball play while addressing concerns about noise and disruption. Under the settlement, play will be permitted five days a week, not seven, with restrictions on equipment—including a requirement to use special quiet paddles and quiet balls between 2:30 and 5 p.m.—and limits on the number of players during certain hours. The club will also implement penalties for exceeding reserved court time. In exchange, the Scotts have agreed to drop their legal claims, with the Irvington Club covering the costs of their legal fees, including mediation ruling out any punitive damages.
While no resolution is without compromise, the agreement provides a structured path forward for both pickleball and pickleball’s innocent standers-by, while sparing both the Scotts and the Irvington Club the fiscal and emotional tolls of litigation. Lisa Scott shared that, while the noise had once been a near-constant but still unpredictable disruption, she now at least has a way to plan around it. “Before, I never knew how to adjust my life around the noise,” she reflected. “At least now I know how I can structure my day.”
She also acknowledged the difficult choices involved in the dispute. “If I didn't want to compromise, if I wanted just absolutely no pickleball play,” she said, “then I would’ve had to go to court. And then that would’ve been a completely different type of situation. That would have damaged me financially and also damaged, I believe, my health.”
As for the protest banner she once hung from her balcony? She still has it, tucked away in storage. She admitted that hanging the banner wasn’t something she ever thought she would have to do when the conflict began. With a satisfied smile, she added, “I’ve never done anything like that before.”