Tuesday, June 3, 2025 (Court Day #810)
I left work about 6:25 p.m., it was sunny and warm.
My elastic brace has been a companion to my right knee for the last few weeks. After playing on Sunday morning, me jumping up and down, it was probably about 6 or 7 out of 10 on the pain scale. It hurt.
I gave my near a weeklong break Sunday to Sunday, but it only helped marginally with my knee. The question is whether I’m going to have to give my knee a longer rest or if it is going to heal up on its own, even with use on a court. I guess we will just have to wait and see.
Games
Christine and I played two games against David Black and his wife Beth. We won the first game 11–5 give or take. The second game was very lopsided—I think the final score was 11-1.
Manda and I were playing a game at the end of the evening against Skyler and someone else. In the game before, I started keeping track of my errors. It wasn’t until about halfway to the game that I made my first mistake, but you were hit a drop shot into the net . My next error was hitting a hard drive while running in and hitting it into the net. Next error was slamming a ball that flew beyond the baseline. By the end of the game, I’ve made six or seven errors in total. One of the errors was hitting a ball that would’ve otherwise gone out. Nonetheless, my number of errors was about half of that of Monda.
One observation from tonight, I’m getting better and better at resetting shots off of slams. For instance, there was a slam of a high shot when I was a step or two inside the baseline. That slam came down hard and fast, bounced, and off of that shot . I had a low drop shot that my opponent had to hit up on the ball. It was an extremely nice shot.
Party Time
After pickleball, a few of us headed over to Bruno‘s restaurant. Aaron Hicks bought me a beer while Manda and Thad and Michael O’Brien had dinner. Christine and Rachel were there too. Once they were done eating, we took a very quick trip down the road to Rachel‘s house where we played ping-pong and hung out and talked for a little bit. Rachel dug out our 1985 Harbor High School yearbook from which she shared my graduation photo. A few minutes before midnight, I called it a night. I was the first one to leave.
Pickleball Injuries
I stumbled across a research paper about pickleball injuries hosted at the National Library of Medicine:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11758564
What’s interesting is that the graph says that if you are under the age of 35, your injury is minimal. I’d be interested why they picked those age brackets, maybe there’s some standard or maybe those ages were an obvious break given a deep dive into the data. It also says you’re two-thirds more likely to have an injury over the age of 65.
Saturday, June 9, 2025 (No Play)
USA Pickleball reached a sponsorship agreement with a milk organization, so milk is now the “Official refuel Beverage of USA Pickleball”. USAP posted on social media about it and had a cow out on a court playing pickleball.
Number of days on a court: 810
Number of total hours: 3,174
Number of paid coaching hours: 138.5
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