Thursday, April 11, 2024 (No Play)

Today, a woman named Aleksandra private messaged me on Facebook about teaching a class at April 23 for her company holding an event at Chaminade Resort across town. She had posted in the Santa Cruz Pickleball group looking for an instructor and I was debating responding when she reached out. We talked about it and I agreed to teach. It’s a corporate retreat and they want to have some fun activities to do as a break from focusing on business. It’ll take about three hours out of my day for the 2-hour session. I don’t know where the company itself is based, but she’s on the east coast.

Friday, April 12, 2024 (Court Day #645)

There was a dramatic weather change this morning. Yesterday, the temperature climbed to almost 80°F. Today, it’s overcast in the 50s with rain forecasted for tonight.

Vet Trip

Oliver, our older corgi, gets monthly shots at the vet and today was that day. I drove out to Scott Valley for his 8:10 AM appointment which was brief and then headed back to Santa Cruz to drop off Oliver and then head out to Bromer.

Board Meeting Prep

Today is the day of the monthly Santa Cruz Pickleball Club board meeting. Last night, I finished off the agenda and tweaked the meeting minutes from our board retreat in March and sent off the links to the Google Docs to the board members. This morning, Pam told me that I had misspelled her last name and Barb told me that I had forgotten an item she had suggested for the agenda. I apologized to them both and made the corrections.

Players Test

Yesterday, while out walking our younger corgi Pepper, I took another crack at the USA Pickleball Player Rules Test. I felt pretty confident about my answers and felt that this might be the first time where I might actually get them all correct. But, unfortunately, while I had my best score ever of 94%, I still missed 3 of the 50 questions. And just be clear, the test is not the same every time, the questions are randomly drawn from a pool.

The first question that I missed was a true or false question regarding verbal warnings. The question asked whether or not it was true, if the team gets a single verbal warning once per match. I said the answer was false. However, the test came back telling me that it was true. I later realized that I was confusing ‘verbal warnings’ with ‘technical warnings’. Both are delivered verbally without immediate consequences, but a verbal warning is just an informal “hey, don’t do that”. A technical warning counts toward a possible technical foul.

I ran out of time before work to scroll down through the 50 questions and figure out which remaining ones that I missed.

The Drive

As I drove to Brommer Park is misting heavily. It wasn’t rain, but it did start to worrying me about the condition of the courts. I had to run my windshield wipers every 15 seconds or so—an annoyance. I was happy that I grabbed a sweatshirt on my way out this morning, I remember one of the previous board meetings being kind of cold though that was during winter and not during spring. But at 54°F, it wasn’t exactly a warm morning today.

Brommer

When I arrived, the parking lot was still a quarter empty. Walking in, I noticed that there was a court with only three players on it. There was Marquis (pronounced “Marcus”), Dan (the middle school teacher) and a man I didn’t know. That man turned out to be Jeremy, who is visiting from Camarillo. Jeremy is a good player, I’d have him as a tournament partner anytime. I played with Jeremy as my partner for the first game and then for the second game we switched it up and I played with Dan. I won the first and lost the second. (I say “I” though it’s always “we”!) Jeremy paid me a few compliments over the course of the matches: “Fast hands!” “Nice drop!”

Confusion!

So whoever the site coordinator was today, change the pen colors. Blue is always 4.0+, and red is Advanced 3.5, green is Intermediate 3.0, and black is novice/recreational. Today, blue was 3.0 and green was 4.0. It was very confusing. I inadvertently signed up in a game with 3.0 players! Exasperated, Pam pointed out the change and I immediately changed the pen colors to what is common and expected. I was very gracious about it and played the game anyway though one of the players offered me an out . . . I played most of the game lefty. One of the players was visiting from the Mount Shasta group. [I played there two years ago.]

I felt I played reasonably well today.

Board Meeting

The board meeting started at 12:15 p.m. and I joined them a few minutes late, right after my game ended. The board was sitting at a park table under the gazebo. (I think it gave someone an illusion of protection from the wind—ha!) It was a long meeting that ended at 2:27 p.m. We easily could have had it go another hour. George is a very good treasurer but he is rather verbose. It can take him 10 minutes to explain something that could probably be explained in 3 minutes . . . but better too much than too little! Boy. It was cold. My sweatshirt was not enough. And I wasn’t the only one! We were glad it was done more for a chance to warm up than to get on with our day!

Number of days on a court: 645
Number of total hours: 2,778
Number of paid coaching hours: 24.5

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