Wednesday, September 12, 2018 (Court Day #196)

I got to Derby Park a few minutes after 9. Stuart had opened the court for Dave Allenbaugh. (During the week, I can never guarantee that I’ll play. It depends greatly on work.) It would be a bit sparser crowd today, no more than 30 people at the maximum.

A couple weeks ago, I did some pickleball court Photoshop work for Stuart. He wanted to present “no line” courts diagrams to various facilities administrators. I told him he could thank me by getting me into some advanced games. We’ve played a few times as partners now and he’s been giving me game advice. Reminders to do . . . well, what I’m supposed to . . . serve deep, return deep, be wise about shot selection. When I’d angle a shot off the court but hit it wide, Stuart would admonish me to “hit it to the middle!” Though, I’ve started admonishing him when his angle shots go wide! Angle shots are good as long as they are executed at the right time and correctly; they don’t have to be a high risk shot.

Stuart and I were in one game where Stuart popped it up for Greg in front of me. Stuart yelled, “Sorry!” and chuckled knowing that ball would be slammed down at me and expected the point to be over. But it wasn’t. I handled the slam and got the ball back. About three shots later we’d won the point. I turned to Stuart, “A point is never over until it’s over!”

Eric and I beat Greg and Allan K. 11-2. We scored 5 points right off the opening serve, which was Eric’s. I thought we might even run right up to 11, but Eric hit one into the net. Regardless, we were soon leading 9-0. Allan was funny, telling us to not announce the score too loudly! Ha ha! I made two error and gave them two consecutive points—one was a return that I hit a bit too deep—but those were the last they scored.

Eric and I played Oleg and Jane. We were down 5-0. Around then, exasperated, I said out loud after a bad shot, “What am I doing?” I was just not hitting well. Popping balls up, Hitting drop shots into the net. It was almost all execution, not shot selection. We crawled back into it 7-9, but we’d go on to lose 11-7. Still, a fairly balanced game. Had it been to 15, we might have won since we were dialing it in.

I checked my phone for the time: 11:43. I checked the courts. The only strong players had started a game a few minutes before. I needed to get to work soon. It would be probably 10-15 minutes before I might get into a good game, so time to go.

Number of days on a court: 196
Number of total hours: 543.5

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