Saturday, March 9, 2024 (Court Day #633)

René asked a couple days ago if I was gonna be playing today or not. Staffing is in pretty good shape at work. I did have to let go a new hire had been with us about a week. It wasn’t working out as well as we had hoped. There’s nothing too major, but a number of little red flags accumulated into enough of a problem. I figured it would be better to nip it in the bud. But even with him gone and one of my staff testing positive with COVID today and being out, we still have enough staff and experience there. There are no “fires” to put out, so figured I’d take the opportunity to get out and play a little bit . . . hopefully, better than I did Thursday night.

The inside of my right knee continues to be a little uncomfortable at times but also perfectly fine other times.

Brommer Park

I left my house at 8:50 a.m. under hazy clouds. There was a temperature in the mid 50s.

I pulled into the Brommer Park lot a few minutes after 9 a.m. and there was plenty of parking. I got into a game fairly quickly and played ok. Barely ok.

In that first game, I partnered with a regular, Paul, and he asked my name. “Andrew.”
“What’s your last name?”
“Lenz.”
“Oh, you’re famous.”
I laughed! (Not so famous that he didn’t have to ask my name!)

Over the course of the morning, I was disappointed and frustrated in my play. Some shots were too high. I had serves and returns and other shots into the net. I popped the ball up to my opponents. For the last game, I played a game with a fellow named Marco against Dieter and René. Marco wasn’t playing stellar, but I felt primarily responsible for a loss 2–11. In that last game, I was dragging due to lack of energy probably from me not eating breakfast and I didn’t bring any snacks today.

All that said, I definitely moments of good play. There was a game where René and I played against Mauricio—my nearby neighbor—and Evon (“Ah-von”). After a net battle, Evon told me, “Andrew, he have really fast hands.” I’d never played with Evon, he’s a good player.

Drilling with Mauricio?

Mauricio was there, and I talked to him about the shared court behind his house. He said the court isn’t good enough to play a game on, but it is adequate for drilling.

Mauricio says that the company that he works for is based on the East Coast so he typically starts work between 6 and 6:30 a.m. That’s fairly early for me. If I got up up at 6:30 every day, there’s little doubt that I’d be sleep deprived on a regular basis. 

There are no ifs, ands, or buts. I really need to start drilling if I’m going to get better. The lack of consistent play in the last nine months has been detrimental to my performance. I’ll just have to take my lumps until I work my way back to playing well consistently.

I checked the time 11:48 a.m. After the poor performance of that last game, and lack of energy, I decided to call it a day and head home then to work.

Number of days on a court: 633
Number of total hours: 2,742
Number of paid coaching hours: 17

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