Thursday, September 11, 2025 (Court Day #851)

I trekked all the way out to Brommer Park on Tuesday night, and while it was worthwhile, I didn’t want to do that again today. I texted René, who is recently moved to Santa Cruz from the San Jose area, to see if she wanted to drill. We agreed to meet at Derby Park around 6 p.m.

Derby Park

René had been there for a few minutes when I arrived. We got about to drilling and we didn’t even get 10 minutes in before we got invited into a game with Simon and his friend Saunder.

René and I won the first game something like 11–2. Then we switched sides and played a second game and this time was a little bit closer but again we won by a good margin, something like 11–5.

Simon invited their other friend Joel to replace him. Joel is definitely a better player than Simon. René and I were not playing our best and we surprisingly lost that game by a pretty strong margin.

Then we switch sides and this time we won.

Joel has some pretty strong spin on shots and is really good with angles. He’s also kind of deceptive where that ball is going to go. I have to give him credit for that.

At 7:30 p.m. it was after sunset and it was starting to get a little bit chillier and people were getting hungry. It was still in the mid 60s but the breeze and no sun made it seem colder. It was time to call it a day.

And?

I felt kind of bad since we didn’t really end up spending much time drilling at all, but I believe that René was OK with playing given that the wind would’ve affected any kind of drilling we might’ve been able to do.

Kind of ironically, or perhaps not so much, when René asked me what I wanted to work on I told her, “not hitting out balls!“ Later on while playing, I hit an outball that very likely would’ve hit the fence behind me. René admonished me for that one! And deservedly so.

Saturday, September 13, 2025 (No Play)

This short reel on Instagram shows the difference in cores between Gen 2, Gen 3 and the newer foam core paddles:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNDvEAHAGJa

Number of days on a court: 851
Number of total hours: 3,280
Number of paid coaching hours: 161.5

To start at the beginning of this blog click on “1st Post” in the menu above.