Saturday, March 4, 2023. (Court Day #581)

René texted me yesterday afternoon asking if I would like to join her, Rick, and Tony (the Cabrillo instructor) at Brommer Park at 8 a.m. to play. The back of my right hand is been feeling a little bit better—though not as good as it should be. I haven’t played for a while, and I was kind of anxious so I told her to “pencil me in”.

Brommer

Some rain was expected today with more off and on rain this week. When I arrived at 8 o’clock sharp at Brommer Park, I could see that Tony was on a court across from Jon Barlow and they were warming up. I looked around and René and Rick were nowhere to be seen. As if she read my mind, René texted about a minute later, saying she’d be arriving about 8:15 a.m. I went down onto the courts wearing a sweatshirt since it was 44° when I left my house. I put on my wrist strap, my forearm strap, and pulled up my knee brace. After me watching for a few minutes standing next to their court, Tony invited me to join their warm-up, which I did.

Apparently, when Tony was invited by René when she didn’t receive his reply that he was coming. So she invited Jon. So we had five players for doubles. Rick stepped out for the first game and played with another group on the adjacent court.

I don’t usually come on Saturday mornings to Brommer, but judging from the comments around, it was a busy morning. Someone exclaimed, “Everyone has the same weather app!” If there hadn’t been a basketball player shooting hoops by himself, there would’ve been 8 courts set up instead of just 7.

Games

I played a couple of games with Jon and we won both. I played a game with Rick we won that one then I played another game with Jon. They were all fairly close game that were well-contested. The last game was Tony and myself against Rick and René which was also a very close game, though Tony and I lost that one.

Issues

So there’s number of issues I needed to address today in the first game. I missed some of my serves long. I did some speed-ups into the net—trying to go low between my opponents—and some into my opponent’s wheelhouse. I was trying some lobs and the first two were disastrous—much too shallow. I tried to two more later in the morning which were successful in winning at the rally. There was one later that Rick was able to reach up and hit back at me and I wasn’t quite prepared and I couldn’t get the ball back over the net. The lesson for that is “always be ready”.

Injuries

In a game with Jon, he got a bit overaggressive and took a backhand shot in the middle and ended up hitting my paddle hand index finger with his padde. That hurt. A rarity for me, I involuntarily yelped, “Ouch!” [Later note, it still hurts to the touch two days later!]

In my last game of the morning, some heavy drops started to fall, but it was a light rain and not enough to cover the court with water. And by the end of that last game, the back of my right hand was hurting. And especially since it was my time to sit out, I figured it was time for me to go.

It was a fun morning with lots of good games. Matter fact, there were only good games!

I headed home at 10:40 to shower and get ready for work.

Number of days on a court: 581
Number of total hours: 2,578.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 2

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