Sunday, November 20, 2022 (Court Day #560)

It would be a nice day today, it was already sunny by the time I left my house for Derby Park to open up the courts. This would be the first time me opening the courts for a month and a half when I was last out and injured my right knee. The backup site coordinators have been very helpful filling in for me.

Last night, I had dug out the simple knee brace that my dad had given me a few years ago and would wear that today. It’s basically an elastic sleeve with vertical semi-flexible metal strips on the left and right sides. While I was trying to get to sleep, the inside of my right knee was very mildly aching. The pain seems to shift, depending on what I’m doing and it comes and goes. About a week ago, walking up the stairs at work brought a sharper pain below my kneecap. Other times, it feels like a dull nail is being hammered to the left of my kneecap. Or an ache to the right of my kneecap.

Derby

I arrived at 8:50 a.m. and the two city nets already had games going on them.

It would be a pretty mellow day as I had originally planned. Initially, my thought was I would come and see how my right knee would manage things. That could have meant part of one game, just one game, a few games perhaps, but I was not expecting my knee to hold up as well as it did and I ended up spending four hours at the courts.

Newbies

A surprise, I’ve been gone from the courts for only six weeks and, looking around today, I didn’t recognize perhaps as many as a third as the players, perhaps even as many has half! People are still coming out and joining the pickleball movement!

Two relatively new players with only a few weeks of experience underneath their belts came today. A woman named Terry and her friend Nikki. I covered some of the rules with them as well some strategies. We played a few games together and Nikki proved to be the better of the two.

Skill Time

By the time 10 a.m. rolled around and we were breaking up court signups into skill levels, I saw that Eric S. ahd arrived and had started an advanced box. Eric asked if I wanted to sign up with him and I added my name below his. After about 5 or 10 minutes, Eric said, “I don’t think there any other players here who consider themselves advanced.” Sure enough there was no one to be seen. A few minutes later, Charles arrived but he signed up as an intermediate. I later discovered that he was still dealing with an injury to his right shoulder so he decided to play left-handed today. That explains why he was signing up as an intermediate instead of advanced.

Over the course of the session I got two, maybe three, solid advanced games. The rest of the time I was training first-time players. There is a woman name Ellen who came, who has some tennis background. And then there was a married couple who arrived, Dave and his wife Denise who supports a British accent. I played a few games with Ellen as my partner against Dave and Denise. I had to be careful. I forgot once and hit a shot more normally—not easing off—and the point immediately ended in our favor.

At 12:45, I showed my three charges how to put away a net, then after stowing it, answered a variety of questions and explained about local courts, the club, email blasts, etc.

Knee

As I mentioned, my knee held up shockingly well. I have an appointment set up for December 12 with the same orthopedic surgeon who did my rotator cuff. The MRI had shown a small tear in my knee and he was looking to operate on it then, but it wasn’t chronic in any sense. Now, it’s more chronic. It’ll sometimes mildly ache for hours.

Monday, November 21, 2022 (No Play)

With all this DUPR, UTPR, WPR, PBR rating consolidation stuff going on, I discovered that I have a WPR rating through PickleballTournaments.com. Currently, they my WPR at 3.549 for men’s doubles. My USA Pickleball UTPR rating sits at 3.580. Here’s a graph of my WPR history…

It’s a bit confusing as the list at the bottom (shows up on the website when you click “March Details”) is not chronological for the last tournament, though if the algorithm is well written, it shouldn’t matter what order since a player’s skill set isn’t going to change in course of the few hours of a tournament.

Four Colors at Brommer

Speaking of ratings, Jason, my tournament partner for Chamisal a few months ago, stopped by work last week and said that Brommer has instituted four colors for signups. Dan Bliss mentioned something to me about this possibility some months back. Jason said that the new color is for 4.0+ tournament players. Since we’re both have 3.5 ratings, that leaves us out of that top group.

The issue I have with this signup system is it’s biased for age. I’ve mentioned this before. A 60+ woman came to me about 4-5 years ago and was successful as a 4.0 tournament player. But she wouldn’t even be a 3.5 in the men’s tournaments. She complained to me that the advanced “red” players wouldn’t let her join them even though she was very much official recognized by the national association as a 4.0. Som which is it? 4.0 or not? Jason shared that he felt we could easily compete with those in this new 4.0 group. It’ll be interesting to me to see who is in it.

I will admit that I looked up some of the local old guard players and was shocked at one who is rated as 4.5—I think he’s a high 3.5 on a good day. Ah, well. We’ll see how this goes.

Number of days on a court: 560
Number of total hours: 2,520

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