Sunday, October 5, 2025 (Court Day #858)

I was taking a leisurely morning today. It was sunny when I left my house shortly after 9 a.m. with the temperature in the low 60s. As I drove down from the upper westside of Santa Cruz, I could see a large fog bank in the distance. I’m thankful for the fog, it keeps Santa Cruz from getting too hot during the day.

I drove into the fog literally two blocks from Brommer Park, but it was already starting to break up a little.

Brommer Park

I pulled in the parking lot at 9:18 a.m. Parking is almost always a cake walk at Brommer on Sunday mornings.

Ying asked if I wanted to warm up, so we ended up on a court. That rolled into a game and Ying and I won 11-2 versus two regulars.

I played with a guy I’d never met named Miles against Ying and Ed. We lost 4-11. Miles made a fair number of errors, maybe he had an off game—I have no idea.

Nick and I played a game against Ying and Sean, who had just arrived. Nick and I were down 0-4, but we came back to win 11-4. (Yes, that’s an 11-0 run.)

The next game, Juls and I won 11-7 versus Mo and Ed. We were down and came back to win.

Gary and I lost 6-11 versus Matt Babb and JP. It should have been a closer game. Matt has gotten pretty close to my skill level these days and JP and Gary are also similar.

Then Ying and I played against Mo and Juls and won 11-3.

Sean, Dave, Aaron

These were the high powered games.

I played a game with Sean against Dave Ryan and a lefty who I’ve never met before named Aaron. Aaron was a machine. Aaron has a really strong tennis background. We had a brief discussion and if I have it figured out correctly, he coached at Cal Poly for a year while Bob Hanson was still coaching at UCSC. Aaron can drive and slice like crazy.

So, Sean and I played together in the first game. We lost by a sizable margin with us scoring about half the points that they did.

We played again and we mixed things up and I played with Aaron. We lost.

We switch sides and played one more game with Aaron as my partner. The final score was us losing 7–11.

Obviously, I was the weak link in all of these games.

It’s fun getting really challenged with the rare experience where I get to be the weakest player on the court. Of course, I hate to be the one to let down my partner, but it really tests your skills.

I left at 12 o’clock sharp. I had to get home then to teaching.

Teaching

I taught my two ninety minute classes from 1:30 to 4:30 at Skypark, then I headed to Derby Park to provide an hour lesson at 5 p.m. to a friend David and his son Nathaniel. It turned into a 90 minute lesson, but I was happy to spend more time with them. It turned out to be very productive and they were quite happy.

Number of days on a court: 858
Number of total hours: 3,297
Number of paid coaching hours: 172

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