Month: December 2024 (Page 3 of 4)

Saturday, December 7, 2024 (Court Day #746)

An orthopedic surgeon, Nick Pappas MD, posted a tongue-in-cheek pickleball-related video yesterday about what not to get your parents for Christmas:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DDKE-vCp8FV

And to nip negative comments in the bud, he included this:
“…this post is meant to be humorous. Some of you will take this way too seriously in the comments. If you like pickleball and already play it, don’t let me get in your way!”

If your parents are 80-90 years old, I’d probably agree with him in most cases. Even then, I’ve played against players over 80. And I’ve heard of players in their 90s, but I have yet to see one in person.

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Holiday Parade

We—and by “we”, I mean the Santa Cruz Pickleball Club—participated for the third year in a row in the Santa Cruz Downtown Holiday Parade. Like the previous two years, I spearheaded our involvement.

Unlike the last two years—when it was overcast and either raining or threatening—today, it was sunny and eventually warm enough to wear just a T-shirt and shorts. I was overdressed later on in the morning.

I signed in our group at the organizers tent shortly before the deadline of 9:30 a.m. The parade would start at 10:00 a.m. but we were group #41, meaning we had 40 groups that would need to mobilize before we entered the parade route ourselves.

We had fewer participants this year—merely 9—but we had good dedicated core. (There was an invitation extended to the local players to join a private pickleball party at the same time as the parade, so we lost some players to that, unfortunately.)

We chatted about various pickleball-related things. Sean McElhaney was talking about how maybe the abandoned tennis courts in the Pogonip could be good for pickleball, though parking would be an issue. Players would have to walk about half a mile uphill to get to courts. Plus a portable toilet would need to be installed. The tough thing about the Pogonip is that making any changes would require battling a portion of local residents who want it used as little as possible. The ironic thing, is that currently, the open space is a haven for homeless people who set up camps, set fires, leave trash, and otherwise disturb the wildlife. Having players keeping an eye on things might be a good thing in the long run and reduce the number of sweeps that the police have to do to clean the area up.

Once the Second Harvest Food Bank truck started moving, we slipped in behind, in front of the loud chanting Girl Scouts. Fortunately, once we added the larger proscribed space between groups, I didn’t notice any chanting after that.

Karin and Mark Maggipinto carried the banner for us. We offered to swap with them, but they decided to take it the whole way. (I didn’t find out until a few days later that Karin is Larry “Lars” Yien’s sister!)

I’d be lying if I said we didn’t temporarily lose some balls into the crowd.

At one point, two of us gave our paddles to two boys from the sidewalk who asked to jump in. They hit a few shots before we had to shuffle off again. That was a new thing. Fun!

When we finished the parade, I checked the time. 11:24 a.m. Almost exactly two hours after I arrived. Not bad.

Parade Video

The Downtown Association live-streamed the parade on Facebook (we are at 1 hours and 5 minutes in the timeline), it also appeared on a local cable station, and is now immortalized on Youtube as well at 1 hour, 7 seconds. (You are welcome to figure out why there is a 5 minute difference!)

Number of days on a court: 746
Number of total hours: 3,029
Number of paid coaching hours: 99.5

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

Thursday, December 5, 2024 (Court Day #745)

Last night, there was a community meeting at the London Nelson Community Center hosted by the City of Santa Cruz’s Parks & Recreation Department. They wanted to get public input about replacing some BMX bike jump ramps at Depot Park with four pickleball courts.

From what I’d heard, I was expecting this plan to be a slam dunk. According to Parks & Rec, the bike park was seeing relatively little use.

After the Zoom meeting that club president Mark Dettle and I had with the city in October (which I mentioned here at the time), they drafted a very nice revised proposal for the court placement.

Community Meeting

When I arrived at the large meeting room about five minutes before the start time at 5:30 p.m., there was already a bit of a crowd, including several bikes and teenagers with helmets. Most of the faces I didn’t recognize, but that is pretty normal given how much pickleball has grown in the last few years. I plopped myself down in the second row.

Seated to my right was Mark Dettle. There were a couple of club Site Coordinators there, Sean McElhaney somewhere behind me and seated to left, Val Rathbone, along with her husband Stan.

Little did I know that 80% of the room were people there to advocate for keeping the bike jumps. By the time the meeting started there were probably about 80 people, including many standing in the back.

Almost all the speakers were against the pickleball courts. A number of the pickleball players got sheepish to say anything.

After I spoke up about the general need for more courts—”maybe not at this location”—and how the game is played by a huge range of ages, Mark spoke about the number of players—though he only mentioned the approximate 460 paying club members, not the 1,000+ local players—and then that perhaps some of the underused city tennis courts could be dual-striped for pickleball. (Not that this idea would make the tennis players happy!)

In the end, it was apparent that the bike contingent was very passionate about keeping the park for their use. It was stated that originally there were novice jumps there but the wood had deteriorated and they were torn down. One man said they had been told by the city that they couldn’t replace those jumps since the jump park was intended to be “temporary.” That left only the taller and steeper expert metal jumps that limited who could use them.

Two pickleball players who I know came but spoke up for keeping the bike jumps and against installing pickleball courts—advocating for places dedicated to youth. And I understand… and concur, if the jumps will really be used frequently. Otherwise, I can guarantee that the space would see a whole lot of use as pickleball courts, especially so near to the big Dream Inn hotel with all its visitors to the city.

By the end of the meeting, it was pretty obvious that Depot Park would not become pickleball courts. And I have no problem with giving the BMX jumps another shot to better use that space.

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Skypark Tonight

It was 54°F when I got the Skypark about 6:40 p.m. Fortunately, there is a pickup truck backing out of a parking space just as I arrived. The truck made about an eight-point turn to get out… it was a little amusing to watch. I suspect it could have been done with half that number or even fewer. But, hey, it’s easy to judge from outside the vehicle, right?

I almost immediately got into a game. There weren’t enough people to warrant using the dry erase board so it was still happily stowed in the storage bin. All four temporary courts for set up for a total of eight and all were in use with only a couple of players waiting.

Games

My first game was with Mo against Oscar and the guy who I am totally spacing about. Mo said that she was heading into her eighth hour of playing today and had lost all her recent games. And we lost this one against Oscar too.

Oscar and I played against Mike and Mauricio and we beat them by quite a bit. I played quite well. They complimented me a couple of times after particularly good shots and I replied, “You should have seen me in my first game!”

The next game was Oscar and myself against two young guys. We beat them 11–0.

Long, Long Game

Mo called me over and I joined her against Mauricio and Diego. That was a very long and fun game. At one point, Mo and I were down 6–10, but we came back and tied it up 10–10. There was side out, after side out, after side out, and we finally went ahead 11–10. There were a lot of really good rallies. Eventually, Mauricio and Diego did pull out a win 13–11. When we came off, someone commented on how long we were on the end court. Yep, a very long game!

Isaiah & Gabe

Mauricio and I played a game against Isaiah and Gabe. It was a very close game but we won.

We decide to have a rematch but this time it was embarrassing. Isaiah was absolutely on fire and if Mauricio and I scored any points, it was no more than two points! I was really impressed with Isaiah’s play in that one.

Last Game

After he won, Gabe said this would be a good time for him to leave, so Isaiah had to find a new partner—a young guy named Ben who has long curly blonde hair that he’ll sometimes secure with a bandana. Ben reminds me of a shorter young Andre Agassi.

Mauricio and I were down 1-7 but had climbed back to 5–7 when the lights clicked off at 8:30 p.m. The chorus of moans of disappointment could be heard from all the courts!

I told Isaiah that he was playing so much better than the last time I’ve seen him. (It had been months.) He said that he’s been playing a lot of singles lately. That might be why his shots are so well dialed in with his angles.

Number of days on a court: 745
Number of total hours: 3,028.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 99.5

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

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

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