I left work and arrived in Skypark just after 6:30 p.m. It was a beautiful warm evening.
There were 7 courts in use and 1 court waiting for a net to be set up. Rachel, my former high school classmate, and Chef Mark (the native spanish speaker), and myself set up a net, then started to warm up. A few minutes later, a woman who I’ve never met arrived and we had a foursome. With her tennis background, Rachel was the best of those three. We played a couple of games.
Most of the games in the evening were pretty uneventful, towards the end I got into a game with David and his girlfriend, Minori and also Pauly. Those were fun and more challenging games. David is fast on the court and hits hard, though sometimes he allows himself to drive too hard for his own good. He also has quick hands.
We finished up play just before 9:30 p.m.
Rachael brought some pickle flavor potato chips, which is obviously very apropos for pickleball! They were pretty good. She also brought a cooler, and very kindly offered some cans of flavored soda water, as well as some alcoholic canned drinks.
Ow.
My right wrist continues to be quite painful for some backhand shots, and other backhand shots it’s only mildly painful.
Wednesday, May 17, 2023 (No Play)
Ow. My right wrist is not happy. Playing left-handed comes in handy sometimes. And my right knee hurts some. Not a surprise. Knee surgery coming June 2.
Number of days on a court: 594 Number of total hours: 2,619 Number of paid coaching hours: 2
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I woke up still very tied. I finally fell sleep about 12:30 this morning and woke up before 7 a.m. Not a massive loss of sleep, but my wife was convinced that I didn’t get a good night’s sleep because I snored a lot. Maybe so. Regardless, I was tired.
It was a misty morning. It was wet enough that I was slightly concerned about the courts needing work to be playable, but when I arrived at Derby Park about 8:45, they were in good shape. Barbara had opened the bins and was blowing off the courts. I got out the nets and started setting them up. In short order, we were ready to go and while it was initially a lighter crowd—we had only two games going at shortly after 9 a.m., the crowd would later grow to 46 people.
I played a mixed=skill game with Sarah, Martijn’s wife. Afterward, I mentioned the game being fairly balanced—I was paired with the weakest player—and she was amused and remarked about me “slamming the ball at us.”
By mid-morning, I was dragging and feeling exhausted, but after not being able to play for over a week, I wasn’t about to leave!
Blog Reader
Dan D., the local middle school teacher and coach who has become a regular, mentioned that someone told him about my blog. “I started reading and 4 1/2 hours later I realized how much time had gone by!” He added, “I didn’t know you had spent so much time being injured and playing left handed.” At that moment, his waiting group got called out to an open court and that was the end of our conversation.
Other Knee Pain?!?
My right knee is lined up for surgery in about two weeks. But today, my left knee was hurting on the inner side. Really? My left knee now? I’m hoping this won’t be a chronic thing. This is the last thing I need. My right hand and wrist continue to hurt so I’m still wearing a wrist brace for every outing. I’m holding off tennis elbow with a forearm strap. Fortunately, that has been precautionary for the most part.
More Play
Petite Linda with the English accent likes to drive every shot, but does a good job getting the ball back over the net and is good enough to often clean up her “mess” that driving everything can sometimes cause. There are drives that would be wiser to be drop shots, but maybe she hasn’t developed that . . . in which case, it’s “drive away”!
I was dragging but finished up play at 1:30. There was only one other game going when we finished my last game and it was a private group that had just shown up.
Shot of the Day
I was back in a game with Eric S. as my partner. We were playing against Ying and a new guy. The new guy slammed a ball. I was deep near the baseline. (I was either still back—early in the rally—or had moved back to give myself more time.) Off that slam, I hit a beautiful dropshot that he had to hit up on. I was proud of myself. It would have been very difficult to hit that shot much better.
Pickleball in local schools
I was asking Dan D. when Mr. Aragon had started pickleball at Mission Hill Middle School. (My daughter Charlotte played it during P.E. there around 2011.) “Oh, he didn’t start the pickleball program . . . I did. Not that I want to take the credit.” He said it would have been 2006. I posed a series of questions and he said he first discovered pickleball by finding mysterious paddles in storage at Harbor High School while visiting. “Middle schools don’t have tennis courts, and I played tennis, so pickleball made sense.” I had always assumed they’d played in the gym. “No, we played outside on the asphalt. We had a full class of fifty students out there playing for an hour and a half straight from the start to the end of class!” He went on that the asphalt is so bad now—rocky, making the balls erratic—that they don’t play much these days. He said that even he used to play with a several students for fun during breaks. Tristan—the really good young local player—was one of those, Dan said he hasn’t seen Tristan for years but would enjoying getting to see him again.
Number of days on a court: 593 Number of total hours: 2,616 Number of paid coaching hours: 2
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My wife was sick and wanted me home to take care of the dogs, so I didn’t play on Tuesday night, returning home with my pickleball gear unused.
Stats of the Pros
Yesterday, some interesting stats appeared on social media. It’s from the pklmart.analytics Instagram account. It shows that pro players are roughly twice as effective for serves, returns, dinks, and third shot drops than even 4.5 and 5.0 players—and are significantly better on third shot drives and speedups.
Skypark
Tonight, I left work at 6:38 p.m. and headed to Skypark. When I arrived I got a pretty easy parking place and when I walked in, there were seven courts set up and six in use.
Typical Skypark evening.
I was able to get into the game fairly quickly against Avery and Marcus with Tim, Casey’s dad, as my partner. I have to say, Marcus has gotten so much better. He might even be a 3.5 level player now. Those are some pretty good games, Although I was not playing that great.
I went on to play a game with Wendy against Larry and my former high school classmate Rachel. Not a stellar performance on my part but I made some good shots in that game.
USAP Ambassador Time
By that time it was 7:40 p.m. I had told a fellow named Michael, that I would call him between 7:30 and 8 p.m. Michael lives down in Watsonville and teaches tennis and pickleball. He contacted USA Pickleball about starting a pickleball league in conjunction with the city. This inquiry was sent to Connie Thrasher who is in charge of our region as “Sector Leader – West”. Given that I was the closest ambassador to Michael, she reached out to me and asked me to address Michael’s needs. It took about a week for Michael and I to connect up but I ended up having a 25 minute conversation with him tonight. I shared how tournaments are run, how leagues could be run, and answered all the questions he had for me. He seemed satisfied with the conversation and I told him to contact me should he have any more questions in the future.
Back to Play
I got back into some games, but by this point, I was stiff, cold, and had to warm back up.
The last series of games was mad at myself against Tim and a tall fellow named Zach. Zach said he’s only been playing for seven months. He’s playing pretty well.
In the first game, Matt and I were solidly ahead, but Tim and Zach came back to win.
We played a rubber match, switching sides, and this game was a slaughter. Matt and I got creamed. Final score with something like 11-2 or 11-3. Fortunately, we are able to play one additional game before the lights went out.
We switched sides once again, and this time again went entirely differently. Matt and I quickly pulled out to a quick lead and I believe it was even 10-0 before Tim and Zach scored a point. But there would be no come back like the first game. The final score was 11-1 and Matt and I felt much better with that win to close out the evening.
I got Zach three times tonight on speedups. Twice hitting him in the chest, and a third he got his paddle on but the ball flew high off to his right out of bounds.
Matt’s buddy Paul is a home brewer and brought a keg of beer that he made. It had a little sign on it stating that was a hazy IPA, but it had a pretty nice fruit aspect to it. It was actually quite good. I was impressed. Many times when people bring their own wine or their own beer some of that it’s less than stellar. That was not the case this time. Good job, Paul!
MacKenzie
There was a young woman there tonight named Mackenzie. I saw Mackenzie twice before at Derby Park and this is the first time that I’ve seen her at Skypark. I talked to her for a few minutes and she is from San Francisco. She’s a student at UCSC majoring in environmental studies biology. She was a wrestler in high school as evidenced by her wrestling T-shirt. Matt said he wrestled in high school was well and commented about the “5 on 2” move. Mackenzie knew what this was though it left the rest of us puzzled. Matt explained it had to do with a wrestler using his hand (5) to gab parts of his opponent’s tender anatomy (2) to gain an advantage! That brought a laugh. When I asked how she got into pickleball, Mackenzie explained that her mom turned to pickleball when her mom got injured and could no longer play tennis.
As I left, I saw a notice on the gate near the pickleball storage bin. Neat. Too bad that I’ll be 15 days out of knee surgery. Not for me.
Monday, May 8, 2023 (No Play)
I’ve been home with unhappy sinuses and chest congestion since Saturday morning. It’s not crippling but it’s unpleasant.
Speaking of unpleasant, I ran across this news report from a couple of weeks ago of vandalized pickleball nets. A tennis coach admitted to collecting all the pickleball nets and throwing them in a heap. Others had nets cut in half.
Unfortunately, we’ll probably see this for some years to come as pickleball continues to grow and works to get its own space.
Tuesday, May 9, 2023 (No Play)
Still home today sick. I woke up early with little sleep and felt like I might end up at urgent care. But a few hours later, my throat and tonsils were feeling better . . . not good, but better.
I’ve been sleeping more often than not with a brace on my right wrist to keep me from tweaking it while sleeping. If I try pushing myself up with my palms against the floor it’s too painful to even put pressure on my right hand.
Wednesday, May 10, 2023 (No Play)
Still not up to going to work. I made an appointment for urgent care and they did a strep throat test which came back negative. They did one other test, I think bacterial, but that would take a day or two. The doctor said it’s probably viral and it would likely take 5-7 days to get through it. It’s been 5 days so far.
Thursday, May 11, 2023 (No Play)
Once again home today sick. I had scheduled a video appointment with my GP to discuss two things.
One, is a rare genetic issue on my mom’s side of the family that gradually affects the ability to walk. It’s a recessive gene. It affects only roughly 15,000 people in the USA, or about 0.005% of the population. He said it’s probably not worth bothering to test for, since it’s not treatable nor avoidable. I decided to not bother. It’ll be what it will be.
Two, I asked him about my right wrist. If I were to try to do a pushup, I can’t even put weight on my wrist, it hurts too much. He asked how long it’s been like that, I told him a couple of months. He said to give it through my pending recovery from knee surgery, then let him know if it’s still a problem.
Friday, May 12, 2023 (No Play)
I returned to work today. I’m not 100% but good enough to get some things done. I arrived to work shortly after opening and then stayed until about 2 p.m. then headed to an EKG heart test in Watsonville that was required for my upcoming knee surgery. [Later note: It came back all good.]
Number of days on a court: 592 Number of total hours: 2,611.5 Number of paid coaching hours: 2
To start at the beginning of this blog click on “1st Post” in the menu above.
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