Sunday, July 20, 2025 (Court Day #832)

I left my house at 9 a.m. sharp. It was overcast and 57° and the street had damp patches from precipitation.

I needed to teach this afternoon so I couldn’t stay and play indefinitely this morning.

At some point, I’ll probably need to take a break from pickleball and give my right knee some rehabilitation time. When I sit too long, my knee gets stiff and a little sore. My knee was complaining some yesterday afternoon at work.

Brommer Park

I parked in the Brommer lot at 9:14 a.m., grabbed my backpack out of the backseat, and walked in.

I played good games with Hugh, Dan Dewey and the tattooed, tanned, bearded guy named Aaron who serves hard and likes to use inside-out deceptive shots.

It was another day of lighter attendance, so I went from game to game to game.

While I didn’t get to play against the strongest local players, most of the games were reasonably challenging. And there are a few rallies today where I really impressed myself.

The last game was Hugh and myself against Marquis and a guy I met once before at club play named Kris. That was the only game of the day that I lost. We lost 7–11. Hugh kind of imploded in that game and apologized to me as we walked up to the net together to tap paddles with Kris and Marquis.

While I had a couple of streaks where I was missing shots, most of the morning I was playing extremely well—I was on fire.

At 11:50 a.m., it was time to call it a day.

Over the course of the 2 1/2 hours that I played this morning, I may have had as many as ten of my serves returned into the net by my opponents. And I only missed one serve today. That’s a pretty good ratio of miss servers versus returns into the net.

It was still overcast in 63° when I left, but I was sweating nonetheless.

Stolen!

Mid-session today, Hugh arrived, was inside the courts for a few minutes, then left, then came back about 10 minutes later. He said that his backpack, which he had left outside the men’s restroom door and included two of his paddles, was stolen. Such a drag. I loaned him my Players Rogue 2 paddle and told him to keep it until he had a new paddle for himself.

Teaching

I taught my two classes from 1:30 until 4:35 p.m. when I called it a day—I gave them an extra five minutes.

Cole from Michigan

As I was talking to some of my students after class, a tall, young man with a trim beard walked up and asked if we wanted to play. My students said that they were worn out and didn’t want to stay. The young guy thanked us and returned back across the courts to stand near the gate, looking on.

I was about to collect my things and go when I figured I could spend 15 minutes drilling, so I signaled the fellow across the courts and as he made his way over, he was stopped by yet another fellow who wanted to get into a game along with the woman who was with him.

Cole, John, Stephanie

The 6-foot man with a beard turned out to be Cole and he moved to our area from Michigan back in February. The other two were John and his lefty mom Stephanie. Cole had his moments, but he is prone to some errors, especially with his backhand. John is definitely a stronger player than his mom, though she is decent. I would say Stephanie is in the 3.0 range, John is at least a 3.5, and Cole is probably a high 3.0.

Cole and I were losing the first game but then came back and dominated to win the game and a lopsided fashion.

In the second game, we lost 10–12.

Before that last game, Cole changed out his paddle and then mid-game—when he was still unhappy with his play—he switched paddles back to his original one. It was not the magic bullet however, since we went on to lose that game too… in a lopsided fashion.

It was about 5:25 p.m. when I left. I had to get home to shower and get ready for dinner with my wife and a couple of friends.

Wilson

Of course, Wilson is well known in the tennis world. I remember playing with Wilson tennis balls—along with Penn balls—back in the 1970s as a kid. They’re entering the pickleball world by creating a paddle. Here’s an ad:

One thing that rubs me the wrong way, but it shouldn’t, is the “racquet” reference. While pickleball is considered a racquet sport, there are no racquets in pickleball. A way to tell someone that you are either new to pickleball—or are simply are disrespectful of the game—is to call a pickleball paddle a racquet.

Monday, July 21, 2025 (no play)

Zane Navratil on his The Dink podcast had a really good point about DUPR. He indicated that you could have two games that end with the same score of 11–2, but that final score is not necessarily representative of the skill involved. You could have an 11–2 game that ends in 10 minutes or you could have an 11–2 game that takes 45 minutes. In other words, one game could have just one side out, but another could have 30 to 40 sideouts. Both are treated exactly the same by the DUPR algorithm. But until DUPR allows you to put in score and server as you go, it won’t be able to account for these situations.

More DUPR

Wow. This was posted on Facebook. This is crazy. You beat another team 15-2 and your DUPR rating goes down? Down?

I looked up Kevin Chaves and he’s a 3.715. I found several “Stephen Fitzpatrick” players, with ratings higher than Chaves. One being a 4.813 and another being a 3.962. I suspect that in this instance must have been the former player. (I didn’t look up the other two partners, Matthew and Mike.)

This reminds me of years ago when Ben Johns and Kyle Yates came to Northern California for the Golden State Championships and Bryan from San Jose and his partner played against them, the #1 doubles team in the world. Bryan and his partner scored 2 points in their loss. (Bryan was not happy.) Now, if unranked players can score 2 points on the world’s best doubles team, should Ben’s and Kyle’s ratings should have gone down? (DUPR didn’t exist yet back then.)

The problem is this forces a team to be brutal against opponents. Mercy is punished. You can’t be nice and let the other team score a point to make them feel better. No mercy.

Number of days on a court: 832
Number of total hours: 3,235
Number of paid coaching hours: 153.5

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