Remove basketball nets from end of driveway, says bylaw to residents in Tillsonburg, Ont.

A battle is brewing over a childhood rite of passage in a town in southwestern Ontario.

A number of residents in a new subdivision in Tillsonburg, Ont., have been asked to remove their basketball nets from the end of their driveways and at least some of them are refusing.

"Well, that's odd," Shannon Steen, 42, remembers thinking when a bylaw officer rang her doorbell to make the request. "Why do I have to move it? It's been there for a year and a half."

Steen has four boys who range in age from seven to 13. "Every day, even in the winter, they're outside playing," she said.

And if they're not shooting hoops on the street in front of her driveway, kids from the neighbourhood are, Steen said.

A school bus recently clipped one of the roadside basketball nets in the new subdivision where Steen lives. Construction crews are paving driveways in the neighbourhood, and the big trucks are clogging the streets making it difficult to maneuver around the nets, said mayor Deb Gilvesy.

"The net portion was overhanging onto the roadway," she said.

"They're playing outside and they're happy and the weather is nice after a long winter, and we're going to discourage that? That's the sad part,"- Shannon Steen, Tillsonburg mom

"Our number one role as council is health and safety. So in this situation, it clearly presented a health and safety concern," she said.

Because Steen's home shares a driveway with her neighbour, she prefers to place her sons' basketball near the road as a courtesy to her neighbour.

Steen has not moved her sons' basketball net.

"Nobody in the subdivision has moved it yet either," she said.

"That'll be something that bylaw will have to take up with them," said Gilvesy. "We have rules and they were warned to remove them