Month: April 2025 (Page 2 of 4)

Tuesday, April 22, 2025 (Court Day #793)

My daughter Charlotte sent me this clip that appeared on Instagram, from Dr. Arianna Gianakos talking about how to prevent pickleball injuries:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIv2ro1RyCy
Being that my daughter is studying to be an orthopedic surgeon—though it’s super competitive to get into—and Dr. Gianakos is already orthopedic surgeon and I asked if Charlotte had met her at a conference, but not yet.

Skypark

The morning had been sunny, but the clouds arrived midday and stayed the night, meaning it was overcast when I arrived at Skypark just before 7 p.m.

Games

Gabe and I played against a pair I’d never met, a woman named Stephanie and her guy friend. I overheard her telling her partner that Gabe is good but she didn’t know me. (I chuckled to myself at this point. Gabe is getting to be formidable, but I’m still an even better player.) Midway through the game, after she returned my serve into the net and she said, “Nice serve!” Gabe told her, “He’s a good player.” She replied, “I can tell!” We won 11-0 in a quick game.

Father-Son Pairing

Chayton was there with his dad Kevin and I got into a couple of games with them. I won with Scott as my partner, then won again with Kirby as my partner. I will say, that first game, my second game of the night, was a little rough in terms of my play. After what seemed like a rash of errors, I was thinking I’d play it really safe and return Chayton’s serve to the center of their court. Instead, the ball flew past Chayton’s right shoulder, wide and significantly deep. Well, that didn’t work! I even walked up to the net and told Chayton about my keen plan and the abject failure of that plan!

Last Game

My last game was with Kirby against Matt Babb and David. It was a super fun game with longer rallies and firefights at the net. They pulled ahead 11-10, but even with Kirby not playing his best game, we won 13-11.

With only 8 minutes of lights left, Matt didn’t want to start another game. Me? I would have played whatever I could get, but you need opponents! So, we took down the last two remaining portable nets instead and after saying a brief general goodbye, I was driving away at 8:29 p.m.

New Paddle

I’m still adjusting to this new Aireo Harpy paddle I got a few days ago. It feels like it has just a little bit more power and that takes some adjusting, but I like it.

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Wednesday, April 23, 2025 (No Play)

With my new ball machine coming in the next month, I have been on the hunt for a cheap quiet paddle. 

I’ve been poking around online for the last week or so and found that someone was selling a new one on eBay for only $35… a new OWL Sport Silent Storm paddle. I think it’s a model that you’d find in some mass market retailer like Walmart or Target. I’ll have to do some testing when it comes to see how it hits a ball compared with my regular paddle. You don’t want them to be too dissimilar or that would defeat the purpose of drilling with a machine… unless I were to switch completely to the Owl paddle.

Anyway, I ordered the paddle. $39.50 after tax and free shipping. It’s $86.99 on Amazon and $89.00 on the Owl website… though it’s on a number of websites at $39 to $45.

Number of days on a court: 793
Number of total hours: 3,130
Number of paid coaching hours: 129.5

To start at the beginning of this blog click on “1st Post” in the menu above.

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.

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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

To start at the beginning of this blog click on “1st Post” in the menu above.

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.

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.

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

To start at the beginning of this blog click on “1st Post” in the menu above.