Sunday, December 1, 2024 (Court Day #743)

When I checked the temperature this morning, I was happy to see that it read 59°F. That’s 5° warmer than it was three days ago on Thanksgiving morning. I’ll take the high 50s for pickleball any day!

Bad Calls

There’s a podcast, “4.0 to Pro“, that I listen to now and then. Occasionally, I’ll pick up useful tidbits or at least validate what I’m already thinking. The topic for the podcast that I started listening to this morning while driving was on the topic of mindset and how you maintain proper focus after you get a bad call on the court. It’s easy to get upset and have it mess up your game.

That got me to thinking. How many times have you made a call that you’re 100% sure about but your opponent still questioned it? If you were to reverse this, it begs the question of how often do you question the call of an opponent when they are making the perfect call? The pickleball court is 44 feet long. That’s a long way to judge spherical object when fractions of an inch are sometimes involved. The other thing to think about is the viewing angle. Think about how much easier it is to judge whether a ball is long or short from a standing position than it would be to judge while laying down on your chest in the same spot. That’s an extreme example, but it kind of gives you an idea about the problem of judging in or out from a distance.

Brommer Park

The temperature was a few degrees cooler at Brommer Park than at my house, with my car thermometer reading 54°F when I arrived there at 8:50 a.m. Nippy but not teeth-chattering.

While warming up with Dave Ryan, I noticed I needed to take more balls out of the air. I was letting too many bounce and some resulted in a slightly uncomfortable hit.

First Game

Evan and Richard joined us on the court and Evan and I paired up. Dave is the strongest player of us and Richard is the weakest. Dave may even be a 4.5 and Richard is probably a strong 3.0 player or a weak 3.5. Evan and I won 11-2. Afterward, Evan told me, “You carried us.”

Games with Kim M.

Marquis and I played against Kim McGinty and Zach Stockwell. (Zach’s wife Julie had run off to the bathroom, so he hesitantly jumped in to play.) We won 11-4. Marquis is fortunate enough to get to play with the local top players. You can’t help but get better doing that.

Kim and I played against Shawnte and Hemmie. We won 11-5. I think it was Hemmie’s first game.

Kim and I played then against Sean and his younger brother Brennan. We lost 7-11. They were playing a power game and it worked. Sean complimented me after a couple of rallies. Nice to hear. And Brennan is coming along.

Evan and I played against Jason Brown and Kim. We won 11-5.

Humility

This morning, I’d won four games and lost one. (A bunch of that depended on who are playing with and against, of course.)

Kim and I played against Dave Ryan and Evan. We got clobbered 11-0. It’s not a surprise that they won, though you would have figured we’d score at least one point. Evan and I are pretty close in terms of skill and Dave is far better than Kim. Sometimes games go like that. But this was on me too, not just Kim. I needed to be spot on in this game and I wasn’t. I need to be better against hard drives. Get out of the way more, perhaps.

After that, Dave and Evan wandered off to play with Sean and his brother Brennan. And that was the end of my games going against a pair of strong players.

More Games

There are a few other games in there of little note that I won’t mention here.

Dave Cox and I played against Pavel and Mike Berger, a club site coordinator. I don’t think I’d ever played with Pavel before. He’s tall, thin, athletic. Pavel took a dive over the draped net between the two sides of courts while he was retrieving a ball between rallies. He scraped up his right knee in a few spots, but he was ok—no dripping blood nor broken bones. Though I bet he’s going to be sore for a few days.

Dave, Me, Mike, Greg

My final three games were paired with Dave Cox against tall lefty Greg and Mike Berger. As one might expect, Dave and I won all three games we played against them, though we started two of the games down by 2-3 points.

It was 1:23 p.m. when I checked my phone. I’ve been there for 4 1/2 hours. It was getting time to eat food… I was starting to wear down.

As I left Brommer Park, it was partly cloudy and 68°F. Had I wanted to, there were enough people there that I could’ve stayed and gotten into more games. There were about six courts still in use.

Bleh

I hit net tape what felt like a bunch of times today for some reason. And I was hitting high balls that I should let sail out continues to be a regular problem with me.

Suggestion for Dave C.

Before the start of one of our games, Dave asked if I had suggestions for him. I didn’t at the time but I did later and emailed him this:

“My suggestion for you would be to trust your partner on service returns. I serve from the right, the ball comes back to me, you’d come across to my side, stretch out, and return the ball. The ball then came back pretty fast to the space that you had vacated in a fashion that was very hard to handle. 2-3 times that ended the rally.

My backhand drops and drives are generally pretty solid. Probably as good as your stretched out forehand but the biggie is it would allow us to continue to cover more of the court. Maybe you have something that no one else has, but no player I’ve played with comes over that far.”

He replied that it was helpful insight. In case there is any doubt, overall, Dave did play well.

Court Coverage

I emphasize with my students that they need to cover the court in relationship to their partner. Here’s a good example that popped up of a player who was pulled wide but his partner filled the vacancy:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DCyzqpDv04E

Number of days on a court: 743
Number of total hours: 3,024.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 99.5

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