THREE OF THREE
Municipalities cannot buy
what nobody has specified.
Pickleball was not on my bingo card. Apparently, public policy has a sense of humour.
Court noise is a real municipal problem and it is being handled, where it is handled at all, by by-law officers responding to complaints after the courts are already built. That is the wrong end of the process. Municipalities generally do not design their own courts. They engage landscape architects who write the specifications, and procurement then tenders from those specs.
So the document has to be useful to the person writing the specification, not to the officer taking the call. That is where it now sits.
There is no Canadian manufacturer of approved quiet paddles or covers, and almost no municipal by-law governs court noise. That window stays open a year or two.
What the document is
A model by-law and a specification, written in my own name, with no company imprint and no commercial interest of any kind on my part. Licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Take it, amend it, pass it. Being known as the author who identified the problem is the whole of what I want from it.
The Ottawa 2025 Outdoor Tennis and Pickleball Strategy and the supporting BAP Acoustics report are the leading Canadian work on this and are credited throughout.
The limitation, stated before anyone finds it
Verifying noise-dampening performance after installation is technically possible and hard to adopt. A product that fails the standard means cost to remove it, amend the specification and reinstall. I would rather put that in the document than have it produced against me later.
Quiet certification also uses specification relief, which means most quiet paddles are not tournament legal. Saying that unprompted is what buys credibility on everything else.