Martinez Staff Recommends Closing Hidden Valley Pickleball Courts Over Noise Complaints

Martinez city staff recommended permanently closing the eight pickleball courts at Hidden Valley Sports Courts on March 13, citing persistent noise and traffic complaints from nearby residents that proved impossible to resolve even after a full year of attempted fixes.

The recommendation will go before the Martinez City Council at its March 18 meeting, where the council will hear public comment and determine next steps. City Manager Michael Chandler framed the decision plainly: "Based on the ongoing operational challenges and concerns over compatibility of these pickleball courts in a residential setting, City staff is recommending discontinuation of pickleball at this location. We invite public comment about this recommendation to help the City Council determine next steps."

The courts opened February 28, 2025, following a $1.7 million expansion that converted former tennis courts into eight dedicated pickleball courts and doubled the overall number of courts at Hidden Valley Park. The project, predominantly funded through one-time federal COVID-era relief funding, also added a new tennis court and a renovated half-court basketball court. Those two facilities would remain open under the staff recommendation.

What made the situation particularly damaging for pickleball advocates is how much the city actually tried before giving up. Over the past year, staff installed signage and parking advisories, ran two structured trial periods with revised operating hours, introduced court-specific rules, and encouraged quieter equipment use with volunteer enforcement. A neighborhood survey released last fall, covering residents within 500 feet of the courts, indicated significant negative impacts on neighbors. By June 2025, several residents told KTVU they could hear the distinctive crack of paddle on plastic ball reverberating through their homes.

The city also hired an acoustical engineer, who concluded there was no way to mitigate the noise given how close the courts sit to residential properties. That finding effectively ended the mitigation conversation.

The acoustics problem at Hidden Valley is a familiar one in the pickleball world. That specific sound signature, a solid paddle striking a hollow plastic ball, carries differently than tennis and cuts through ambient neighborhood noise in ways that have triggered disputes from Berkeley to communities across the country. One commenter on the City of Martinez's Facebook post, Glenn Lucey, pointed out that pickleball had been played at the site for at least eight years before the renovation with no formal restrictions, suggesting the scale of the new eight-court layout changed the equation significantly.

The council's March 18 discussion will be the first public hearing on the recommendation. If the council follows staff's guidance, Hidden Valley would go from one of the Bay Area's newer dedicated pickleball facilities to a cautionary example of what happens when court capacity outpaces site suitability in a residential corridor.