Month: August 2025 (Page 2 of 4)

Tuesday, August 12, 2025 (Court Day #839)

As of right now, one of my full-time staff is in the middle of a month long vacation. As a result, there hasn’t been a lot of margin for error for staffing at work. So—for example—yesterday, we had our monthly Santa Cruz Pickleball Club board meeting. Normally, I would take the morning off from work and play, then sometimes stick around after the board meeting ends around 2 p.m. and play some more. But that was not the case yesterday. I had way too much to do, so I arrived in street clothes for our board meeting yesterday then left immediately after to return to work.

I haven’t played for a week and a half. My right knee has been bothering me, plus I’ve just been overloaded with things demanding my time.

Skypark Unpleasant Surprise

During the pickleball club board meeting yesterday, I received disruptive news via an email message from Allison, the head of Scotts Valley Parks & Rec. She was telling me that I needed to reschedule my two pickleball classes that were supposed to start this coming Sunday. The long-anticipated court resurfacing would be starting on Monday, August 18. In and of itself, that’s a good thing.

The surprising part of her email, was her explaining that the contractor had told her that the repair to the courts might take as long as a month! So this didn’t mean just delaying my August classes by a week… this meant completely rescheduling them for the middle of September! And it also means rescheduling the following series of October classes, which would now overlap with the last week of these newly rescheduled September classes. It’s a royal pain.

It’s now been over 24 hours and I’ve yet to hear anything from the Rec.us people about rescheduling my classes. I did email all my registered students today to tell them about the resurfacing and the conflict with our class. This conflict would affect almost 20 students.

Leaving Work

As I was about to leave work and I was still in the parking lot, leaning into my car and changing my shoes, I heard this voice tell me, “Do you know where I can find a bagpiper?” I turned around and found one of my customers along with her husband—we’ve become friends. We ended up talking for about 20 minutes.

Skypark

I arrived at Skypark at 7:08 p.m. Earlier today, just before noon, I sent out an email blast on behalf of the club, letting all our members know that the courts would be closed for a month. I was expecting it to be busy tonight… and it was.

After not playing for nine days, expected tonight to be a little rough. Plus, I never play as well in gloom or darkness than during daylight.

My first game was against David L. and Matt Babb with me up against a novice player named Charles. Between “rusty me” and Charles inexperience, we got clobbered. It is expected and not a surprise in the slightest. Even if I’d played really well, it’d be unlikely I could have carried our team.

Savannah

Tonight, I got to meet my wife Kristen‘s tennis coach from La Madrona Athletic Club, Savannah. She dabbles in pickleball and is very nice.

I played against Gabe in a couple of games. Gabe is getting more consistent and he’s developing more power—if that is even possible! Gabe has always been a hard hitter. He won a number of rallies by simply overpowering myself and my partner. Hopefully, I will get the opportunity to play against him more. It requires developing some different skills to counter what he’s doing.

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Wednesday, August 13, 2025 (No Play)

So, hilarious. “When they ask me about my pickleball partners”:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNTPypGt6nP/

DUPR

Here’s an hour-and-a-half discussion about DUPR and ratings. I haven’t watched it yet, but plan to:

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Thursday, August 14, 2025 (No Play)

A funny video short: “When I ask Google how to recover from a pickleball injury and it says…”
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DHleU43RCoO/

Number of days on a court: 839
Number of total hours: 3,250
Number of paid coaching hours: 161.5

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

Thursday, August 21, 2025 (Court Day #843)

An unusual thing lately, I had two highly-experienced employees at work to cover in my absence, so I left work about 5:40 p.m. and headed to Derby Park. The key was that the Santa Cruz Pickleball Club (SCPC) was hosting a “Advanced” training from 4:30 p.m. until 6 p.m. What does that mean? That meant that they were going to be a bunch of good players at Derby Park who might want to stick around and play some games after the session was over!

It was still sunny and then the high 70s… warm!

Derby Park

When I arrived, they were still running the clinic, which was not a surprise. There were four or five people milling about outside the courts waiting get in and play at 6 p.m. I went in and talked to Val—a fellow SCPC board member—for a minute.

Val shared with me that there were four no-shows and that it was a disappointment because she had people on the waiting list who would’ve come.

A woman in the outside group that had been waiting came through the gate and loudly announced that it was 6 o’clock and that they were taking a court. Val pointed that group towards an empty court on the far end.

A few minutes later, I started scoping out people who wanted to stick around and play a game.

Games

I went about trying to get into a game and found myself playing with Tom Sherwood against tall lefty Glenn and a woman that I don’t know. I went to the game with exactly zero warm-up. Even with that, I was obviously outperforming Tom because our opponents were picking on him. After we lost the game and Tom said he was tired and wanted to leave.

The next game, I was partnered with Fahad U., a new player, against Mark Dettle and that same woman. It was a close back-and-forth game. My partner is a mix of really good shots and really bad shots… expected for a new player with some racquet background.

Scott, Mark, Mark

After that game, Mark D. and I played against Mark G. and Scott Anderson. We ended up playing three games. We lost the first, won the second, and lost the third.

Scott hit a crosscourt shot from my left off the court to my right. I had the ATP but Mark had shifted over but Scott hadn’t. So I changed my strategy and instead hit a winner down the middle in the gap.

It’s kind of funny when Scott would return my serve into the net. He would tell me how many times it happened. “That’s three serves, Andrew!”

I played a game with a young woman named Brittany—who I learned had graduated UCSC in 2017—against Conner McNicholas and his dad, Jim. They were taking a little bit easy on my partner and making an effort to hit more shots to me.

For the next game, Jim sat down and I teamed up with Brittany against Conner and Brittany’s friend Anya.

After that, Conner and his dad returned to drilling and I called it day.

Local Pickleball Noise In the News

Ok, not exactly super local, but about 25 minutes north in Los Gatos:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNoP4JsyZq2/

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Saturday, August 23, 2025 (No Play)

Here’s what a super hard drive from midcourt looks like:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DMyNFscvkOC/

Number of days on a court: 843
Number of total hours: 3,258.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 161.5

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

Tuesday, August 19, 2025 (Court Day #842)

With Skypark being resurfaced, any pickleball activities required in an alternate location and that time would be limited since Skypark is still the only public courts in the county with lights for playing at night.

Conner and I had drilled at Derby Park together in the past so I reached out to him to see if he wanted to drill after I was done with work. I figured 6:50 p.m. would be the earliest that I’d be comfortable committing to.

Derby Park

As it turned out, I was there at 6:45 p.m.

There is a full game going on one court and on another court, a couple of women were knocking a ball back-and-forth over the net. Being that I hadn’t put on my knee brace, I walked over to the metal bench where a woman was sitting and slipped on my brace. She asked me if I wanted to hit a ball back-and-forth. I told her they given that my drilling partner wasn’t there yet I’d be happy to. It turned out to the blonde woman’s name was Linda and she was signed up for one of my postponed classes at Skypark. Then after about five minutes, Conner arrived, and I excused myself.

Drilling

Connor and I started with us dinking at the net followed by some transition zone work with one player at the net attacking. Then we did some crosscourt dinking. (Or “crossword thinking” if you believe voice to text!) 

Next Conner and I played two games of 7–11. I was the first baseline player with Conner at the net. With some errant shots on my part, Conner won the first game. Then we switched spots with me at the net and name of the baseline. I was still at 9 points when he got to 7 so he won that one as well. I gave him two easy points in that game by “serving“ too long from the net to get the rally started.

Next, we played three games of skinny singles, I got him with 2-3 body bags. “You’ve definitely got me in the hands battles.”

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Wednesday, August 20, 2025 (No Play)

The work on resurfacing the Skypark courts was scheduled to start a couple of days ago and, indeed, they’ve started. Here’s a photo that Matt Babb took.

I’m glad to see progress. It looks like they’ve already started patching cracks. Though I still don’t understand why it would take a month to complete the resurfacing. I suspect that the contractor will not be working on the courts in a dedicated regular fashion.

Pickleball Movie

With pickleball continuing to get more and more popular, it has gotten to be mainstream and now there’s a pickleball-themed comedy called The Dink featuring Bell Stiller coming to—not the big screen, but as is more and more typical these days—the small screen in the form of Apple’s streaming service:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/ben-stiller-pickleball-comedy-movie-the-dink-apple-1236346940/

Speaking of funny stuff…

When pickleball opponents realize that you are the weaker player:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNjKt1nSiqK/
(You’ll want the sound on for this one!)

Number of days on a court: 842
Number of total hours: 3,256.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 161.5

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