Tuesday, December 3, 2024 (Court Day #744)

I was hoping to leave work early around 5 p.m. today, however, by the time the end of the day rolled around, we were short two people, so that wasn’t going to happen.

Pickleball at Work

Dan, one of the friends of Matt and Paul in Scotts Valley, visited my work today. That reminds me… Barbara J. came into my work a few days ago also and got to meet my son Nicholas who happened to be in the store too. It’s always fun for me when I get to see pickleball players out of context.

Database Woes

There are some adventures with the Santa Cruz Pickleball Club this week. George, our treasurer, was tweaking some things between Wix, our website hosting service, and MailChimp, the bulk emailing service, which acts as our de facto membership database. George accidentally erased all the members in MailChimp. (The documentation was misleading and support was not ideal.) Fortunately, we have a separate spreadsheet of names and email addresses that Pam had exported previously. It’s a bit more complicated than simply loading names and email addresses into the MailChimp system—there are some digital signatures involved also. George said he was going to need to manually copy and paste everything over and was estimating that it would take 12 hours of his time. Ouch. It’s good for the club that he’s a volunteer. It would get expensive if he wasn’t retired from his career as a software engineer!

Skypark

It was warm outside for December day. You could easily get by wearing shorts and a T-shirt. However, when I arrived in the courts at 6:40 p.m., it was 54°F. Still not too bad for a December night, but certainly not warm.

When I got to the courts, I jumped right into a game with Scott against Mauricio and little Lou. The first game was pretty close, but Scott and I squeaked out a win. We did a repeat of the same game, switching sides. This time, Scott and I won by a significant margin.

Little Lou and I played against against Francis and Scott. It was a good game to continue to warm up with. Not too difficult. I continued to dial in my game. We won 11-6.

The Last Games

The last three games were with Mike Sullivan—who is ticking down to retirement this month—and myself against David and his girlfriend Minori.

In the first game, we got completely clobbered. It was something like 3-11. We did another game and this time it was closer, we lost 6-11. In the third game, Mike and I went on a big run took a very substantial lead to the surprise of both of us. We went on to win 11–6.

That last game wrapped up at 8:25 p.m. so there was not enough time for another game, so the four of us took down two temporary nets.

I wore my sweatshirt tonight for the whole session though I probably could’ve taken it off midway through. When I left, it had dropped to 48°F. 

And?

Generally, I was unhappy with my play tonight. Sure, I had my moments, but I was not doing my best by any stretch. Some nights, I have a harder time judging distance under the lights. There were definitely a few shots tonight where I misjudged and hit a ball incorrectly.

Aireo

Spencer was sporting in Aireo paddle—it was a model one step up from the one that I had received myself. I’ve actually been quite happy with mine, but I’m anxious to try the higher-end paddles from them.

Shot Reaction

There were very much shots I made tonight where my reaction was just like this:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C-vxoh9vl1I/
(Though my outburts were more subdued and self-directed!)

NBA Pickleball

Kenny Atkinson, the head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers pro basketball team, got them out on a pickleball court a week ago:
https://www.fearthesword.com/2024/11/29/24307865/cavs-kenny-atkinson-isnt-impressed-with-cleveland-cavaliers-pickleball-skills

And here’s a link to a video of the team playing:
https://twitter.com/cavs/status/1861497670138757532

Number of days on a court: 744
Number of total hours: 3,026.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 99.5

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