Saturday, April 19, 2025 (Court Day #791)

With my help, The Santa Cruz Pickleball Club had arranged with the Bay Area paddle company—Aireo Sports Inc.—to have a paddle fundraising day. That was today at Skypark. 10% of all sales would go to the SCPC. No percentage of any sales would go to me nor any club member.

I left my house about 8:30 a.m. and headed out under cloudy skies. There was actually a little bit of drizzle while driving there, but fortunately that was the extent of precipitation.

Skypark

I arrived at Skypark at 8:45 a.m and went about setting up the table and two chairs that I had brought for Matthias Kling, company co-founder. He arrived 5 or 10 minutes later from Palo Alto. He’s a materials professor at Stanford University.

Matthias Kling explains their new top end paddle to some local players.

There were not a lot of strong players there today. Tall Brandon, the post-doc, was there, but he wasn’t playing up to his normal level and was making more mistakes than typical for him. I think it’s pretty safe to say that of the players that were there today, I was the strongest one. I’m sure the best local players were at over at Brommer Park. 

My son Nicholas was visiting for the weekend and showed up mid morning and played with random people that were more his intermediate skill level. We didn’t get any games together.

Golden Pickle

I had my second ever golden pickle. I was playing with the tall guy named Brian who I’ve never met before. Brian is either a strong 3.0 or a weak 3.5. We were playing against Pauly and little Maria in their first game of the day. I started serving the game and never relinquished my serve. It was just a combination of momentum and lack of warmup and me serving very well—they are not bad players by any stretch. This was at least a better game than my first golden pickle… that first game was just sad, with a very weak player as one of the opponents.

12:46 p.m. My son Nicholas is on the far court at the net just after hitting the ball.

I stopped playing about 12:30 p.m., then helped Matthias keep track of—and later collect—the demo paddles still out on courts.

Matthias was very happy with the sales of his paddles and players appeared happy with their new paddle acquisitions.

I headed home, showered, had lunch, then was off to work!

[Later note: The SCPC received a nearly $300 donation from Aireo for hosting. That’ll help with some of the new rolling nets the club is contributing to!]

Number of days on a court: 791
Number of total hours: 3,127
Number of paid coaching hours: 129.5

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