Friday, March 8, 2019 (Court Day #244)

I was in San Antonio, Texas for a few days starting the last weekend in February for an annual art materials trade show for work. I was visiting a booth in the show when, Rob—a casual acquaintance and the owner of a vendor company based in Illinois—walks across the aisle and asks the woman in the booth, “Do you know what his nickname is?” He paused, then with a big grin, told her, “The Velvet Hammer!”
I was stunned. That’s only in pickleball and not many people use it.
Incredulous, I asked, “How did you know that?” He looked at me, still smiling, “The Pickleball Forum on Facebook. I play pickleball!” Turns out he’s been playing for about a year and is signed up for his first tournament in a few months.

The next day Rob’s wife shared with me that she won’t play against him any more since he’s very competitive and he’ll hit her with the ball to win! “I thought it’d be something fun that we could do together . . . but nooooo!”, obviously both amused and vexed at the same time.

ATP Drop Shot

At the Facebook Pickleball Forum, someone posted a link to a video of a “new shot”. I’m not sure if it’s new enough to warrant a different name or merely a variant of the Around the Post shot:

 

Finally. Playing!

The rain has been pretty constant this year with outdoor play pretty rare. I arrived at Brommer Park at about 9:10. A few games were already underway. It was chilly enough that I wore a sweatshirt to start—a sign of California winter. While warming up, a shower opened up, leaving heavy drops all over the courts. It was a mix of sun and scary gray clouds. The courts dried out then it had another very brief shower. No one left the courts!

Today, I played every shot—as I have been—left handed. While there were periodic wild shots, my lefty game is improving. I easily made most of my serves, at least 75%. And some were getting deeper. There were some net rallies that I won. I have to say, there’s a real sense of satisfaction and success going toe to toe with an opponent at the net volleying back and forth and still winning even with the disadvantage of playing with the opposite hand. John P. commented that he was impressed that I could even do anything at all with my left hand and that I was especially good at the net.

I was in the car shortly after noon to head home to get ready for work.

I’m so ready to play again right handed but I’m resigned to the possibility that it may be six months or more. Frustrating.

PickleballForums.com

I’m continuing to tweak the setting and features of my forum project. Again, I have no idea if it’ll take off or just be a fruitless fun exercise. But, if I can even get 1 out of every 10,000 players in the USA to be an active participant, that’s 200 people. I’d be happy with that. Maybe I can get folks for other countries. And pickleball is only going to continue to grow. The hard part is both letting people know about it and also getting people to participate. With 0 posts in a section, that’s not going to inspire confidence that it’ll be an active community worth the time to post there. Dunno. We’ll see.

Number of days on a court: 244
Number of total hours: 673.5

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