Thursday, February 5, 2026 (Court Day #899)

It was a warm 63°F when I arrived in Scotts Valley at 6:55 p.m. I had enough gas to get there and back home, but I’m definitely going to need to stop for gas tomorrow morning!

As I walked through the lot after being forced to park down the block, two cars departed leaving two empty parking spaces. Figures! Maybe someday the city will come up with a new location for courts or figure out a way to add more spaces.

Games

Chuck and I did a few games against Sonny and Chloe. Chloe has a rocket of a serve—tennis background!—although she is not super consistent with it yet. She occasionally served into the net or even once into the fence. It took a few serves for me to get used to the speed—I was hitting very bad returns (if they got over the net at all)—but after that, I had no trouble returning them.

We played several games. Chuck and I did manage to win one of them. In that game I was scoring so many points in a row off of my serves—it was at least 6—that I hit a high lob serve. It landed outside of the court. It was not entirely on purpose, but I wanted to something to change since I was feeling embarrassed scoring so many points with no rallies.

More Games

Chloe and Sonny stepped out and I teamed up with a guy named Andy who I’m pretty sure I had met once before—maybe twice. We played it against Chuck and River. River is a good player, he is at least a 3.5 and maybe a 4.0… probably a 4.0.

In the first game, we lost our serve without scoring any points and the ball went to Chuck. Chuck went on a 10-point run on his serving! Maybe it’s the poor lighting on the court, the adjustment from faster serves to slower serves, or something else, but I also was having trouble handing Chuck’s first three or four serves. I got things dialed in, though Andy continued to have trouble with those serves. Everything that could go wrong was going wrong. We eventually we scored a at least a few points, but still lost in a lopsided fashion.

When I was serving to Chuck from my right, River was standing practically on the centerline. I hit a curving serve that would have hit him had he not moved out of the way, but my serve still landed in. River was impressed.

We had a rematch, in this game was much closer although we still lost.

We went on to play one more game with the same partners and this time Andy and I pulled off a win. The tide had turned!

We were leading to comfortable margin in the last game when the lights clicked off shortly after 8:30 p.m.

Surprisingly, it was still in the low 60s when I got home at 8:52 p.m.

And?

I started out unhappy with my play tonight, but even with intentionally trying to hit balls to River in those later games, I felt happy with my play tonight.

At one point, Andy was asking me why I was wearing the glasses with no lenses in them. These are the Kitchen Blockers. I told him that I got hit in the eye once and I was not going to go through that again.

Number of days on a court: 899
Number of total hours: 3,381.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 197.5

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