Tuesday, March 10, 2026 (Court Day #911)
Tennis pro Nick Kygros is out playing pickleball in preparation of going onto the PPA tour…
DUPR mocking
With DUPR charging people to reset their DUPR rating, there are a good number of people giving DUPR a hard time about it. (As in, why charge people to fix a rating determined by your apparently insufficient algorithm?)
This Reddit discussion about it is pretty funny…
Defense Matters
Here is a masterclass demonstration on defense. On the near court is Ben Johns with partner Gabe Tardio. Wow.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DVpXVJ2jQsT
Play Time for Andrew
With the time change two days ago, it was very much still daylight on my trip to Scotts Valley when I left work shortly before 6:30 p.m. The one annoying thing was the sun was low in the sky. It gets in your eyes pretty much no matter what you try to do to prevent it. But still, it’s nice to have the sunlight.
Games
I teamed up with young Andy and we lost 6-11 to Jordan Rein and Marquis. This was a fun game. I’d say Jordan was the better of our two opponents, but both are stronger players than I am.
Jordan wanted a more balanced game and asked to play with me. He and I went on to win 11-4 over Andy and Marquis.
We played once again, and this one really was more balanced. Jordan and I still won 13-11.
DUPR
There were enough players tonight that we were using the paddle rack system. I went to put my paddle in and there were three paddles grouped with a Post-it note that said “DUPR?” Matt Babb was standing nearby and I asked him about it and he explained that Paul (his friend) was part of that group of paddles. I figured, “Why not?”
Once on the court, we had to figure out teams. I was on the side with Mike Diaz so I figured that would be as good as anything. Paul and I are the strongest players. It was only after the teams were decided that Mike told me that he had not played for a month. I had to chuckle a little bit of that, it figures!
Mike and I were up 8-1, but then lost 8-11 when we stalled out and Paul and Scotty stopped their errors and came back. Once the game was complete, I could see Paul was entering the result into the DUPR app on his phone. I was expecting my rating to go down a little bit after this game.
[Later note. I verified the final score and, as expected, my DUPR dropped a bit to 3.889. Lesson: no DUPR games at night and especially after a long day at work! But my reliability score for my rating is still only 20%… that is, up to 80% inaccurate.]
Lights Out
After the lights clicked off, there was the normal light-hearted pickleball community chatter as players fell into a little groups while getting ready to go.
There were three Indian guys, Ashley, Humad, and Shreyas, plus the short, very talkative friendly Michael. (Someone described Michael as a own local Richard Simmons of pickleball.) Ashley and Humad are hilarious! Part of the discussion was how Ashley gets mistakenly identified as Abhi. Both are tall, Indian, and can drive hard, though I’d take Ashley as a tournament partner. Michael turned to me and said “Abhi could benefit from some of your game, Andrew.” His point was that I play more of a control game versus driving very frequently. I was kind of surprised that Michael remembered that much about me.
Wednesday, March 11, 2026. (No Play)
Some people have been saying that Apple decided that adding a pickleball emoji in their latest operating system update was not worthwhile.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DVwm2pOEZtB
But that is not entirely accurate. Apple in and of itself does not call the shots. They are part of the Unicode Consortium based in Mountain View, about 45 minutes north of my house in the Silicon Valley. The Unicode Consortium’s Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) meets quarterly and decides what proposed emojis get added to the standard. The committee has representatives from Apple, Meta, Adobe, Microsoft and others. While we didn’t get a pickleball emoji this time, we might get one in another three months!
Number of days on a court: 911
Number of total hours: 3,412.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 203.5
To start at the beginning of this blog click on “1st Post” in the menu above.
Leave a Reply