Mashpee Pickleball Players Must Now Use $50 Quiet Balls After a Neighbor’s Yearslong Noise Fight

Eight courts sit on Ashumet Road in Mashpee, Massachusetts, open every day from 8 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. For years, the pop of plastic pickleballs echoing from those courts has set off one of the most bitter neighborhood disputes on Cape Cod. Now the town has picked a side, and its own pickleball community is furious about it.

Starting in August, every player on the Mashpee courts has to swap a standard plastic ball for a quieter one. Some of the approved options run as high as $50 apiece. More than 600 people have signed a petition asking the town manager to reverse the rule. A local instruction group that runs hundreds of lessons at the courts each summer has canceled every Mashpee class rather than teach with the new equipment.

“If people have to conform to this no one will play there,” said Jill Alpert, a Mashpee resident and USA Pickleball ambassador for Cape Cod. “I truly believe this is the underlying hope and wish.”

A Fight That Started With One Neighbor

The Mashpee pickleball park opened in August 2018. Earnie Barrows lives roughly 250 feet away, through a line of trees, in a house he built in 1998 as the first home at the end of a dead-end road. He has spent years bringing complaints to Town Hall and the police department, and the two sides have clashed everywhere from public meetings to the courts’ own parking lot.

“11.5 hours of this, constant,” Barrows said, describing the sound from his back deck as players filled all eight courts under the morning sun. “I wake up in the middle of the night hearing pickleball.”

Barrows says players have harassed him in person and online, including recording him near the courts. Players counter that his presence, and his habit of filming games, has made them feel unsafe. Last year, players reported to police that Barrows set off an air horn and lit firecrackers at his property while people were playing, though he said no one from the department ever approached him about it.

Town manager Rodney Collins, who put the ball rule in place, said it has drawn more criticism than anything else in his two-plus decades as a public official. He isn’t backing down.

“We’ve got to control the noise,” Collins said. “The world isn’t going to end and the sky isn’t going to fall if they don’t play pickleball.”

What the Sound Studies Actually Found

Mashpee has tried to fix the noise problem before. Sound-dampening fencing went up at the courts in 2020, and a town-commissioned study found it helped. A second study, conducted in 2023 by professional sound consultants, found that the games did not routinely exceed the noise standards set by the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, though it recommended raising the court fences further and switching to quieter equipment. That same study found a significant source of ambient noise came from Otis Air Force Base, roughly a mile from Barrows’ home.

Collins now says the town made a mistake in 2017, when the courts were approved at a Town Meeting without notifying nearby residents about the potential noise.

“Nobody really knew what pickleball was” at the time, he said.

Barrows has been advised through his campaign by Rob Mastroianni, who describes himself as a “pickleball noise solutionist” and now travels the country taking sound readings for neighbors with similar complaints. Mastroianni previously sued the town of Falmouth over a court near his own former home, a case that led a judge to permanently close it in 2023.

The $149 Ball That Started the Backlash

On July 20, Mashpee announced that players would soon be required to use the Vortexball EVO Gen 2, priced at $149 for a three-pack, or roughly $50 a ball. The price triggered its own wave of complaints, separate from the noise debate. The recreation department responded by approving nine additional reduced-noise balls, ranging from about $3 to $30 each. Only two of those options are approved for tournament play by USA Pickleball.

Players say none of it feels like their sport anymore.

“It’s like playing golf with a ping pong ball instead of a golf ball,” Alpert said. “People would have to relearn the sport.”

Marie Cheung-Truslow, an attorney and regular player at the courts, was blunter. She called the approved balls “garbage” and said Collins has “made pickleball play into a criminal act.”

The instruction group that ran lessons at the courts all summer announced on social media it was canceling every Mashpee class going forward, declining to teach beginners with the new balls. Other players said they expect to simply move their regular games to courts in neighboring towns.

A Select Board Divided

Not every town official backs the crackdown. Select Board chair John Cotton is himself an avid pickleball player and has opposed the new rule. At a board meeting, Cotton apologized to both Barrows and Collins for what he called the “incredibly rude” reaction to the ball mandate on social media, while also arguing the town has gone too far to appease one resident, whom he referred to as “the town crier.”

Collins pushed back on the idea that players have been reasonable in return.

“Their only answer to me so far has been tell [him] to pound sand,” Collins said of the players’ response to Barrows’ complaints.

Not everyone opposing the noise agrees Barrows is exaggerating. Nancy Percey, 59, lives down the street and signed an anti-noise petition Barrows first circulated back in 2018. She was one of 16 neighbors who signed then, and she still calls the sound “obnoxious,” adding that she believes the town never gave proper notice before the courts went in.

Barrows insists more neighbors quietly share his frustration but won’t say so publicly, out of fear of retaliation. He has told officials he’s prepared to go further if the quiet ball rule doesn’t hold.

“I’m willing to refinance my home [to sue],” he said, sorting through sound studies and town documents at his kitchen table.

At a packed Select Board meeting in late July, Collins told players that town lawyers had already evaluated the odds of a nuisance noise lawsuit, and that Barrows had presented what officials considered compelling evidence of health harms.

“If this went to litigation, you wouldn’t have any pickleball court,” Collins said.

Mashpee Is Not Alone

The standoff on Cape Cod reflects a fight playing out in pickleball communities across the country as courts get built closer to homes than the sport’s early planners anticipated. Wellesley officials banned pickleball play at certain courts last year. Kittery, Maine, closed an outdoor court in April over noise. Nantucket officials have floated banning the sport across the island entirely. And Falmouth’s permanent court closure, secured by the same consultant now advising Barrows, stands as the clearest example of how far a noise dispute can escalate when it reaches a courtroom.

For the players who built a summer routine around the Ashumet Road courts, that history is exactly what worries them. A rule meant to keep the courts open, by making them quieter, is the same rule threatening to empty them out. Whether the compromise holds could depend on how many of the 600 petition signers keep showing up to play once the plastic pop of a real pickleball is gone for good.