Tuesday, March 25, 2025 (Court Day #784)

I arrived at Skypark after work at about 6:50 p.m. It was busy enough to use a signup board but it didn’t take long to get into games. Well, it would’ve taken longer had I waited for better players. This evening was not-so-great games with at least one or two weaker players in each one.

It wasn’t until the last game of the evening that I had four reasonably strong players on one court. I was playing with Adam (a lefty) against lefty Aaron B. and Mike Sullivan. It was a close game, but we lost.

I felt that I played ok tonight, but nothing to write home about. I made my share of mistakes.

Tennis Players are Nicer

Zach—the young guy who was teaching off-the-radar pickleball classes at Skypark on Sunday afternoons—came tonight. He came up to me and gave me a sideways bro hug. When I said I hadn’t seen him for a while, he said he moved to San Jose and had a full-time day job now and has gone back to teaching exclusively tennis. He asked how my classes were going. I told Zach the story about a two weeks ago when I gently warned a group that they’d need to move to the other open permanent court at 1:30 due to my parks & rec class. Seven minutes later, when I told them it was time to move to the open unreserved court, the man got in my face and gave me a hard time for forcing them to move mid-game. After my story, Zach said that tennis players understand the tennis is harder to learn and are therefore more humble and nicer. I’m not sure I 100% agree, but pickleball is indeed easy to learn… but it’s also very difficult to master. And I’ve found pickleball players are generally very friendly, but there are always rare exceptions.

Rain Coming

It’s supposed to rain half an hour for the rest of the week through Sunday at least. I’m on my break from classes so at least I don’t have to worry about rescheduling those due to rainouts.

Rallie Machine

I received an email in the past few days from the Rallie Pickleball machine people saying that there are only a handful of their machines left unspoken for. It’s kind of silly that they’re sending me this message given that I already bought one. Regardless, the message did explain the ball machines will be shipping in the middle of next month. That will be exciting. I’m thinking I’m going to see about getting my hands on one of the new quieter paddles… like one of the Owl brand paddles. My plan is to use the ball machine in my backyard, so I’d like to make it as quiet as possible when appropriate (like evenings) for my neighbors.

Wednesday, March 26, 2025 (No Play)

A video popped up. The key takeaway was to determine which opponent is better at offense and which is better at defense and adjust your shot selection based on that. Surprisingly, I’d never considered this. It’s good advice and seems obvious when you think about it. Sure, if your goal is to win, you hit to the weaker player. But the weaker player may depend on where your opponents are on the court! (And I when say “goal is to win”, I typically don’t go out of my way to hit to the weaker player during rec play… in fact, it’s often the opposite. Tournaments are an entirely different scenario though!)

In other words, if you have two opponents back and on the defensive and you know which is weaker from that position, that one should get the ball. And if you have two opponents at the net and ready to attack, you want to try and isolate the one who doesn’t attack as well.

Something to consider!

Number of days on a court: 784
Number of total hours: 3,111.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 126.5

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