Monday, December 8, 2025 (Court Day #879)

I’ll point out here that when I use “voice to text” on my phone to make notes for these entries, it’ll make the funniest errors sometimes. One is instead of recording “Brommer Park”, it sometimes records it as “Groomer Park.” Grooming for better pickleball, I hope!!

I seem to be missing a pair of sunglasses in the house somewhere and the only pair that I can find is the one where one of the wings partially snapped which I had reinforced with tape. So, yesterday I ordered another pair on eBay for about 15 bucks. It’s nice when the sunglasses that you like are cheap!
[I’ll note here that I later found the missing sunglasses when my wife opened the passenger door of my car!]

Meeting

Today, is our monthly Santa Cruz Pickleball Club board meeting, so I took most of the day off from work. Today’s meeting was my third nonprofit board meeting in five days. Between that and working six days a week, it doesn’t leave a whole lot of extra free time. I spent about an hour yesterday finishing the November SCPC minutes (since our board secretary quit with a notice), then I spent about an hour this morning finishing the agenda for the meeting today.

It was a beautiful day, but not a cloud in the sky and a temperature of 55°F.

Brommer Park

Surprisingly, when I pulled in the parking lot at 10:31 a.m. there were about half a dozen parking spots open. That was a bit of a shock for me.

During club play, the blue color is supposed to be 4.0 and higher. I was signing up in blue and one of my partners was obviously a 3.0. I’m always verbally kind and supportive of my partners, and generally, I don’t really care too much about playing with a weak partner if I have strong players to play against, but when your partner can’t keep a rally going, that starts to get annoying. I mean, how many drives can you just hit into the net! Still, I didn’t say anything negative.

The best game of the day was when I was paired up with a guy named Thomas against Mo and Soji. (Mo knew Thomas, but he was new to me.) My play that game started at a little rough, but then I dialed it in just in time for Thomas’s play to get a little rough. Eventually things fell into place and we were both playing better. We ended up winning the game. I will say that Soji has gotten significantly better over the last year.

I finished play at about 12:10 p.m.

Our board meeting was called to order at 12:16 p.m. We covered a variety of topics including setting membership dues for 2026 and setting the amounts for optionally prepaying annual court fees as a lump sum instead of paying two dollars in cash every time.

And?

I felt my play was ok today. I had my share of errors, especially early in the session, but I got more and more consistent as time went on.

Today, there was a new experience of feeling somewhat consistent knee pain even during a game. I specifically remember standing at the net waiting for my partner to receive and noticing that my knee hurt a little bit. It is not good.

Pickleball is Dying!

So this guy, affiliated with Bluejay Capital Group, because some indoor pickleball complexes are going bankrupt, posted on social media on November 24 that pickleball is dying, comparing it to the rise and decline of racquetball. His claim is that, “I expect pickleball to fade out of our lives over the next five years.” I can’t believe just how ignorant and wrong that is!
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRdlB3YDs9L

I thought this was complete biased nonsense and posted a rebuttal at the time…

pickleballjourney:

“There is no decline. Pickleball continues to grow. It has grown 311% in the last three years and the Sports & Fitness Industry Association is projecting double digit growth for at least another four years.

Just because people don’t want to pay to play inside when they can play outside for free, doesn’t mean this sport is dying.”

I didn’t think too much about it after my reply, but then an article appeared talking about this guy’s post:
https://www.dailydot.com/news/is-pickleball-dying

Since it has been getting some notoriety, there you go!

Number of days on a court: 879
Number of total hours: 3,340.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 185.5

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