Sunday, May 7, 2017 (Court Day #23)
I spent a couple days of last week in Portland for work. If I had had more free time, I would have looked up some courts, but it was chock to block, unfortunately. I flew in Wednesday afternoon and back out Friday night. I will admit, while taking the hotel stairs from the 6th floor—I got exercise where I could!—I noticed that the stairwell would have made a decent backstop for dinking practice had I brought a ball and paddle, though had I missed, the ball could have rolled down the stairs! (And 6 stories is a lot of stairs—unless I set up shop at the bottom, of course!)
“Hellllo?”
I arrived at Derby Park at 9 a.m. sharp to empty courts with the exception of Dave who was setting up the first net. It took me about two seconds to figure out why the lack of early arrivers. The Bay Area Senior Games! As previously mentioned, a number of the club were participating in the tournament. John, Dave, Melody, and others. I heard that one (or two) of our club won silver in the “70 and over” class. Congratulations to whomever those are!
New Video Camera
The new (refurbished) Akaso camera arrived while I was out of town. When I unpacked it, it was missing the second battery and I couldn’t get the remote control to work. I’ll be sending Akaso a message!
I took the new camera instead of the old GoPro, hoping it would work. I recorded a few games on the 1080P resolution instead of the 4K maximum resolution. I do have to be aware of the angle. Hanging the camera up at arm’s length on the fence straight out cuts off the bottom of the court, I’ll have to angle it down a bit:
The quirky thing about the camera is that it segments videos after 10 minutes. So a 15 minute game will end up as a 10 minute video and a separate 5 minute video. Super annoying. But at least you can very easily combine videos in QuickTime Player using “Edit” -> “Add Clip to End…” The picture quality even at 1080P is obviously far better than my old GoPro’s 720P. I’m curious to see what the 4K looks like. I need to figure out the buttons. I believe I missed a game or two because the recording didn’t kick in. We’ll see how it goes.
Kim and me taking on Bruce and Janet. (Cropped image.)
I got to play with a slightly older Asian fellow named Ted. (Not to be confused with Eric’s friend Ted.) Nice guy. Very solid player. Smart in his ball placement and strategy. He also gives good advice and is patient with his partners—like me who aren’t as good as he is. I’d never played with Ted before. He obviously knows how to play, but hasn’t been around much since I started.
Here I am getting little air in a game with Maree against Ted and Robin. The ball ended up slammed right at Robin’s feet for a winner:
The last game of the day was with Robin and Mark with his wife Maree as my partner. It’s was a good back and forth game. Maree and I won. I was tired. I think we all were by then. 4 solid hours of playing—except maybe Robin since she’d arrived about an hour after the rest of us.
Later in the afternoon, my feet ached. I also tweaked my right big toe again and walking barefoot or in flip flops was too painful. Fortunately, wearing shoes helps a lot.
On a high note, I’m playing overall better. Less hits into the net, but I’m still doing that occasionally on those soft shots. But better. I still can improve on my strategy. And I had 2-3 failed poaches on the day that I should have let pass to my partner nearer the baseline—that’s not a new mistake, unfortunately. That’s an old one. There are plenty of small things to clean up on my game. Basics. And plenty to do developing spins and stronger/faster serves.
Hopefully, I can get out on Wednesday morning to play. The next month or so will be a lot of traveling. I’ll miss a few weekends of pickleball.
Number of days on a court: 23
Number of total hours: 67.5
Leave a Reply