Friday, October 19, 2018 (Court Day #216)

Being that I’d be working six days this week and staffing was ok for a change, I opted to take the morning off and play. I arrived at Brommer Park at 9:35 under sunny skies. It would be a beautiful day. A game was already underway.

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Tom Sherwood, Christine (I think) and Terry Long. Tish on the nearside of the right court.

I played a number of games. My play was mixed. Pretty good, but I did make some boneheaded mistakes. Execution errors mostly. My shot selection was generally pretty good.

The game of the day was Eric and David against me and Ted/Theo. After an early very contested point, David exclaimed, “What kind of game did I get myself into?” Eric made an uncharacteristic number of errors and Ted went on a lobbing spree—at least half a dozen in the game—most of which resulted in a lost point. Ted knew it wasn’t working: “There I did it again. I can’t help myself.” I get it, I was popping up dinks randomly recently with no explanation. Play autopilot. Reprogramming is necessary. It was a good game—ok, Ted and I led the whole game. David is a good, consistent player. Sure, he made some errors, but, boy, solid player.

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Eric resting his eyes, David Sewell from Bakersfield, and sweaty me. Ted B. took the photo for me and told us to take off our caps so our faces wouldn’t be in shadow.

I left at 12:30 to head to home then to work. This was a good day of play and an overall good day of my performance.

Delamination!

Between games, I noticed my paddle’s face was delaminating from the core. There are parts of your paddle that you never want to see!

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I emailed Paddletek with photos of my Tempest Wave to see if they’d be willing to send me a replacement under warranty. I guess that would solve the autographs on the face versus santioning! I was listening to the Pickleball Kitchen podcast and Barrett Kincheloe—who is a Tempest Wave fan—and he bought a Prince paddle to test out. He’s a paddle nerd and tries a lot of paddles, but has always come back to the Tempest. This time though, he said he really likes the Prince and might just stick with it.

Number of days on a court: 216
Number of total hours: 592.5

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