Saturday, June 14, 2025 (Court Day #815)

Due to other obligations tomorrow, I can’t play on Sunday morning and being that work was very adequately staffed today, I decided to take the morning off and play at Skypark with my son Nicholas who is in town for the weekend. 

Skypark

We arrived at Skypark about five minutes before club play was to start at 9 a.m. We grabbed one of the last two parking spots in the lot. No doubt, it would be busier later.

Nicholas and I played two games with two players I’d never seen before. They were 3.0 players. I had to try to keep the rallies going. In the rematch, I played left-handed and we still won handily.

After that, Nicholas and I played on different teams to balance them.

Nicholas and I played a few games on the same court before splitting up and signing up different skill levels.

Midway through the session, Mark Dettle, president of the club, stopped everyone and reminded folks about the $2 court fee. The court fees help cover the expense of reserving the courts entirely for communal pickleball play… no tennis, and no private groups hogging the pickleball courts. Nicholas and I had each already put in our two dollars.

Best Game

There is only one game where I felt I was truly challenged. I was teamed up with Francis against a young guy named Ralph and the guy I’d seen a handful of times before named John. John is tall and obviously has a lot of experience with racquet sports and he played very well. I was coming off games with weak players and being lazy and getting used to the ball not coming back. John, however, did a really good job getting balls back over the net. Francis was the weakest player in that game. I say say Francis is a strong 3.0 or a weak 3.5. I’d say Ralph is a solid 3.5 and John is a 4.0, easily. I wish I could’ve played more games with John, but he left after that game.

My son Nicholas and I left at noon sharp to go pick up my car from the repair service.

New Surface Coming

The City of Scotts Valley is supposed to resurface the courts “before July” but the Parks & Rec director, Allison, said that they didn’t have a date set yet. It’ll be nice when it’s repaired. There are a lot of cracks and there are patches approximately 2-feet in diameter where the surface flaked off completely.

Number of days on a court: 815
Number of total hours: 3,190.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 141.5

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