Monday, January 20, 2025 (Court Day #763)
I arrived at Brommer Park at 10:21 a.m. Today was to be our Santa Cruz Pickleball Club board meeting. I had to do some prep for it this morning and that kept me from playing earlier—well, that and just being tired!
Games
When I got to Brommer, harder games (blue, 4.0+) appeared to be difficult to find, so I signed up in just red (Advanced) instead. Tom Sherwood and I played against short Chris and another guy I don’t know. Tom and I won pretty easily. It was a lazy warm up game.
Tony Sloss and I won 11-4 against friends named Adam and Chris.
In a game against Josh, there was one shot from the kitchen where he slammed it near my right hip, and I whipped my paddle to my right and returned the ball. Afterward the rally ended, he exclaimed, “Wow! Where did those hands come from?”
While playing in a game with Tony, I said, “I got it!” but then I hit the ball off the edge of my paddle and it flew up and nearly hit the fence behind our opponents. Oops!
Tony, Ying, Mo
My last game was with Mo against Tony Sloss and Ying—mixed doubles. We lost 11–7. We were down quite quite a bit but then we worked our way back and we were getting closer but ran out of time. Mo and I were not playing our best.
Tony was back at the baseline and I hit a very short shot, but Tony managed to sprint up to the ball and drop it over the center of the net. Nice get and nice hit, Tony!
Meeting Time
It was 11:54 a.m. when I got back out to the club’s court scheduling board and, by appearances, there is no way I would get an additional game in before our board meeting starting started at 12:15 p.m.
It turned out that there was some confusion amongst the board regarding the date plus president Mark Dettle was at the ER with his elderly mother, so after about 20 minutes of club business discussion, we decided to postpone the meeting.

Pro Paddle Sponsorship Fiasco
Recently, Selkirk told their sponsored pro players that they were only allowed to play with the 008 paddle in competition. Apparently, this was with short notice, and this particular paddle behaves differently than the selection of paddles the players were allowed to choose from before the mandate. One pro player, Quang Doung, was traveling in a different country and playing in a tournament. Midway through, he had enough of trying to adapt on the fly to this new mandated Selkirk paddle and switched to a Proton brand paddle.
Understandably, Selkirk was very unhappy about this and sent him a letter not to do it again. Selkirk pays hundreds of thousands of dollars to sponsor athletes. If an athlete doesn’t use their paddle then that is a breach of contract and Selkirk is not getting their money’s worth. This was especially damaging to Selkirk and was unexpected positive publicity for Proton. Selkirk may need to tighten up their contracts but also consider making sure they give enough notice to their sponsored players regarding having to switch paddles.
Volleyer’s Eye
Something interesting that Colin John’s mentioned on a podcast is something he referred to as “the volleyer’s eye”. He compared this to the batter’s eye, which refers to the color of the background that the batter sees past the pitcher on the mound. For instance, you wouldn’t want to have a white background because it obscures the baseball being thrown by the pitcher. In a similar way, you wouldn’t want to have a light colored wall or a window without opaque blinds beyond a baseline of a pickleball court.
Number of days on a court: 763
Number of total hours: 3,071
Number of paid coaching hours: 108.5
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