Author: andrewlenz (Page 103 of 328)

Thursday, April 18, 2024 (Court Day #647)

Today was the day of the SCPC volunteers round robin at Willowbrook Park. We were asked to get around 8:30 a.m. for a 9 a.m. start. Pam Rissmann messaged the whole SCPC board asking for someone to bring a couple of chairs and I volunteered. I picked them up at work—I’d forgotten to grab them yesterday—then drove out to Aptos. I had to park a bit down the road as a number of people were already there.

It was overcast with fog then partially sunny. It got oddly muggy as the morning went on.

Pam used an app on her phone to randomly assign us courts. Court #1 would be the premier court and Court #5 would be the bottom court. If you won, you’d move up and the partners would split, and if you lost, you’d move down a court and split. If you won at #1, you’d stay and if you lost at #5, you’d also stay.

I was assigned Court #2 to start—which I was happy about—along with three other players. My first partner would be Mike F. I don’t know Mike well, but I’ve seen him at Derby. He’s an Asian fellow maybe about five years older than me. Smiley guy, I like Mike.

Game #1 (Court #2)
Mike F. and I won against Ken and Alan. (I hadn’t met either of them before.) It was looking bad. We were down 0-6 but we came back to win 11-9 after Mike and I got warmed up—especially Mike! Mike and I moved to Court #1.

Game #2 (Court#1)
George and I won against Mike F. and Pam 11-3.

Game #3 (Court #1)
Trevor and I won 11-4 against Sean M. and George. After particularly nice play on my part—stretching out to reach a ball low over the middle at the net which I hit for a winner—Sean blurted out, “Damn, Andrew!”

Game #4 (Court #1)
Mike F. reappeared and he picked me to play with. He and I won 11-1 against Trevor and Ken. (Ken lives in Watsonville. Pam invited him in order to make the correct number of players. Ken, Barb, Pam, and John P. rotated in and out of the games.)

Game #5 (Court #1)
I was partnered with Sean M. and we won 10-7 against Mike F. and Rich. (The 15-minute time limit expired, so the team leading won.) As we walked off and got the waiting area, Trevor asked Sean, “Who won that game?” Sean replied, “Andrew.” (Thanks, Sean, for the compliment!)

Game #6 (Court #1)
This was my first loss. John P. and I played against Sean and Trevor and we lost 9-11. We had been leading, but they came back and pulled off a win. I can’t blame John entirely for the loss. I was starting to fatigue and I started to miss shots I was nailing earlier.

Towards the end of the session, as it got warmer, and as I got tired, my play wasn’t quite as noteworthy. It was a little bit frustrating.

Game #7 (Court #2)
Eric Schmidt and me won 11-8 against Mark Dettle and Rick Abend. Eric and I lost at least four rallies—at least 2-3 were serves—where the ball hit a strange dead strip on our side of the court. The ball would land then not bounce back up to the correct height. Eric mentioned it and I kind of just blew it off . . . until it happened to me! Nothing like experiencing something yourself to believe! Still, we won. Back to Court #1.

Game #8 (Court #1)
I lost with Trevor 4-11 against Eric and George. Eric and George were playing very well and I was fading some.

That was the end of the round robin. Pam had decided that there would be an exhibition match featuring those who would otherwise be playing on Court #1 after the 8th game. I would have been watching but Eric had to leave and George was nursing a torn labrum and decided to be done for the day. That meant that Trevor and I would be playing one more game.

Exhibition Match (Court #2)
Jackie had worked her way up from Court #5. I was paired with Rich against Jackie and Trevor.

Knowing about the dead strip on our side, before we started, I asked if we could switch ends at 6. Jackie agreed. We were also looking into the sun a bit, though it was still partially overcast.

Once this game got going, it was never in doubt.

Jackie and Trevor were targeting Rich and with me fading and missing some shots, there was no way he and I could to pull this one off.

It was 6-1 or 6-2 when we switched ends. We lost 11-4. I hit the ball three times into white tape, missed a dink, failed on a drop shot. It was not my best. Jackie was playing very well. (And I told her so afterward.)

It was a fun morning.

I iced my right knee when I got home before heading to work.

Second Session!

After work and a 5:15 p.m. board meeting, at 7:44 p.m., I was at a stoplight at Ocean Street about to enter the freeway when I gazed at the thermometer on my dashboard: 57°F. Larry Yien has been on me to meet and talk about classes. Larry’s going to be teaching some intermediate classes for Rec.us in Scotts Valley during the week. I have a feeling he wants to know, more or less, what I cover in my classes for beginners.

Tired

I probably would’ve headed home after my board meeting at the Santa Cruz Art League, but I had told Larry that I would be in Scotts Valley tonight. I was pretty exhausted. I was awake for an hour and 45 minutes starting a few minutes after 5 a.m. so between that and the three hours of pickleball this morning, I’m beat. I’m also kind of hungry. I had lunch at noon and then had a banana at 4:45 p.m.

Weight

Yesterday, I had a virtual meeting video with my nutritionist. I think this was my third meeting with him. He’s a nice guy. The meeting was mostly a pep talk. I decided yesterday it was time to lose weight again. I lost 20 pounds last year and I gained back about 13 of them since November and the holidays. I want to be more healthy and also make it easier on my knees and other joints by being lighter.

Skypark

When I arrived at Skypark, it was sunset in the clouds were pink. It was just on the verge of starting to get truly dark. It was 54° when I actually arrived at Skypark.

I made a circle to the parking lot which was completely full and I had to park down the block. Things were hopping tonight, but the sign-up board was not out. I was able to get into a game fairly quickly. Since I had arrived a few minutes before 8 p.m., a number of players were leaving about the time I arrived.

Games

Almost immediately got into a game with David (of Minori fame) against two guys that I didn’t know. I think the two guys came from a tennis background. They had pretty good ball control skills, but one of them was at the net when his partner was serving . . . a sign of a rookie. David let them take that serve over. (I’m of a mind to let pain be a reminder in those cases, but later when I was receiving, I waved him back.) David and I found ourselves down, I think it was 0-6. It was my first game as well as David‘s first game but after we started warming up, we did better and ended up winning the game by 4 or 5 points.

They wanted to play again so we did and this time David and I won by a very significant margin. Still, not an easy game.

Matt & Paul

David and I moved on to playing with Matt and Paul who are doing a tournament together in a week. David and I got decimated in the first game. It was kind of depressing. I think we scored just 1 point! Then we played another and lost that one as well, 11–3. It was then that David said we should be more careful about our speedups. Both Matt and Paul have quick hands. The next game we managed to pull off a win by a couple of points. We played one more and lost by a couple points, but we had been leading. Those are fun, challenging games. Matt and Paul have gotten so much better. They’ve really reigned in their errors. If they keep it up, they’ll both be 4.0 players before too long. And David gets around the court like no ones business. He’s quick and dedicated to making the shot.

Matt has gotten me a couple of erne shots now. He’ll dink deep to my right side where I have to lean to get it and he’ll leap into action. I have work to do to keep him from taking advantage of that!

Larry

Larry had left before I got there, however, he’d forgotten his shoes. I called him asking at the shoes for his and they were. I carried the shoes in my car with intention of Larry picking them up from me tomorrow at work.

When we finished our last game at 9:20 p.m., all four temporary nets were still left up. Matt called over to a couple of guys exiting the gate, encouraging them to help take down a net, but they just ignored Matt and walked away. Rude. So the four of us took down the nets. We’ve all had a lot of practice, so it went fairly quickly. Still, it’s disappointing when no one else helps.

I iced my knee when I got home.

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Friday, April 19, 2024 (No Play)

My knee is bothering me a little bit, but not too bad.

I ended up dropping Larry’s shoes off on his doorstep while I was walking our corgi Pepper with my son Nicholas. I didn’t know Larry lived that close to me until tonight. My wife Kristen asked what Larry’s last name was and it turns out she’s acquaintances with Larry and his wife Jacquie. Small world.

Pop Star Pickleball

Taylor Swift participated in some TikTok reel thing that’s going around and in the video, she shared a brief snippet of her playing pickleball:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2hBLC7E8v3A

As a Raiders fan, playing with a Kansas City Chiefs paddle is unforgivable, but it only makes sense since her boyfriend Travis plays the tight end position for them. Anyway, I don’t know how often the famous pop recording artist plays, but there you have it.

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Saturday, April 20, 2024 (No Play)

As of this morning, I’ve lost three pounds since this past weekend.

Sitting and typing this, I can feel my right knee ache a little bit. It’s like a super mild bee sting. Like merely a 1 on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being excruciating). But it’s there.

Number of days on a court: 647
Number of total hours: 2,785
Number of paid coaching hours: 24.5

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

Tuesday, April 16, 2024 (No Play)

In case you are wondering, I took Sunday morning off from pickleball to help out a religious sister that I’ve known for almost 50 years. Then, against the forecast, around noon it started hailing, then raining. So much for resuming my much-delayed pickleball class in Aptos! After I had rain confirmed by text from a former student living in Aptos, I texted all my current students that we had to cancel. After I cancelled, it started to get sunny and nice. Nutty weather.

Rules Test

I took the USA Pickleball Player Rules Test again today. Still only 94%. In my haste, I missed the difference between forfeiting a game versus a match in a best 2 of 3 match. If you are 10 minutes late, you forfeit the first game. If you are 15 minutes late, you forfeit the entire match. In another question, if you hit an otherwise successful ATP, but it grazes the referee, it’s a fault on you. (A bummer, but it is what it is!) For the test, you’ll want to know the difference between a forfeit, a withdrawal, and a retirement.

Work, Food, Fatigue

We had a late customer at work plus I finished up a couple of things. I brought food—leftovers—from home, which I ate. Regardless, by 9:30 p.m., I was pretty exhausted, and dragging on the court. I’d always thought that was based on a lack of food, but I think it’s more of a case of me simply being tired. My wife is usually in bed before 9 p.m. As the first grade teacher, she gets up early and deals with small children all day and she’s pretty exhausted by evening. My wife is one of those people who go to sleep on a dime. Me, not so much . . . though if I’m super exhausted then I can sometimes fall asleep quickly. Normally, though, I need to crawl into bed and wind down. Sometimes, that’s before the lights would be off at Skypark.

But I’m ahead of myself!

Skypark

I arrived a little before 7 p.m. There were people waiting to play, but it wasn’t as crazy as it has been lately. Forty people or less. Not fifty plus.

I got into in a game partnered with Ying against Avery and Tiffany. One of the better things I’ve learned in the past few months has been letting high ball at the net drop lower then hit them hard as more of a forehand drive instead of a downward slam. This tends to be very effective. When you slam a high ball, often times it’ll bounce high and provide a return opportunity for your opponent. When you let the ball drop lower, it’s less likely you’ll slam it into the net and you can hit it harder with more preparation towards your opponent’s feet or angle the ball off of the court. Ying gave me a compliment, “I see what you’re doing there. It’s like a lesson playing with you.” For those high shots, I was stepping to the side, giving myself more space to hit a forehand drive, and she was noticing that. It’s hard to return a drive from the net right at your feet, so that’s what I hope to force to my opponents to do.

I was playing very well until the sun went down, and then I went from playing very well to just good.

It was a strange muggy evening. My right wrist support was completely soaked through. People left early. By 8:30 p.m., there was no waiting, you could just immediately take a court.

I got into a series of games with Matt Babb, David, and Francis. We rotated partners after each game. Francis was the least strong player, but he was stronger than some others who were there tonight. I don’t know if he lost every game of that series, but if he didn’t, it was close. That said, he had some really good shots. He occasionally whips out a nasty cross-court shot during a dinking battle.

It’s not all the time, but I’m getting better hitting drop shots off of slams from the baseline. I can’t do it on every slam, but that’s two outings in a row where I’ve had at least one really spectacular drop shot off a slam.

Lights Out

After the lights clicked off, I was talking to Ofer and Spencer about the new Gearbox paddle. I was talking to Shawnte on Friday about the same paddle and he said that it’s a very hot paddle and balls have a tendency to fly too deep—and out! He also said that the paddle is also very unforgiving with the smaller sweet spot. Earlier in the day, I ordered a Gearbox backpack, that exact Gearbox Pro Power Paddle, a paddle cover, and assortment of grip tapes and edge guards. There are responsibilities that come with being a USA Pickleball Ambassador, but there are some perks. A number of vendors provide discounts, and Gearbox is one of those. I got 50% off on my order. I was going to order an extra pickleball net too, but the discount didn’t apply to the net, so I nixed that.

Knee

I didn’t wear my knee brace and my knee was bothering me partway through the evening. What’s odd, is that the discomfort was on the top of my kneecap instead of to one side or the other. Dunno. Weird.

Thieves in the News

Game-Set-Match, is a family-owned retail sporting goods business based in Colorado with three stores there and one location in Las Vegas. Over the last two months, thieves shoplifted thousands of dollars worth of pickleball paddles from all four of their stores. One was a $20,000 theft and this week was a $5,000 theft.

Here’s more about it:
https://www.ktnv.com/news/las-vegas-pickleball-store-may-be-latest-target-of-organized-theft-ring

Running a retail store for a living myself, low-life thieves are a fact of life. It keeps you from being able to pay your staff—and yourself!—as much as you’d like. And unless you are a corporate officer in a big retail chain, no one gets rich working in a retail business. I’d love to be able to pay my staff as much as I believe they are worth, but we’d go out of business. And shoplifters just make the matters worse.

All that said, it’s one thing to lose a steady trickle of $10 here, $100 there, $50 here. We lost $800 to one thief in one day once. But to lose $20,000? Or even $5,000? That’s painful!

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Wednesday, April 17, 2024 (No Play)

I iced my knee this morning. It’s bugging me a bit.

Rules

Just a reminder in case anyone is interested in seeing what people are proposing for rule changes for next year:
https://rules.usapickleball.org/

Football to Pickleball

Another former pro pickleball player has taken up pickleball, Danny Wuerfell. Now, even as a football fan, I had to look him up. He played with the Saints 27 years ago, then went on to play in Europe before returning and playing for a string of teams no closer to me than Texas. He retired from pro football entirely after 5-6 years of being a backup . . . aside from his time with a German team where he won the World Bowl championship and was named the MVP. It’s kind of like winning a D-IV college championship . . . and yes, I know there is no D-IV!

New Paddle Delay

I got a notice today from Gearbox that my paddle is delayed 1-2 weeks. I also received a separate email that the paddle would take 1-2 weeks to “break in” once I received it. When I was talking to Spencer last night, he said it might really be more of making sure that the player gives the paddle enough time to get used to it before deciding that it’s no good. Spencer didn’t like his at all.

Big News!

USA Pickleball this afternoon announced that they are partnering with UTR to use their new UTR-P rating system. UTR is “universal tennis rating”. The “-P” is pickleball. I guess the association got tired of further developing their own system and decided to use a variant on a venerable respected system. USAP will also be using UTR’s tournament software and apps. That should be really good. Hard to fault that.

Coaching on the Docket

Next week, on Tuesday afternoon, I’ll be teaching at a corporate retreat at Chaminade. Then on Thursday at 5 p.m., I’ll be doing a short clinic as part of the Rec.us launch event at Skypark. It’ll be a busy week.

Number of days on a court: 646
Number of total hours: 2,780.5
Number of paid coaching hours: 24.5

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

Thursday, April 11, 2024 (No Play)

Today, a woman named Aleksandra private messaged me on Facebook about teaching a class at April 23 for her company holding an event at Chaminade Resort across town. She had posted in the Santa Cruz Pickleball group looking for an instructor and I was debating responding when she reached out. We talked about it and I agreed to teach. It’s a corporate retreat and they want to have some fun activities to do as a break from focusing on business. It’ll take about three hours out of my day for the 2-hour session. I don’t know where the company itself is based, but she’s on the east coast.

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Friday, April 12, 2024 (Court Day #645)

There was a dramatic weather change this morning. Yesterday, the temperature climbed to almost 80°F. Today, it’s overcast in the 50s with rain forecasted for tonight.

Vet Trip

Oliver, our older corgi, gets monthly shots at the vet and today was that day. I drove out to Scott Valley for his 8:10 AM appointment which was brief and then headed back to Santa Cruz to drop off Oliver and then head out to Bromer.

Board Meeting Prep

Today is the day of the monthly Santa Cruz Pickleball Club board meeting. Last night, I finished off the agenda and tweaked the meeting minutes from our board retreat in March and sent off the links to the Google Docs to the board members. This morning, Pam told me that I had misspelled her last name and Barb told me that I had forgotten an item she had suggested for the agenda. I apologized to them both and made the corrections.

Players Test

Yesterday, while out walking our younger corgi Pepper, I took another crack at the USA Pickleball Player Rules Test. I felt pretty confident about my answers and felt that this might be the first time where I might actually get them all correct. But, unfortunately, while I had my best score ever of 94%, I still missed 3 of the 50 questions. And just be clear, the test is not the same every time, the questions are randomly drawn from a pool.

The first question that I missed was a true or false question regarding verbal warnings. The question asked whether or not it was true, if the team gets a single verbal warning once per match. I said the answer was false. However, the test came back telling me that it was true. I later realized that I was confusing ‘verbal warnings’ with ‘technical warnings’. Both are delivered verbally without immediate consequences, but a verbal warning is just an informal “hey, don’t do that”. A technical warning counts toward a possible technical foul.

I ran out of time before work to scroll down through the 50 questions and figure out which remaining ones that I missed.

The Drive

As I drove to Brommer Park is misting heavily. It wasn’t rain, but it did start to worrying me about the condition of the courts. I had to run my windshield wipers every 15 seconds or so—an annoyance. I was happy that I grabbed a sweatshirt on my way out this morning, I remember one of the previous board meetings being kind of cold though that was during winter and not during spring. But at 54°F, it wasn’t exactly a warm morning today.

Brommer

When I arrived, the parking lot was still a quarter empty. Walking in, I noticed that there was a court with only three players on it. There was Marquis (pronounced “Marcus”), Dan (the middle school teacher) and a man I didn’t know. That man turned out to be Jeremy, who is visiting from Camarillo. Jeremy is a good player, I’d have him as a tournament partner anytime. I played with Jeremy as my partner for the first game and then for the second game we switched it up and I played with Dan. I won the first and lost the second. (I say “I” though it’s always “we”!) Jeremy paid me a few compliments over the course of the matches: “Fast hands!” “Nice drop!”

Confusion!

So whoever the site coordinator was today, change the pen colors. Blue is always 4.0+, and red is Advanced 3.5, green is Intermediate 3.0, and black is novice/recreational. Today, blue was 3.0 and green was 4.0. It was very confusing. I inadvertently signed up in a game with 3.0 players! Exasperated, Pam pointed out the change and I immediately changed the pen colors to what is common and expected. I was very gracious about it and played the game anyway though one of the players offered me an out . . . I played most of the game lefty. One of the players was visiting from the Mount Shasta group. [I played there two years ago.]

I felt I played reasonably well today.

Board Meeting

The board meeting started at 12:15 p.m. and I joined them a few minutes late, right after my game ended. The board was sitting at a park table under the gazebo. (I think it gave someone an illusion of protection from the wind—ha!) It was a long meeting that ended at 2:27 p.m. We easily could have had it go another hour. George is a very good treasurer but he is rather verbose. It can take him 10 minutes to explain something that could probably be explained in 3 minutes . . . but better too much than too little! Boy. It was cold. My sweatshirt was not enough. And I wasn’t the only one! We were glad it was done more for a chance to warm up than to get on with our day!

Number of days on a court: 645
Number of total hours: 2,778
Number of paid coaching hours: 24.5

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