Thursday, July 26, 2018 (Court Day #175)
I posted a photo of my cracked padddle on Facebook’s Pickleball Forum. Several people commented on Paddletek’s great customer service and their lifetime warranty. I wrote to Paddletek explaining and sharing the photo. We’ll see what I hear back. I’ll admit it was fun to have top-player Kyle Yates comment on my post: “Hahaha my paddle looks worse than that .. should play just fine but if it really bothers you I’m sure they’d replace it.” Kyle is part of Team Paddletek and is sponsored by the company, so it’s not entirely unexpected that he might comment. Kyle will be in Concord on Sunday to compete.
Game Night
I had to finish up some things at work so I got to Skypark a little later, about 7:10. There weren’t too many strong players there. Rob and Bruce were there and Colleen. No Eric, no Brennan. Oleg would show up later though. Janet mentioned Jerry Louis. Jerry moved to Nevada or Arizona months ago and I haven’t seen him since. Too bad, he was good at keeping us on our toes.
Rob (left) and Bruce waiting for a game.
Rob and I played Oleg and Bruce and won.
Then we played Oleg and Mark Dettle and won.
We played a game against Janet and Bruce intentionally giving up winners to get into a soft dinking game for practice. We told Janet and Bruce what we were doing. It was a closer game than it would have been normally, but we still won. It was an opportunity to experiment with spin shots and loopy serves and whatever else we wanted. Rob commented, “I don’t think you’ve missed even one of your backspin returns.” I don’t think that I did—and a whole lot of them ended up in the net over the course of several games. We’ll see if I get an opportunity to use them in the matches on Sunday.
The last game was Adrian and Colleen versus us. We were just coming off a very relaxed lazy game where we gave up our intentional winner shots. We didn’t dial it back up, underestimated our opponents and lost the game to Colleen and Adrian! Colleen could be named “backboard” . . . she’s good about returning shots. Adrian doesn’t have a complete game—he’s getting over some knee injuries—but can make some crack shots when given the opportunity. Our game was the last of the night. Oleg and Olga were watching, but aside from site coordinator Mark Dettle, everyone else was gone.
Afterward, Mark was packing up the courts and asked, “Was that the only game that you lost?”
“Yep!”
We were done about 9:15. It’s really nice having lights to play under. Even if it does make it hard to always spatially judge the ball location.
Tournament in three days!
Number of days on a court: 175
Number of total hours: 483.5
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