Shannon Kampf and Joey Case hear the changing of the seasons whenever they open their front door near Toronto’s Greenwood Park. The crack of the bat on ball. The boom of an errant puck on the boards. The splash from a cannonball dive. The dribbling of a basketball and whoops after a three-pointer gets all net.They love the noise. And like many in a Raptors-crazed city — and nation — Kampf and Case say they especially want to hear more sounds of basketball.“My son’s playing ball outside instead of watching TV. And I think there should be more of that,” said Kampf, a lawyer and mother of two who is pushing for more access to courts in her Leslieville neighbourhood. On Thursday, their cause won two major victories. In the morning, in response to mockery over a viral video from the night before that showed kids in full daylight making shots on a hoopless backboard, city spokesperson Brad Ross said parks staff will stop taking down basketball rims nightly at some city parks due to noise complaints.Later that afternoon, the Toronto District School Board announced it, too, will keep its nets up, saying it will leave the rims in place outside school hours as part of a six-month pilot project.For at least 10 years, city staff had been responding to neighbourhood noise complaints at courts that are in “close proximity to homes,” Ross said. In a statement posted to Twitter Thursday, the city acknowledged what was seen in the video viewed more than one million times — in it, a worker takes down a park rim while youth are using the court in Phin Park near Danforth and Jones Aves. — was “not reasonable.”City staff couldn’t immediately say how many courts were targeted for regular rim removal, but Ross said crews “would make their way to various parkettes ... and remove the nets and replace them the next day to mitigate noise complaints.”Ross said the issue will not go to council for cons ...
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