Month: January 2024 (Page 2 of 3)

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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Thursday, January 11, 2024 (Court Day #620)

I left work early to cook dinner for my wife, but she had forgotten that I was planning that tonight and she wasn’t too keen on me cooking what she had prepped for. She said that I could go to pickleball, so that’s where I headed. When I pulled up to the courts at 5:30 p.m., it was a chilly 46°F.

There was plenty of parking and weirdly only two games going, but I don’t remember ever being at Skypark that early before. I asked someone if this lack of players was normal at this time and he didn’t know either.

I got into a game fairly quickly and people started to trickle in. At the peak of the evening, all eight courts were going, though earlier on, one court at the end was not being used because it had some slippery wet spots on it.

You could easily see your breath and people were complaining about the cold. My hands were numb. I was wearing shorts but I wore my sweatshirt the whole session…typically, I remove it after a few games—not tonight!

The first hour and a half worth of games were confidence boosters. I was winning every single game regardless of who I happened to be partnered with and I was rotating through various people against various opponents. I played some games with Paul, Minori and her boyfriend David, and later Matt Babb arrived as well. Paul and Matt played against David and me. They won a game. We won a game and then in the last game I was not playing well at all and we lost without scoring a point. By then I was quite tired and hungry. It was 8:17 p.m. I was having a hard time concentrating, so I figured since I’d be playing tomorrow morning at Brommer anyway, I would call it a day and head home.

I had my moments—like doing a beautiful dropshot from the baseline to reset the point after a deep lob over my head—but, overall, I was not happy with my play. I’m continuing to wear my right knee brace and my right wrist brace and those help minimize discomfort.

My car read 43°F when I left, it had dropped only about 1 degree per hour. Interesting.

Number of days on a court: 620
Number of total hours: 2,703
Number of paid coaching hours: 9.5

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

Sunday, January 7, 2024 (Court Day #619)

Today was my first day back into regular duties as site coordinator for Derby Park on Sundays since my knee surgery in early June.

It’s kind of ironic that in the last couple of weeks, I made up a meme kind of mocking those who don’t want to play pickleball in the cold. As I peered out my back window through the blinds, I could see some ice patches in my backyard. It rained very heavily yesterday afternoon, but it was mostly clear skies today. The thermometer in my car read 39°F and there was ice on my windshield. The excellent thing is sun. The sun beating down should dry out the courts fairly quickly. I rarely wear a sweatshirt but with freezing temperatures overnight, today was one of those days!

Derby

I parked outside Derby Park at 8:42 a.m. and walked in to completely empty courts. And they were wet. I pulled out one portable net (there are five rolling nets now) and set up the sign-up board and blew off a court before my neglected club battery died. (Apparently, it drained over the last six months while waiting for use.) For the first hour, we had to wait for four of the six courts to dry, initially only allowing those for drilling. Gradually, one by one, courts were no longer slippery and I released the courts to games.

Of the first few people who arrived today, I had no idea who they were. The first one, John, said he’s playing for about three months and the second one, Mike, for about five months. By the time the session was in full swing, I would say I knew about half the players. A whole lot of new faces!

Scot, one of my students from my very first Willowbrook beginner class that started in November, was there and greeted me as I passed. On my way back, I said, “Nice to have a Scot sighting out in the wild!”

While warming up, the guy I was warming up with complimented my drop shots. I shared back, “It’s not my first rodeo!”

I spent the last 20 minutes of my time at Derby instructing to brand new players. For the two newbies that I trained when was named Gina, neither one was named Qwa.

I had Rick Abend close for me and Mark G. took over teaching the two newbies. I left a few minutes after noon . . . I had to get to my class in Aptos.

County Class

I drove home and picked up my wife. She was going to tag along to go walk with a friend of ours who lives two blocks from Willowbrook County Park. Our younger corgi Pepper came along to go with her.

One of my eight students, Nina, didn’t come to the first class.

My first class went well. I’ll admit that I should have reviewed my notes from my first class a bit more, I forgot to cover details of holding the paddle, but we’ll double-check that next week. It’s a more equally skilled group this time. Last time, I had students who had a really hard time directing the ball but also Scot who obviously a step up from the rest . . . he did come in with some previous game experience though.

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Monday, January 8, 2024 (No Play)

I heard about this technique years ago, but this video is the first time I’ve actually seen it in practice:

Knee

My knee is bothering me some. Knee discomfort on stairs is minimal but noticeable. Walking to my car to head out for lunch, it was a different kind of pain, less achy and slightly more sharp, but still relatively mild.

Number of days on a court: 619
Number of total hours: 2,700
Number of paid coaching hours: 9.5

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