Sunday, April 20, 2025 (Court Day #792)
After Easter services this morning with family, I was planning to go to Brommer Park today to get more challenging play. However, my son Nicholas was in town this weekend and he wanted to play but was not interested in playing at Brommer. He’d be far more comfortable joining in the level of play found at Derby, so that’s where we went.
Derby Park
We arrived about 10:50 a.m. and had to park down the block and around the corner. From that, I knew it would be busy.
I spent a session signing up in red (advanced) instead of blue (4.0+) since I would be playing with Nicholas.
Games
For one game, Nicholas and I were playing against J.J. and a young Asian fellow named Ben—not the Ben often seen in Scotts Valley. Nicholas and I found ourselves down in that game but then came back and tied up 8–8, and then even took a lead 10–8. Then they tied it up 10–10. Then we got one more point before turning the serve over to them. They end up winning 13–11. It was a fun game, J.J. is always upbeat and Ben was too.
We played reasonably well in the four games we played in over the hour and a half that we were there. However, the last game was against Beth and a man named Jonathan, who had never seen before today. We played them a previous game, and it was pretty balanced. However, this game was a fiasco. By the time we were down 0–6, and then 0–8 on their very first service, I was thinking, “This better not be a golden pickle for our opponents.” While I’ve lost a small handful of games 0-11 in my eight years of playing, I’ve never lost a game where an opponent ran the table on the first service. Fortunately, we broke their serve, and there would be no golden pickle loss today either—thankfully! Nonetheless, we didn’t score a point in that game. For me, I think it was a combination of me not taking my opponents seriously enough, playing with a new paddle (an upgraded Aireo paddle), but also having to wait so long between games. Nicholas hit some roll volleys into the net, along with other errors. But I definitely made my share of errors too. I was disappointed and would have been more frustrated with my performance had I cared.
Given that it was Easter, and we had family obligations so Nicholas and I couldn’t stay to make ourselves feel better with a more respectable follow-up game.
It was 12:20 p.m. so we gathered our things, it was time to go. We were expected at my brother John’s house about an hour later.
Monday, April 21, 2025 (No Play)
I received an bulk email from Rallie about the ball machine I ordered. They apologized for the delays and said they’ll be receiving the machines to customs in Los Angeles then shipping directly from there. LA is only about six hours away, typically two days of shipping. So, probably the first week in May.
The other part of the equation is having enough balls to fill the machine. Currently, I don’t have nearly enough. Of course I could always pick up random balls in bulk online somewhere, but the local ball of choice is the Franklin X. The bummer is Franklin is completely sold out of the yellow colored balls in 100 packs. You can find them around, but I get a little bit of a discount as a USA Pickleball Ambassador if I buy them directly from Franklin. Or at least that used to be the case. I emailed Franklin today asking if they had an ETA for the yellow 100 packs. Maybe they are on the same container ship as the ball machines!
Pickleball Sucks
The Dink shared on Instagram some comments about pickleball from pro tennis player Aleksandar Kovacevic, ranked 79th in the world.
“I hate pickleball! (laugher) I think it’s it’s a very dumbed down version of tennis. As a serious professional sport, I don’t respect it. At all. Now, as a sport for a recreational purposes, yeah, go for it. The reason that it is popular in the States is because it gets people out to exercise. Obviously I support that. It’s very accessible. Kind of like cornhole or something to play. Go for it. It’s a fun game. You can get your family playing. I can get my grandpa to come out and he’ll probably be ok at it in like 20 minutes. But for a real professional sport, it’s a joke. A lot of the guys that are anything ranked seriously in that sport they are all coming from tennis, they couldn’t make it in tennis.”
You can read the full interview here:
https://www.claytenis.com/interviews/aleksandar-kovacevic-hates-pickleball-loves-djokovic/
Still no respect for pickleball.
[Later note: On The Dink Podcast, it was claimed that Kovacevic was joking around and actually doesn’t mind pickleball, hence the “(laughter)” included in the quote.]
Number of days on a court: 792
Number of total hours: 3,128.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 129.5
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