Tuesday, March 4, 2025 (Court Day #775)
Over the last few days club president Mark Dettle and I, well mostly me, have been working on getting a video together to promote pickleball in Santa Cruz. It will play at the Santa Cruz Warriors basketball game at halftime on Friday night.
Mark has been broaching the subject here and there with a local videographer named Peter for over a year. At the last minute, that worked out, so I sent over my materials to Peter and let him take over. Mark and Peter had met at Brommer Park yesterday as well as Willowbrook Park and recorded video. I had shared video with them that I had taken on Friday last week. My son Nicholas composes music in his free time for fun and I thought one of his songs would work well if we remove the vocals. Nicholas mastered a new version has an instrumental and sent me the file which I, in turn, shared with Peter. That became the background music. Peter put together a draft video and send it to Mark and myself tonight. I suggested some edits.
Skypark
On Sunday last week, my Kitchen Blockers dropped out of the pocket on the side of my backpack and Kristin Long found them. We hadn’t connected for me to get them back, so I wore my old protective glasses instead tonight instead.
Boy. I was not happy with my play tonight. David said I played fine, but I was popping up shots. It was not good. I told someone that I hoped I was getting all my bad shots out before the halftime demonstration on Friday!
Thursday, March 6, 2025 (No Play)
Amused, my wife sent me this short video about this “Pickle Balls” snack now available at Costco:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DGWxmuESACz
Kaiser Permanente Arena
Mark and I arranged to meet with Spencer Arburn, of Santa Cruz Warriors staff, at the arena at 11 a.m. to do a dry run of temporary “throw down” court lines and work out logistics for our pickleball halftime show tomorrow night. Spencer, Mo, Jackie, and I will be representing pickleball in front of the crowd. We will only have six minutes total including setup. Our prepared video will play while we set up. Then we should have about four minutes to actually play. Maybe long enough for 4-6 rallies.
Mark, me, Spencer and his coworker Michael helped stretch out the various rolled orange fabric court lines and velcroed them together. The lines came with eight weight bags, but we needed something to actually put in the bags to make them work. Mark left that aspect to the Warriors staff. We don’t want to be held responsible for potentially damaging their floor!
We set up a temporary net as well, then we stashed it—fully set up—behind the ramp to Section H. Then we carefully folded the lines up assembled. At my prompting, we laid them back out to make sure it wouldn’t be difficult under pressure. And it wasn’t. It went quickly and smoothly. Then we carefully stashed those with the stored net. Hopefully, people won’t mess with them before halftime!
Spencer showed us the space behind the arena where us players could warm up during the 2nd quarter.
After 45 minutes, we were finished. I just need to write up some notes for the announcer about us players then all the prep work will be done!
Rain
While Mark and I were in the arena, it was pouring rain. It actually hailed for part of it and that was loud in an arena with a vinyl roof! Anyway, the weather prevented any play tonight at Skypark… maybe some brave souls made the trek to the courts to see if they were dry enough to play, but not me. It’s been raining a goodly amount. My classes were rained out this past Sunday.
Number of days on a court: 775
Number of total hours: 3,095.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 114.5
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