Sunday, August 23, 2026 (Court Day #957)

As I left my house and made my way to Brommer Park, it was 63° and, while the sky was completely hazy, it felt sunny. The temperature prediction called for the mid-70s, meaning is going to be warm for my last meeting of my two classes this afternoon in Scotts Valley.

Knee

In a resting position, my knee doesn’t hurt, but there’s a certain amount of pain walking around. If I only played when there was no pain in my knee, there would be very long stretches between outings!

Brommer Park

I pulled into the lot at 9:03 a.m. and the courts are half empty.

I left at 12:05 pm. The game of the day was a player who I’m forgetting now and myself winning 11-5 against Mickey and Drew. (Voice to text thought that player was named “Cannon” but there is no player named Cannon!)

The last game was Jesse, the tan guy with tattoos, against John (Robin’s husband) and Ken. Ken was playing really well today. It was the best that I’ve ever seen him play. While I was playing against him in a game or two, he got me on one or two serves that were low, fast, and angled. Nice work, Ken!

Most of the games were pretty good today. Though there were a game or two were is lopsided. Ed and I played against Lefty Greg and a very muscular middle-aged blond man wearing a tank top whose name that I forget, whom I’d never seen him before. He was a 3.0 level player. I think Greg and his partner scored maybe two points the whole game.

Shot to the Face!

About an hour into play, during a game against young Aaron, he did a speed up and hit me right in the face breaking my sunglasses. He felt bad about it, but I told him not to worry about it, it’s just part of the game.

Blast from the Past

Across the divider, David Black asked if I wanted to join their group. There was a group of pickleball players somewhat older than myself who had rented two courts this morning. One of the group was Karen Long, former president of the Santa Cruz Pickleball Club. Karen splits time along with her husband, Terry, between California and Arizona depending on the season. They come back to California during the summer when it gets really hot in Arizona, but then head to Arizona when it gets cold and rainy in Santa Cruz. Karen and Terry were part of the original group responsible for bringing pickleball to Santa Cruz along with Dan Bliss and Jerry Louis.

I hadn’t seen Karen in many months. Maybe even like a year or two. I got a hug. I asked Karen if she was still involved with any governing bodies of pickleball. (She had been involved at one point with the International Federation of Pickleball.) She said she isn’t right now and that she’s been playing more softball than anything else.

Karen said she’d tweaked her back. That’s why I got invited to join the group.

I played with Beth against her husband David and Monica (Kiko’s mom). It was a fun game.

Teaching

For a wide variety of reasons, a bunch of my Advanced Beginner students could not make our last session today.

I’m not sure the reason, but signups for my classes starting next month are minimal. If it stays that way, I will simply end up canceling the classes. It doesn’t bother me, I do it mostly for fun. Sure, having supplemental income is is nice, cause that’s not the main reason I do it. But I still do it if I didn’t get paid? No. My free time is too valuable. But I do enjoy teaching.

Sunglasses

I just ordered three pairs of sunglasses on eBay, which totaled about 40 bucks. I currently own three broken pairs. One which the arm was snapped off at the joint this morning, another months ago that snapped around the lens when I went to put it onto my face (I’m hoping to glue that one back together), plus another one where one of the arms snapped and I taped it back together temporarily— that is the one that I wore to my classes this afternoon.

Number of days on a court: 957
Number of total hours: 3,524.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 231.5

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