Sunday, February 13, 2022 (Court Day #468)

When I arrived at Derby Park about 10 minutes before 9, John P. was there with a woman name Rachel and they were drilling. They were very kind and helped me set up while I was blowing debris off the courts.

After an early game against him, Mike K. (a.k.a. Grumpy Mike) told me, “You played well in that game.”
I replied, “I played badly in that game!”
“That wasn’t your fault, that was your partner.”
There are shots that you feel like you should have been able to return them, but when you think about it, they were not easy shots. Such as your partner hits a ball high enough to have the ball driven hard near you . . . but the ball is still in your wheelhouse, and had you been a bit faster, your would have gotten it over. But, hey, it wasn’t an easy shot. And your partner made it harder than it needed to be.

For the next game, Mike was my partner and this time we both made a lot of mistakes and lost the game. Bleh.

But we had a rematch and won. As we walked off, Mike told me with a smile, “We really cut down on our mistakes in that game.” Mike called it a day immediately after that and headed out—going out on a high note! Not surprisingly, mistakes do make a huge difference at my level of play. It’s not about forcing a winner, it’s often about sitting back, getting the ball back over the net, and waiting for your opponent to make a dumb error like hitting the ball into the net or out or dinking too high. It’s mistake avoidance.

Harder Games

I got a game together of me, Eric S., Charles, and lefty Jeff. Eric and I won that game fairly handily. Jeff was definitely off. We played a rubber match and that one was much closer. Eric and I might have even lost that one . . . I can’t remember. (I’m tardily typing this paragraph a week later!) Fun games.

Last Gasp

Later on, I played with a man named Tyler with his teenage son Theo and their friend Reggie. I was going to leave but they were asking player after player for a fourth so they could have a doubles game. Tyler was by far the strongest player. He has serves that I’d expect from a 3.5 player—impressive! The rest of his game was more 3.0. Theo and Reggie were obviously very new and have a long way to go, but they did a decent job getting the ball back over the net. I gave them a small handful of pointers here and there. I tried to keep it to one or maybe two tips (or rule corrections) per player.

About 1 p.m. I was done and heading home.

What did I learn?

Dunno. Today was a pretty routine outing as far as pickleball goes.

Arm

Tennis elbow still very manageable.


Number of days on a court: 468
Number of total hours: 2,235.5

To start at the beginning of this blog click on “1st Post” in the menu above.