Thursday, June 26, 2025 (Court Day #820)
Yesterday afternoon, I was invited by a friend to go sailing. I was able to leave work a couple of hours early. I only knew two out of the five others on the sailboat, but it was a easy-going group. It has been at least a couple of years since I’ve been out. Funny for a family that at one point owned 3 1/2 sailboats… one Olson 25 keelboat and some smaller boats—an El Toro dinghy, a Laser, and split ownership with another local family of a CFJ. They say with boats, the happiest day is the day you buy the boat and the second happiest day is when you sell it! These days, we happily own zero boats!
Pickleball
With Tony Sloss and myself playing together in the mini tournament on Saturday morning, we wanted to play more together in preparation for that. (We played together some on Tuesday evening.) Tony said he was going to arrive between 5:00 and 5:30 p.m., so my goal was to be there no later than 5:30. A few minutes before I was going to leave work, Gary W., who had been a store manager for our family business 40 years ago, called out of the blue from the East Coast and we ended up speaking for about 20 minutes, catching up on my parents and relatives and his kids and my kids. It was a nice surprise and a pleasant conversation… although it did make me behind schedule to get home and feed the dogs—my wife is out of town—then change and get out the Skypark.
I texted Tony about 5:50 p.m. to let him know that I was on my way. He said that he had just arrived at the courts. I pulled in the parking lot at 5:59 p.m.
Skypark
Tony and I played against Frabrizio and Kirby and we won 11-4. We played again but lost a close one. Another rematch resulted in another close loss. But our fourth game resulted in a 11-1 win for us.
Tony and I ended up playing seven games against Kirby and Frabrizio. Tony and I won the last game 11–2.
With the electric lights off but enough natural light to play, I convinced Manda and David L. to play one more game. I ended up on the same side of the court as Kirby so he and I ended up playing together. We were a force. We won 11–4. Often, with David a strong player, it would be Manda making most of the errors, but for tonight, there was a good balance of mistakes by David and him.
We wrapped up that last game at 8:44 p.m.
Today was lighter in attendance and the whiteboard came out only briefly. That’s when I signed up our group, we only had to wait for one game to finish before we could go on… and for next game, by the time I finished writing all four names on the whiteboard we were already on. The whiteboard was stowed away by the time that next game ended.
Evaluation
Tony and I didn’t play perfectly together, however, it was as an improvement over our teamwork on Tuesday night. We had better communication.
There is one shot with Tony to my right where he hit a shot a little bit too high and Kirby ripped it back down the middle between us. That meant that I was a little bit out of position. I should’ve been more to my right. Oops. I will say that generally I’m in the right place.
I had a few drives into the net tonight, and a few of my drop shots were too short. But generally, I drop shots were pretty good. Tony and I adjusted the game and stop doing as many speedups, we did better. Tony was repeatedly impressed with the speed of my hands during firefights. I told him that hand speed is generally not one of my problem areas. The hardest thing for me is judging quickly enough while at the net which balls are going out when they’re hit from the kitchen line across from me.
Overall though, I felt satisfied with my play tonight.
Pain in the Neck!
In that last game, there is a rally where Kirby and I were getting stretched on the court. The ball was popped up. David jump sideways and hit the ball out of the air and smack into the right side of my neck. That was the second time in two outings that I’ve been hit in the neck! Weird.
Olympics
Pickleball took a step closer to the Olympics with the merger of the IPF and WPF:
https://theipf.org/assets/pr/Press-Release-16.6.25.pdf
Member countries unanimously approve the merger of IPF and WPF to establish a fully democratic, IOC-compliant global federation headquartered in Switzerland
In a historic move for the sport of pickleball, member nations of the International Pickleball Federation (IPF) and the World Pickleball Federation (WPF) voted unanimously at Special General Meetings (SGMs) held on 14 June 2025 to unify into a single international
governing body. The unified entity will uniquely continue to champion “One Country One Vote” – ensuring proper representation for all nations.The new organisation will initially operate under the name World Pickleball Federation (WPF) and is established as a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) entity registered in Illinois, USA. It will combine the assets and resources of both federations into one unified structure.
To align with the global sports community and meet the highest standards of governance, the new WPF will also be registered in Lausanne, Switzerland—home to the International Olympic Committee (IOC)…
The trick will be getting the GPF to merge with the new combined IPF/WPF governing body. USA Pickleball left the IFP (later the IPF) and later joined the GPF. It’s all politics. I’d like to see one global governing body as soon as possible. This fracturing is unnecessary and detrimental to the sport on the international stage.
Number of days on a court: 820
Number of total hours: 3,200.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 147.5
To start at the beginning of this blog click on “1st Post” in the menu above.
Leave a Reply