Friday, January 12, 2024 (Court Day #621)
Today was the day of the Santa Cruz Pickleball Club board meeting. It was my first one as a member of the board since I’ve now filled the secretary position. I went to print out the meeting agenda that I’ve been working on this week, but I couldn’t access the club’s Google account from home. (Kinks to work out!) I ended up making an unexpected drive to work to print the agenda from there.
I pulled into Brommer Park at 9:22 a.m. and the car in front of me strangely circled around and simply passed by the last spot in the parking lot. I was a happy guy!
DUPR
It was decided to reserve half the courts, starting at 10 a.m., for DUPR games to help people get rated. Unfortunately, that meant anyone not participating in the DUPR games had to use only four of the eight courts from 10 a.m. to the end of club play at noon. Only about one third of the players were taking part in DUPR, so there were some very long waits for the other two-thirds. I debated about doing the DUPR games, but the better competition was in the open play section, so that’s where I stayed.
I got in only four games—maybe it was even only three games. Regardless, it was an incredible amount of standing around. To further complicates things, at 11:30 a.m. a newbie showed up which took away one of those four non-DUPR courts leaving only three for people signing up for regular club play. There were a number of folks complaining about the DUPR impact.
Overall, I felt I played pretty well today. Sure, I had some bad shots, but those were greatly outnumbered by good shots. Today, I had some shots I was shocked that I got the ball back over the net . . . those were ones where I was contorting my body to get to some really uncomfortable ball, typically during some kind of firefight at the net.
Meeting
Once I finish the last morning session game, I headed over to the picnic tables for the club board meeting. The meeting was called to order at 12:22 p.m. There was Mark Dettle, Pam Rissmann, Jackie Signor, Dan Bliss, Andrew McLeod, and myself. There’s no treasurer for the club right now, which is a significant problem that we need to take care of soon. John Pacholski provided his last Treasurer’s report by email, which we read at the meeting. Two board members weren’t there—Barbara Gerry, who is sick, and Kristin Long who had warned she might have a timing conflict—which turned out to be the case. We went through the agenda talking about site coordinators, court repairs, club events, and various topics of discussion for the club. We adjourned the meeting at 1:36 p.m.
More Games
Before I headed over to the board meeting, René had asked if I was going to stick around and play some. Initially, I told her “no”, but now she was in this game with the exceptionally good player named Eddie. I met Eddie very briefly last week. I got to really talk to him this morning. Eddie is from Venezuela and he’s married to a woman named Christina who arrived a bit later than he did and also left earlier. Eddie said he’s been playing about a year and a half but comes from a college D1 tennis background. Christina said she’s a relative newbie but is learning to play.
Unfortunately, Eddie took off after that game was finished so I didn’t get to play with him.
I played four games with Jackie, René, and Pauly. We rotated through partners. Those are really fun games. Pauly has gotten much, much better, though he was still the weakest player on the court. What was unusual is I was experiencing some mild cramping in my right calf and right hamstring in those last games. But it wasn’t constant and it didn’t affect my game.
Those were fun. I hit an ATP but René got it back over the net and my partner was there to cover and keep the point going. Good stuff.
At 3:15 p.m., I called it a day and headed out. I originally had told my staff I would be in about 2 p.m. but at this rate it’ll be closer to 4 p.m.! I worked a ton in the last month, I think I’m entitled to a little bit of time off.
Hopefully tonight, I’ll get time to type up the minutes from the board meeting. Yet one more duty for me to do in my life!
Happy Losing Shot
I can’t remember the players, but it was in a strong game—I was proud of myself for not getting to a ball and allowing my opponents a winner. What? Crazy, right? I was on the right. The ball was a sharp diagonal dink that landed about 2” inside the line to my right out of my reach. Great shot. But risky shot. The reason I didn’t get it was I was covering the middle and the high percentage shot instead. You’ll sometimes lose doing that, but you’ll win more. Riley Newman would be proud of me.
Oh, what to say for court hours today? I had about 4 1/2 hours waiting for and playing games, but with all the extra waiting, I’m going to call it 3 hours to add to my total.
Number of days on a court: 621
Number of total hours: 2,706
Number of paid coaching hours: 9.5
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