Tuesday, December 26, 2023 (Court Day #616)
I was off from work today. Our family business is closed for “Boxing Day”, the day after Christmas. Basically, it’s an excuse to recover from holiday retail and spend more time with family. My wife was in her 1st grade classroom prepping—teachers still work some during their holidays from school—and so things were quiet at my house. I blasted out to the pickleball text group to see if anyone wanted to play this afternoon. The only one who expressed interest was Conner, so we set up a time to drill.
Fraud
A woman asked to join the Santa Cruz Pickleball Facebook group. The account looked sketchy and I was going to delete her, but Brenden had approved her already. She posted, exactly copying a question posed in the same thread a few hours earlier and already answered—super suspicious. I replied to her question asking where she lived. No reply.
Then she posted about a “gift she’d received for Christmas” and shared a link to on-demand illegal copies of “Santa Cruz Pickleball” T-shirts. Uh . . . NO! I deleted the posted and banned her. The problem was the illegal T-shirts are still available. I sent an email to Mark and Jackie (president and VP of the club) and told them about it and gave them the link to dispute the shirt.
Drilling at Derby
Conner and I met at Derby Park at 3:45 p.m. As I approached the courts, I saw a friend’s mom, Lilia, and two of her sons. She said she had just played pickleball for the first time and really enjoyed it.
There was only one empty court and it was a city net so I didn’t have to go back and drag my portable net from the car. Amusingly, the net did have a hole in it just big enough for a ball and our ball did manage to go through it several times over the next hour!
Connor and I worked primarily on dinking and drop shots. We also worked on resets with one person driving the ball hard at the other from the transition zone.
A thing I noticed was that Conner was able to take a lot of my dinks out of the air. He still had to hit up—that’s the goal, make your opponent hit up—but it wasn’t off the bounce. Something to maybe for me to work on.
We also played a game and a half of skinny singles. In the first game, we shifted on even scores. In the second, we shifted on odd scores. So, sometimes we’d be diagonal and sometimes we’d be directly across from each other. In the first game, I took an 8-0 lead, but Conner came back and won. It was a couple big runs of points by each of us.
It’s kind of funny, but I had more fun drilling with Conner than I did doing games with family members yesterday. It was just that the skill levels were so lopsided yesterday, the rallies were very short unless I went way out of my way to make shots easy for them. Today, it was much more balanced.
Conner shared appreciation for my two ATPs during drilling. ATPs are an easy decision when you have very little choice because the ball is so wide!
Conner said that his foot was bothering him so we switched back to net drills—there is less moving involved—then soon after we called it a day at about the one hour mark. I felt it was time well spent. Conner recorded himself during our drill sessions. That’s definitely dedication, I should’ve thought of bringing my sports camera. Next time.
At a quarter to 5 p.m., with sunset looming, there were four games going on at Derby. Yes, pickleball is getting more popular!
Mark Dettle wrote me back about the illicit club T-shirts. Not the answer I was expecting, but Mark said he was taking me up on my offer to assume the position of “Secretary” for the club and my first duty would be to resolve the T-shirt problem! Ha, ha! Key job for a leader—delegate! It seems when I suggested something to the board, it’s often, “Great, go ahead, take it on yourself and do it!” Like when I suggested we should have a local tournament again. “Great, go ahead, take it on yourself and do it!” The trick is bandwidth. I have only so many free hours in a week and in a month and a lot of them tend to be hours when I’m tired from work!
Brother Pickleball
At 11:42 a.m., my brother John texted saying that he played pickleball this morning with a friend of his, Deborah. That’d be his fourth pickleball outing. I think he’s starting to get hooked on the game.
CORE Box
A box arrived from CORE pickleball today, from the order I placed on December 19. It was a dozen of their high-end CORE balls and a dozen of their cheaper Impact balls. I’m interested to see how they play.
There’s a bit of a fortuitous twist, or call it divine providence. Out our sliding glass door is our patio. We had the backyard redone about a year ago, with new concrete. I went out and measured the blocks and they are exactly seven feet. I had a sudden recollection that I’d done this before. Regardless, the dividing lines in the concrete are exactly the size of the non-volley zone—yes, seven feet! Perfect for my new practice net! Granted, the concrete isn’t perfectly smooth, but I suspect it’ll get the job done. I just need someone to dink with! Maybe my neighbor around the corner and down the street . . .
Number of days on a court: 616
Number of total hours: 2,689
Number of paid coaching hours: 8
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